Discussion on Leiter Reports [0].
[0] https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2024/02/science-does-...
4,578 karma · joined December 13, 2014
“In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth ― only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.”
― C.S. Lewis
“In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“All people suffer, but […] not all people pity themselves.”
― Marcus Aurelius
"A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials."
― Chinese proverb
"Men's hatred for the one who has been unjust to them is trifling compared to their hatred for the one they have treated unjustly; every reminder of him brings a fresh twinge of pain."
― Paul Mankowski
"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk."
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Let your credo be this. Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“We should understand the meaning of statements from the reasons for making them, since speech ought to be governed by things, not things by speech.”
- Hilary of Poitiers
[0] https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2024/02/science-does-...
i.e.,
\log_{b_1} n = \frac{1}{\log_{b_2} b_1} \log_{b_2} n
\frac{1}{\log_{b_2} b_1}
But one of the aspects of types that I find useful is the documentation they provide. In a dynamic language, you often have to guess what the types of functions are by reading the implementation, and not just of the function in question, but the functions composing that function. As a code base grows in size, this can become annoying. With code base size, modularity becomes increasingly important, and modularity benefits greatly from clearly defined and stable interfaces. Also, types can enable something like LSP to make suggestions about what can appear in a given place. With type inference, this can be quite powerful, allowing you to build code in an interactive fashion (proof assistants make use of this behavior).
Unit tests can also provide value as documentation, in the sense that they can function as tested and working examples of, say, how a library could be used.
So, in other words, both types and unit tests have value, and the value they offer will vary depending on the type system and how types are being leveraged in a given situation. There exists an overlap in the practical value provided by types and by unit tests, and where there is overlap, I would say types have the upper hand in principle, if not always in practice.
Furthermore, Carl de Marcken, chief scientist/co-founder of ITA, had chosen Lisp because it was what he was most familiar with. He had told me in 2007 that if he had to choose a language again, he probably would have chosen Java, a choice Google would likely favor over Lisp.
I say this not to disparage Lisp—I enjoy Lisps, and I use Lisp professionally—but to contextualize this particular use of Lisp at Google.
EDIT: Just saw your reply to a sibling comment explaining that you meant SBCL, not Lisp per se.
> Given the documented failures of common sense in mathematics and physics [...], why should anyone think common sense is a reliable metric to how things are?
I think the most serious objection is that categorical dismissal of common sense is a form of skepticism, and as a consequence, you undermine the very claims you are appealing to. All science takes place within a context and that context is going to be common sense, ultimately; the alternative is some truncation or corruption of it. So you might as well own it and own it to the fullest. All skepticisms suffer from the same problem, namely, the strange belief that you can know something while undermining the very conditions possibility of knowing it.
Note that by "common sense", we mostly mean that we take the human apprehension of the world as basically accurate, even if it is fuzzy around the edges or needs correction or refinement [0]. So at the very least, I think that the presumption is in favor of common sense. Your question does not provide a reason for doubting common sense categorically or even rejecting common sense interpretations of QM. It is a better idea to engage with the proposed interpretation, to understand it, and make specific criticisms instead.
[0] https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2012/10/aristotle...
Droit empowers institutions to make millions of decisions – complying with thousands of complex rules, every day. We build mission-critical, breakthrough products to advance global regulatory compliance and real-time controls. We are pioneers in computational law and automating intelligent decision-making. We see the complexity of rules and regulations as an opportunity for better action.
We are currently looking have openings for software engineers, front end developers and a VP of engineering. For more information, please visit: https://grnh.se/0ed7fd851us
Droit empowers institutions to make millions of decisions – complying with thousands of complex rules, every day. We build mission-critical, breakthrough products to advance global regulatory compliance and real-time controls. We are pioneers in computational law and automating intelligent decision-making. We see the complexity of rules and regulations as an opportunity for better action.
We are currently looking have openings for software engineers, front end developers and a VP of engineering. For more information, please visit: https://grnh.se/0ed7fd851us
Droit empowers institutions to make millions of decisions – complying with thousands of complex rules, every day. We build mission-critical, breakthrough products to advance global regulatory compliance and real-time controls. We are pioneers in computational law and automating intelligent decision-making. We see the complexity of rules and regulations as an opportunity for better action.
We are currently looking have openings for software engineers, front end developers and a VP of engineering. For more information, please visit: https://grnh.se/0ed7fd851us
But it takes philosophy to make the sorts of claims you make, making them self-refuting and incoherent. Perhaps the problem was not philosophy, but how you practiced it or how those you engaged with practiced it.
