Comment by memla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by memla | Hacker News Reader

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But in a philosophical debate, "right" would be quite ambiguous. One party, for example, could posit that the ideas of "right" and "wrong" are completely subjective. That, in the absence of some stated goal or constraints, what's "right" or "wrong", "good" or "evil" is no more valid a topic of debate than whether chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla.However, once you introduce said constraints, the discussion is no longer philosophically interesting.

So, what you're saying is that the problem of philosophy is that someone could derail a discussion concerning ethics by simply asserting meta-ethical subjectivism and that would be uninteresting or bad in some other way...

I don't quite understand this objection. Not to mention that this is exactly the opposite of what you would expect to find in a philosophical debate. The whole point of the discipline is that every position must be argued for and questioned and not just asserted. That of course includes subjectivism.

It's not that the discussion is simply derailed. It's that it can't even take place until both parties agree on the terminology. The word "right" is packed with all sorts of assumptions on the speaker's part that the listener may not agree with. If that is the case, the discussion devolves into a discussion about those assumptions, which in turn devolve into more discussions about more assumptions.

>> The whole point of the discipline is that every position must be argued for and questioned and not just asserted.

That's the problem. Nearly every word is packed with meaning, which must be unraveled and argued for with... more words. The cycle never ends.

>>It's not that the discussion is simply derailed. It's that it can't even take place until both parties agree on the terminology.

On a theoretical level, this is true for every discussion in every discipline. On a practical level, how would you know that this is a special problem in philosophy if you admit that you haven't studied any?

>>That's the problem. Nearly every word is packed with meaning, which must be unraveled and argued for with... more words.

Just for the record. I did say that arguments are required and of course those arguments are composed of words (and symbols) but i never said that those arguments are about the meaning of words.

I don't know. I only suspect based on what I've seen. Philosophy, it seems, makes it difficult to use common language colloquially, because the meaning of the words is the primary linchpin upon which many philosophical debates rest, rather than external data or evidence.

In other disciplines, this is not the case. The two participants in a discussion generally share the same goals, or at least agree on the measuring stick (e.g. uncovering evidence to prove a hypothesis, making an app load faster, improving a car's fuel efficiency, etc). Progress toward their goals can be measured in straightforward and objective ways. Thus, it's much less common for there to be disagreement about basic terminology.

Of course I could be wrong. Maybe there are many interesting philosophical debates that don't simply devolve into semantics. Perhaps you could humor me by providing examples?

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