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Philosophical Methods

philosophical
methods

informal observation,

guesswork (‘intuition’),

imagination (including for ‘thought experiments’),

reasoning and argument,

& pursuit of theoretical elegance

First, think about the methods philosophers use. Am I missing any?
Next, think about how philosophers construct theories of action ...
Here’s Ayesha and she’s about to act, which involves some kind of processes occurring in her imnd.
Ben want’s to predict Ayesha’s action, perhaps so he can coordinate his actions around hers. He is therefore having a think about what Ayesha might be up to.
Implicit in Ben’s thinking is a model of actions.
And along comes the philosopher and attempts to guess what is going on in Ben’s mind when he is thinking about Ayesha. The philosopher asks, in effect, What model of actions is implicit in Ben’s thinking?
And this, essentially, is the raw material for philosophical theories of actions.
Focus on Ben for a moment.
What mundane purposes does thinking about actions serve? Prediction and coordination; ethical (assigning responsibility, blame; living together); normative (he wants himself and others to live it out as much as to describe how things are; there may also be something about ‘understanding’ here). So it’s not all about accuracy; in fact, of these, only prediction and coordination even potentially requires that his model of actions is accurate.

Functions of Ben’s model of minds and actions:

  • ethical
  • normative
  • predictive
    Second, consider Ben’s concern with making predictions.

    --- speed vs accuracy

    Whenever you are making predictions about anything at all, you face a \textbf{trade-off between accuracy and speed}. Making more accurate predictions requires considering more information and integrating it in a more complex model of minds and actions. By contrast, making faster predictions requires narrowing the information you consider and using a less complex model of minds and actions. Since Ben often has to make predictions fast enough to actually coordinate his actions with Ayesha’s, and since making predictions consumes scarce cognitive resources, Ben is usually needs to trade accuracy for speed.
    So Ben’s model of minds and actions is not built for accuracy.

speed vs accuracy

Since this is an important point for me, let me repeat: any broadly inferrential process must make a trade-off between speed and accuracy.

Henmon (1911, table 2)

speed vs accuracy:
Here you see the results of an old experiment by Henmon who had subjects judge which of two only very slightly different lines was longer. He noted that ‘under each category of judgment the wrong judgments are in general shorter’.

‘the wrong judgments are in general shorter’

This experiment doesn’t provide evidence for a speed-accuracy trade off and wasn’t designed to (speed was not experimentally manipulated). But it’s interesting that the idea of a speed-accuracy trade-off goes back such a long way.
Henmon p. 195: ‘A continuation of this investigation (1) where the time of exposure of stimuli was limited, (2) where the time of judgment was voluntarily shortened or prolonged, (3) and with varying differences in stimuli, should give significant results. footnote: The writer had planned such an investigation, but a change of work has necessitated its indefinite postponement; hence the publication of these preliminary results.’
\textbf{The value of having two systems which process inputs from a single domain arises from this trade-off.} Having multiple systems enables complementary trade-offs to be made. So it is not obvious that there could not be two systems both of which can predict the trajectories of moving objects.
Focus on Ben for a moment.
What mundane purposes does thinking about actions serve? Prediction and coordination; ethical (assigning responsibility, blame; living together); normative (he wants himself and others to live it out as much as to describe how things are; there may also be something about ‘understanding’ here). So it’s not all about accuracy; in fact, of these, only prediction and coordination even potentially requires that his model of actions is accurate.

Functions of Ben’s model of minds and actions:

  • ethical
  • normative
  • predictive

    --- speed vs accuracy

So this is the model of minds and actions on which many philosophical theories are based ... they are cast as attempts to characterise this model.

Relying on philosophers to characterise actions
would be like
relying on Aristotelians to characterise physical objects.

In the case of physical objects, I suppose few people seriously think there is much we can understand without appeal to physics.
As Newton stressed, contemporary philosophical methods are not well suited to the task. Contemporary philosophical methods are of limited use in making discoveries about the world.

Looking ahead ...

Godfrey-Smith contrasts models with theories,
and suggests that philosophers are often
best seen as constructing models rather than theories.