(Reply to second response)
W.r.t. the liberal arts, we must distinguish between genuine liberal arts and some decadent ersatz or blatantly ideological counterfeit. I don't wish to spend time making distinctions here and now, but it is worth keeping that in mind.
However, I should also note that what "the sciences"[0] give us is not a straightforward matter, either, and what they give us, the actual character of scientific aims, methods, research and results is precisely the domain of the philosophy of science. (My view is that a strong impetus in empirical science is mastery of nature and technological production, not necessarily the truth. The story is a bit more complicated than that, but I'll leave it here.) Empirical science is very much informed by background assumptions and can make metaphysical insinuations, assumptions and insinuations that are not the proper domain of the empirical sciences, but philosophy. The notion that science is magically free from the usual human foibles like unwarranted appeals to authority or bullying or ideological insinuation or whatever is, of course, false. Add to that the confusion that some scientists show when they fail to distinguish between science and scientism, for instance. Holding philosophical views or presuppositions, at least tacitly, can hardly be avoided.
W.r.t. scholasticism, I'm sorry if that was your experience, or your interpretation of your experience, but I would call that a thoroughly unjust characterization of scholasticism. Citations and giving credit is a normal part of any published work, but scholasticism is certainly not characterized by obsequious deference to prior authors (say, Aristotle; indeed, within the broad scope of what is traditionally called "scholasticism", you have varying views of, e.g., Aristotle). Scholasticism is famous for its rigorous disputations and appropriately draws from developments elsewhere.
[0] Even what the broad view of what "science" is will vary by language. The English/Anglophone meaning of "science" is generally the more restricted "empirical science", while, say, the German "Wissenschaft" is more inclusive and broad and it would seem closer to the classical or traditional view of a science as a body of systematized knowledge.
In some sense, we all philosophize to one degree or another. We can either acknowledge that and learn to do it well, or we can do it poorly.
You tell us. You seem perfectly comfortable speaking of a multiplicity of instances.
(Personally, I would begin the discussion with substantial form. I can speak of many triangles that instantiate the same triangularity which allows me to assert the same properties of triangularity of them all. And yet triangularity is not to be identified with any particular triangle.)
And this notion is precisely one I reject. The author himself makes the distinction between art one likes and good art, though he doesn't offer an explicit metaphysical explanation and I wish to stay clear of any kind of relativism that may be implied. (My initial reading allows for competing interpretations of the article.)
For instance, if we take the example of the fine arts, we must distinguish between beauty and taste. Beauty is objective (and as a transcendental, is to be identified with the transcendentals of the good and the true). It concerns a thing's perfection in relation to some telos, some form. Taste, on the other hand, concerns one's subjective experience of pleasure experienced in the reception of a thing. This is why we can, in principle, speak of someone having poor taste or refined taste. Poor taste is undiscerning and lacking in sensitivity, even going so far as to prefer vulgarity to refinement. If beauty were a mere matter of taste, then we could not speak of good or bad taste, or of garishness and the sublime, except as a glorified way of saying "I like this, but not that; this pleases me, that does not". I do not accept this view, though it is the received and conventional view today. A shabby and nihilistic view rooted, no doubt, in our Cartesian inheritance.
Now, this doesn't automatically mean that there can be no debate about the beauty of an art piece. Indeed, the very possibility of debate presupposes a distinction between beauty and taste, between the objective and the subjective reception of a thing. What it does mean is that aesthetic judgement is, like moral discernment and logical reasoning, something that requires not just capacity, but something that must be refined and perfected. If we debate such things—the good, the true and the beautiful—we do so with a view of conforming ourselves to the truth, and in the case of beauty, our tastes with the beautiful, just as through ethics we seek to conform ourselves to the good.
It is important to emphasize that while this may be a consequence of wisdom, it is not what leisure is for the sake of. To reduce leisure and wisdom to instruments of productivity is to miss the whole point. We do not make leisure so that we may work, so that we may be more productive; we work so that we may make leisure. Wisdom is an end in itself. Work is not. "Productivity" is not. Work exists for the sake of leisure, not the other way around. (We must also not confuse recreation with leisure.)
