I do not think you have comprehended Luke's perspective. Your rebuttal is largely demonstrating the behaviors he is, aptly in my opinion, criticizing.
Your overly romantic definition of philosophical inquiry would relegate it to a metaphysics of the unknown at best, mysticism in the cloak of learned language at worst.
I cannot conceive of how you interpret any of what Luke is saying as being even covertly anti-intellectual. You appear to be projecting your own world view and social groupings onto this topic, and presupposing some conflicts between them.
This continuum of deeply inscrutable pure truth pursued by inquiry at one end opposed to surface practical technical solutions developed by practitioners at the other is an artificial perspective. There is no opposition between these things. Often both are advanced in the same moment, and by the same work.
Descartes himself is an excellent example: he was intensely focused on devising exact formal methods. His philosophical results are now largely a historical marker on a road to nowhere. His formalisms are still used by every human practitioner of math from elementary school students on up.
I strongly encourage anyone who finds this discussion interesting to read the mentioned books by Pearl and Kahneman. They have transformed my thinking more than anything else I have learned in my entire life up to this point. These aren't mere technical tools, or interesting empirical results in some corner of practice.
I don't know of a short introduction to Kahneman's work, but the epilog to Pearl's book[1] is a short read and touches on the philosophical side of his thinking.
Kahneman is an easy and very enjoyable read, but do not underestimate the value of learning your mental model of your own cognition has no clothes.
Pearl's basic concepts are accessible, but finishing the book will require some effort for most, as will considering the implications rigorously. It's worth it however, because he provides a compete theory of knowledge that is both philosophically rigorous and algorithmically exact. His Turing Award lecture[2] should give you some sense of how staggeringly broad the implications of his formalism are.
Personally, I see that lukeprog demonstrates an anti-intellectualism when he states, 'Another paper arguing about the definition of "knowledge"? No thanks.'
I'm trying very hard to not be rude and laugh at the ridiculousness of eliminating certain philosophical studies/classes that lukeprog suggests.
Let me first say I lean more towards unalone's thoughts on this matter. But essentially, I believe what is going on here is an ideological battle that has occurred many times in the history of Western philosophy (to quote a certain someone). That is, what is the purpose of philosophy and who should it serve?
Philosophy, if it perfected anything, is the art of meta and intertextuality. Yes, even the latter. Read Euripides.
Philosophy has mathematical philosophers, it has scientific philosophers, it has gnostic philosophers, it has theological philosophers, and a long list of etcetera. But to narrow it down ideologically to one single thing the way lukeprog desires, is a foolish thing and unproductive to philosophy at its core. Why? Because any student of philosophy will tell you that asking 'What is knowledge?' is philosophy. Epistemology (the study of knowledge) is an important part of philosophy because philosophy is very much tied to culture as it is to history as it is to rationality and logic. To reduce philosophy to only its practical components and, this is the important part for me, oppressing certain philosophies is no better than trying to erase part of someone's culture.
But all this has already been discussed in philosophy with regard to Bertrand Russell's approach. The fact that all of us are having this discussion is philosophy. Some philosophies do not want to be science, and no one should force them to.
If you watch The Philosophers' Football Match (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5fGSBsfq8), for example, there is a meta discussion and intertextual reference going on that is never mentioned, but it exists. It gives as much insight into what philosophy is for each country as a study on truth tables or logic.
"Personally, I see that lukeprog demonstrates an anti-intellectualism when he states, 'Another paper arguing about the definition of "knowledge"? No thanks.'"
I see how this criticizes one branch of intellectual thought within one discipline. I don't see how it is anti-intellectual. Luke runs the singularity institute, an organization dedicated to a highly specific and speculative conception of humanity's future (and a mistaken one in my opinion). You're trying to convince me this is not an intellectual activity? That he's anti-intellectual? This is rubbish, and you're just being defensive because he's attacking a specific set of ideas you value.
"Epistemology (the study of knowledge) is an important part of philosophy because philosophy is very much tied to culture as it is to history as it is to rationality and logic."
If you had read Pearl, you would understand that it is foremost, an epistemological theory. Luke is not rejecting the study of knowledge as a whole, he is bemoaning that only computer scientists and statisticians are learning a theory of knowledge that he believes supersedes the majority of historical philosophical thought on the matter. I strongly agree with him on that point. I think there's still value in teaching Aristotle et all, but that exactly as you say above, the perspective should be historical.
I agree that Luke is being a bit hyperbolic in the language of his post, but the vast majority of people responding here do not understand what he is advocating because they simply HAVE NOT READ THE BOOKS HE IS SUGGESTING YOU READ. And so they attempt to argue against his suggestion, not even knowing what motivates it or its merits.
I briefly read some parts of Pearl's text you provided. Apart from my having an issue with his approach/tactics to explaining his thoughts, it reminded me of Mill's Methods (1843), which were 'influenced' by Avicenna's Book of Healing (1020).
And why should it 'supersede' (do you mean replace or 'is better than'?) previous philosophical thought?
What of Al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error, which 'influenced' Descartes' Meditations?
There is no need for a 'replacement'. If Judea Pearl specialises in cognitive science and artificial intelligence and wants to write on cause/effect in relation to them, that should be its own branch, not replace an epistemology class.
There are no apples and oranges in this conversation. Mistaken epistemology is mistaken. Fruit plays no part in it.
