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Comment by viridian | Hacker News Reader

This entire discussion makes a good case for why the general populace would benefit from being taught the basics of philosophy.

In this case the topic of value is the often fraught relationship between empiricism and rationalism, and the impacts each have on the scientific process, research, education, and how we go about understanding the world.

To operate with one with a complete absence of the other is to expose yourself to huge, often fundamental gaps in your thinking, your arguments, and your plans. This is what the author is ultimately getting at from the direction of the empirical: data, in the form of a large collection of discrete observations, can be used to justify a sea of mutually exclusive claims that may or may not be in accordance with reality, and that's to say nothing about the quality of the data itself.

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Most argumentation we do as on questions that are worth debating aren't based purely on deductive reasoning, but more on informal reasoning and heuristics with limited evidence.

Toulmin identifies the three essential parts of any argument as

    - the claim
    - the data (also called grounds or evidence), which support the claim
    - the warrant.

The warrant is the assumption on which the claim and the evidence depend. Another way of saying this would be that the warrant explains why the data support the claim.

Toulmin says that the weakest part of any argument is its weakest warrant. Remember that the warrant is the link between the data and the claim. If the warrant isn’t valid, the argument collapses.

Example:

    Claim: You should buy our toothwhitening product.
    Data or Grounds: Studies show that teeth are 50% whiter after using the product for a specified time.
    Warrant: People want whiter teeth.

Notice that those commercials don’t usually bother trying to convince you that you want whiter teeth; instead, they assume that you have accepted the value our culture places on whiter teeth.

https://www.blinn.edu/writing-centers/pdfs/Toulmin-Argument....

I would start by simply putting everyone through a course in deductive reasoning at the earliest age possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning

From there you can go into the whole spectrum of critical thinking approaches, and then on to what's basically the liberal arts e.g. philosophy, social sciences etc. as you desire. But the value you get from all of those things depends heavily on the framework you have for thinking about them going in.

Claiming random things are "fake news" would be a lot harder if people could work out what is and isn't fake by themselves!

> I would start by simply putting everyone through a course in deductive reasoning at the earliest age possible

I was taught the explicit premise of deductive vs. inductive reasoning as part of our unit on the scientific method in, I think, fourth or fifth grade. I always assumed this was a standard curriculum module.

>I would start by simply putting everyone through a course in deductive reasoning at the earliest age possible

Indeed. This would help ensure people's brains' transition function is stable enough to perform faultless computation. We forget that our brains aren't wired for exact computation. They're wired to perform approximations of computation that are good enough for survival.

As a result, you end up with myriads students who go through the school system via memorization and emergent fuzzy computation.

They reach an adult age without possessing the cognitive tool-set to grasp the subtleties and nuances of the world they live in. The fact that such people are also preyed on by charlatans, ad companies and politicians(intersection of charlatans and ad companies) obviously doesn't help.

I agree so strongly with this.

The point I would add is that hardly anyone uses the empirical process directly. It is all 'this article claims this' or 'this study says that'. It's very 'meta' with little to no personal verification or testing of the claims - ie, theories based on theories or models based on models, or maps based on maps.

Very few check the terrain itself to confirm that the map applies. We trust education, experts, peer review etc. We're drowning in models, especially as these are easily represented on computers, but have no ability to check the models against reality.

PS this disassociation from reality will not improve as we move forward technologically. No doubt, in the metaverse we will be able to create ever more elaborate models, or is it that we will be ever more disassociated from our own anecdotal experiences? (Where 'anecdotal' is something to apologise about).

And often we have no idea who made a particular model and what are it's limitations.

In the metaverse, the map is the territory. Think about how the word "map" is used in gaming.

> This entire discussion makes a good case for why the general populace would benefit from being taught the basics of philosophy.

But our entire education pipeline is optimized for loading people into the “system”. Philosophy etc. has little market value (unless it aligns with the system).

While this is indeed an issue that falls within the domain of philosophy, philosophy is also home to fields in which the absence of empirical evidence is regarded as an irrelevance, or at best a mere detail that can be deferred to an indefinite future. Take, for example, the resurgence of enthusiasm for panpsychism, and the enduring appeal of armchair metaphysics.

I am doubtful that academic philosophy has much enthusiasm for pursuing and inculcating the practical aspects of reason (any more than does theoretical physics or mathematics), though there are exceptions.

Exploring ideas like panpsychism doesn't mean you're committing to them being true. We can't know everything, and we can't always link new ideas deductively to things we are certain about, but we can notice the inadequacy of current explanations, say "suppose this explanation is true" and proceed from there. Every good philosopher knows that they're doing that. And the fact that people defend their position and attack opposing views is just part of the adversarial process for testing ideas. Yeah, of course ego and pride and hubris happen to many philosophers, and the academic profession is frankly in a bad state, but that doesn't mean the fundamental approach is bad.

That is a fair point in general, but in the specific case of panpsychism, at least one of its most active proponents (Goff) combines an insistance that it is the most plausible explanation of the mind with an apparent lack of interest in saying anything empirically verifiable about what it actually means.

Whether in physics or metaphysics, one can only go so far without facts. Even the mundane world of that which actually is has repeatedly turned out to be stranger than was imagined possible.

Idk how if studying philosophy helps. Most philosophers were/are themselves committed to one school or theory, with gaps galore.

In any case, I think empirical science's defeat of rationalism ( eg Galileo Vs Church) has all sorry of ramifications. Social sciences like economics and psychology have a lot of trouble bridging the gaps.

Epistemology is a subfield of philosophy. Seems like a healthy understanding of that would be good for society right now.

> Most philosophers were/are themselves committed to one school or theory, with gaps galore.

Most scientists specialize one thing, but students of science don't. One can learn about many schools of philosophy, as well.

The problem with this is that philosophy isn't a magical panacea that illuminates the way towards a more ideal state. It can be used to justify a sea of mutually exclusive claims that may not be in accordance with reality, and that's to say nothing about the quality of the arguments themselves.

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