Josef Pieper's book "Leisure: the Basis of Culture" makes exactly this point. Something Pieper covers in the first chapter and worth noting here is that the word "school" comes from the Latin schola which in turn is derived from the Greek σχολή (skhole) which is the Greek word for "leisure" (indeed, the absence of leisure characteristic of work was defined negatively, askholia in Greek and negotium in Latin). Modern education may make this difficult to comprehend, but this is more discernible in classical education. Similarly, the "liberal" in "liberal arts" refers to the freedom to pursue leisure, and these are opposed to the so-called servile arts. And lastly, Pieper draws attention to the prevalence of religious feasts during the Middle Ages whose essential function wasn't to stuff your face with food and drink yourself under the table, but leisure. What could be more "leisurely" than religion, that which is, after all, concerned with the ultimate end and the highest good?
We moderns live in what Pieper called the world of total work (he was writing this book in the postwar period, so this affliction is nothing new). To be sure, we must toil and till the field in which wisdom will grow, but we do not live to till the field; we till the field so that we may live. What is it that we live for, that we ought to live for? Perhaps it is our modern nihilism that frightens us enough to invert the relation between work and leisure, leading us to lose ourselves in work to avoid the realization.
I don't think anyone makes exactly this claim. From the article, which I presume draws faithfully from the source text[0]:
"Both sides make reference to ordinary objects, such as a clay pot. Both sides agree that the pot is ultimately made up of unobservable atoms. But the Buddhist reductionist says that those atoms are really all that exist, that there is no such thing as a composite whole over and above them."
The point of disagreement between the Buddhist reductionist and the Nyāya commentator, then, is over the existence of composites as bona fide things versus, say, perceptual illusions or whatever. Because both the Buddhist reductionist and the Nyāya commentator refer to composites, clearly both accept composites as objects of perception, so what is perceived is not the point of disagreement, in which case where does the misunderstanding over the conditionality of composites enter the picture? Again, the Nyāya commentator doesn't deny that composites are composed of atoms, nor that their existence is contingent or temporary. Additionally, it seems that if atoms are what ultimately exist, then there would appear to be at least some things which are not conditioned, if I understand the term.
Now, given that, the counterargument is epistemological in nature, specifically, that if what we know about the world begins with perception, and what is perceived are composites and not atoms, and that our knowledge of atoms is inferred from our knowledge of what is perceived, then it is incoherent to also deny the existence of composites because our knowledge of atoms depends on our knowledge of composites. To deny the reality of the latter is to deny the knowledge of anything that depends on the former being the case.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Nyaya-sutra-Selections-Early-Commenta...
(N.b. there appears to be a similarity between the conventional/ultimate distinction you've explicitly mentioned and the Aristotelian-Thomistic distinction between accidental form and substantial form. In the former case, we may speak of artifacts like chairs, computers and clay pots whose telos is extrinsic and observer relative (to borrow a Searlian expression) whereas in the latter case we may speak of human beings and oak trees whose telos is intrinsic. That a suitably shaped piece of fired clay it taken to be a clay pot is thus a matter of convention, but that a particular man is a human being is not. The atomist is therefore someone who takes everything to be an accidental whole arranged out of whatever he takes to be atoms.)
Except they are not, as objects of experience. They are redefined in physics. This is related to the problem of qualia.
Materialists often attempt to consign qualia to the mind, but this merely passes the buck since the mind is just another bit of matter that cannot, according to the materialist’s own metaphysical commitments, “host” such things as qualia. Some materialists are so obstinately committed to materialism that, having realized this glaring flaw, will go so far as to embrace eliminativism which involves the denial of qualia on the grounds that materialism cannot account for them.
Materialism, a metaphysical position and not a scientific one, is discredited in a number of ways, but in this case, any materialism that defines matter as whatever physics says it is undermines itself by leading to idealism because the content of physical theories and models are mathematical idealizations, ones which need not strictly correspond to reality. If you’re not a materialist, and especially of a scientistic variety, then your views are not the subject of this post, but the view of physics you confidently declare is not shared by everyone.
One example close to home for me and from industry is a dependently typed language we are working on at my company that's used to encode validations and transformations for transaction reporting (other teams have also begun to use the language for other uses). Consistency is ensured by the type checker and the compiler subsequently generates the aforementioned transformation and validation functions that are used in production. This is admittedly a very niche application, but as I've already written, the use of static analysis admits a range of rigor—it's not either/or—so it's a question of determining the appropriate degree of formality for your particular case.
[0] https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile/blob/15801c8ef4...