I'm sad that your response to Pearl's ideas is to cite a litany of influences you believe as exposing his ideas as not novel. This is a a pointless activity.
Theories are not equal alternatives. When a complete and clarifying framework is defined, we abandon the mistaken structures of the past. Knowledge does not endlessly bifurcate: unification is our most valuable intellectual activity. Your equivocation among competing alternatives is an exercise of socially attached apologetics.
Causal explanations form the basis of the entirety of western philosophy, from Aristotle's four causes onward. Accuracy is not a matter of taste.
This is a great statement, because it points to the fundamental problem with Descartes' legacy:
"His philosophical results are now largely a historical marker on a road to nowhere. His formalisms are still used by every human practitioner of math from elementary school students on up."
As if his "formalisms" could stand on their own without the philosophical foundations of his entire system. And yes this is what modernity after Hume did -- take Descartes' project forward long after the core assumptions had been completely undermined.
In many ways the history of modern philosophy since has been a quest to re-ground the Cartesian project with the kind of confidence he promised, and a succession of regressive rear-guard actions taken against the encroaching skepticism that threatened the entire enterprise at every turn. And finally we're left with a weird, cobbled-together Popperian/Kuhnian pragmatism that long ago gave up on "certainty" or "clarity" and settled for "less wrong."
No wonder philosophy is held in such low regard in scientific communities. It has done science no favors whatsoever in the last century, other than to progressively undermine its naive epistemological assumptions and redirect it back to some kind of Formal Realism -- at which point the scientific community yells "remember Galileo!!" and runs the other direction.
It's a sad state of affairs when we can't distinguish between the salutary philosophical insights of Aristotle and religious tyranny. It's going to take a long, long time to recast the entire narrative to where the two points of view can inform each other once again.
In what way are the notations Descartes introduced dependent upon his philosophical views?
"And finally we're left with a weird, cobbled-together Popperian/Kuhnian pragmatism that long ago gave up on "certainty" or "clarity" and settled for "less wrong."
What surprises me is that people are so willing to assume that such certainty is desirable. That quantified symbolic logic is both primary and desirable, and that probabilistic reasoning is at best an occasionally necessary but highly suspect tool.
What a sadly limited universe of discourse that is, being forever circumscribed by Godel. It is fortunate that we don't exist trapped in it. I see no reason to intellectually place myself in the same prison.
Sure -- Descartes mathematics in the abstract are surely not dependent on his foundationlism/rationalism. As such they are merely tautological. But the science that deploys that math in pursuit of practical knowledge is.
Agreed that 'certainty,' at least the kind that Descartes was advocating, is an abstraction in search of a definition, and as such not desirable. Godel and incompleteness is just one species of the problem. This is where I would rather see a reformed Baconian science, tempered with (rather than utterly rejecting) an Aristotelian view which had a more sophisticated language for dealing with ambiguity and the fluid borders between substances. Our physics has advanced far beyond simplistic atomism, why can't our philosophy of science?
Popper and falsification is a good rear-guard action against skepticism and making unwarranted philosophical leaps within the Cartesian taxonomy, but why can't we question the taxonomy itself? There are plenty of good starting points -- Whitehead and Bergson come to mind, as well as an open re-examination of medieval and pre-socratic philosophy, as Heidegger does in the Question Concerning Technology. On and on. It's not as if no one is asking these questions or refining philosophical language to deal with them -- it just seems that the scientific community would rather declare its own sovereignty and emancipate itself from first-order questions once and for all.
I do not think you have comprehended Luke's perspective. Your rebuttal is largely demonstrating the behaviors he is, aptly in my opinion, criticizing.
Your overly romantic definition of philosophical inquiry would relegate it to a metaphysics of the unknown at best, mysticism in the cloak of learned language at worst.
I cannot conceive of how you interpret any of what Luke is saying as being even covertly anti-intellectual. You appear to be projecting your own world view and social groupings onto this topic, and presupposing some conflicts between them.
This continuum of deeply inscrutable pure truth pursued by inquiry at one end opposed to surface practical technical solutions developed by practitioners at the other is an artificial perspective. There is no opposition between these things. Often both are advanced in the same moment, and by the same work.
Descartes himself is an excellent example: he was intensely focused on devising exact formal methods. His philosophical results are now largely a historical marker on a road to nowhere. His formalisms are still used by every human practitioner of math from elementary school students on up.
I strongly encourage anyone who finds this discussion interesting to read the mentioned books by Pearl and Kahneman. They have transformed my thinking more than anything else I have learned in my entire life up to this point. These aren't mere technical tools, or interesting empirical results in some corner of practice.
I don't know of a short introduction to Kahneman's work, but the epilog to Pearl's book[1] is a short read and touches on the philosophical side of his thinking.
Kahneman is an easy and very enjoyable read, but do not underestimate the value of learning your mental model of your own cognition has no clothes.
Pearl's basic concepts are accessible, but finishing the book will require some effort for most, as will considering the implications rigorously. It's worth it however, because he provides a compete theory of knowledge that is both philosophically rigorous and algorithmically exact. His Turing Award lecture[2] should give you some sense of how staggeringly broad the implications of his formalism are.
[1]: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/shrout/SEM06/pearl.pdf
[2]: http://amturing.acm.org/vp/pearl_2658896.cfm