Pet Peeve: Not reading your interlocutors charitably.
Even worse: Not even reading your interlocutors.
Worse: Not even pretending to read or understand your interlocutors, and then claiming they must show respect for you.
What absolute garbage. The internet is filled with garbage.
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Sometimes, when faced with a wall of text, I skim. Maybe that makes me garbage, but I'm garbage who has some time left over for other things in life.
ReplyDeleteI literally skimmed it in two minutes. I found his question is less time than it took me to write the above post.
ReplyDeleteI'm not so fast at reading, and evidently I miss stuff when skimming.
ReplyDeleteMy back hurts. I'm on the sofa watching DS9 and playing on the internet. I'm in a terrible, foul, no good mood.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'm just good at reading, or was expecting his question. It's essentially taken straight from Dennet.
And to be clear, Isaac: You are not garbage.
ReplyDeleteI agree with William Nichols. I think if there's an important discussion going on, one should take the time to read what is written before posting, there's no hurry. And if that person says something wrong because he didn't read carefully, he can politely acknowledge his mistake and ask.
ReplyDeleteProblem is, people aren't polite and respectful and just want to tell others what they think, without listening. It's not a dialogue, it's preaching
To be honest, I have never been a strong reader. And I am not familiar with Dennet (Dennett?).
ReplyDeleteI simply have not read many books compared to most of the folks I associate with, not even comic books/graphic novels.
"""
ReplyDeleteHow to compose a successful critical commentary:
1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.
2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
"""
brainpickings.org - How to Criticize with Kindness: Philosopher Daniel Dennett on the Four Steps to Arguing Intelligently
I do try to generally be polite and respectful. I'm not as good at it as I feel I ought to be.
ReplyDeleteThere are many folks who are consistently disdainful of others. I actually try to accommodate them to an extent, at least in cases where that disdain is pretty much universally applied (this can be a spectrum trait rather than something purposeful and malicious).
Steve S That sounds very wordy, and it may be a reason why I failed to catch all of your salient points while skimming through your commentary.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I'd rather you just get straight to the point - doing #4 first - rather than placing it at the end of #1-3.
Also, as a practical matter, doing #1 (restating the target's position) is almost guaranteed to sound exactly like man-splaining when doing this to a woman. That's just not practical, and in many cases it'll be rude.
Oh man, G+ just ate a post. I hate that.
ReplyDeleteBasically, Isaac Kuo: If you don't know Dennett and don't enjoy reading, then the conversation shifts a bit. Dennett is a living academic philosopher, with what degree of fame can come to a philosopher.
Here's the wikipedia link to his views on philosophy of mind:
en.wikipedia.org - Daniel Dennett
This is, of course, imprecise and inaccurate. It is also relatively close.
Here's how to politely do #1:
ReplyDeletePerson: Everyting is water!
Me: I think I hear you saying that water is wet. Is that right?
I practice that quite frequently in discourse. It's taken a while to get the formula down, but that's proved useful in past.
William Nichols also, asking quetsions instead of making statements goes a looong way in not making one sound like he's teaching others (in your example, the "right?" at the end gives the other person the chance to say "no, that's not what I'm saying")
ReplyDeleteYep, Patrick Marchiodi! I've worked on this for years, and you are absolutely right that the question is intentional.
ReplyDeleteIsaac Kuo Politeness is like dancing: you get better with practice and even if you don't think you're good at it you can probably fake it decently. :)
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols Skimming, I immediately caught the link to "qualia" since that's a term I'm already familiar with. This led me to the "qualia" page and its Critics section:
ReplyDeleteen.wikipedia.org - Qualia - Wikipedia
I am reading this section, and in particular the part where it has an "a/b" thing:
"Dennett's argument revolves around the central objection that, for qualia to be taken seriously as a component of experience—for them to even make sense as a discrete concept—it must be possible to show that
a) it is possible to know that a change in qualia has occurred, as opposed to a change in something else; or that
b) there is a difference between having a change in qualia and not having one.
Dennett attempts to show that we cannot satisfy (a) either through introspection or through observation, and that qualia's very definition undermines its chances of satisfying (b)."
All the other stuff about Daniel Dennett seems to be about a lot of stuff which...well, let's just say I have a dim view of these "New Atheists". (Note - I am an atheist.)
William Nichols The Socratic method, however, can be infuriating.
ReplyDelete...and now my head just hurts, and I'm having flashbacks to philosophy classes with all that qualia B.S.
ReplyDeletePhilosophy often gives me headaches. Then I write down what I think I read, and then reread to see if I got it right. I got better at that as took a bunch of philosophy classes.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols The thing that really grated on me with the philosophy classes I took was how disconnected they were from scientific knowledge from biology and (the then nascent) field of cognitive sciences. It didn't help that the philosophy professors I took classes from were theists obsessively iterating failed after failed attempt at proving the existence of an absolutely perfect being and that there was some sort of specialness to human consciousness (i.e. God and the soul, with the serial numbers filed off).
ReplyDeleteDennett's basic approach is actually one which I approve of. We have learned time and time again that something mysterious about humans turns out to be something that had a concrete evolutionary survival value. Furthermore, the ways in which these things have conferred survival value have proven to be far more fruitful in providing insights into their nature than centuries of philosophical introspection.
So, the specific qualities philosophers have attributed to "qualia"? Useless B.S. that has little or no value (IMHO).
And yet, I cannot deny that I viscerally feel experiences. I'm not talking about "qualia", because that term has been loaded with a bunch of dubious qualities.
Bad professors are gross.
ReplyDeleteI've been lucky to find some good ones; even in undergrad, phil science professors whose math was better than mine. In grad school, well, I was lucky enough to goto a good grad school where faculty could reasonbly say "Dennett's new book will be out in a couple of weeks. Here's exactly what he's going to say"
But, that is not everyone's experience and that sucks. There's a lot of really bad philosophy.
Back in college one of the intro Phil profs was covered in the book that he chose for the class. On one hand he had the tact to not be the person doing the lecture when we covered that section of the book and had a grad student do it. On the other he could have just chosen to NOT COVER HIMSELF IN HIS OWN CLASS since we didn't cover the entire book anyways. I kind of wish I could remember what his name was, but it was 25 years ago and I was a horrible student who barely attended the class...
ReplyDeleteWhat university, Matt Johnson?
ReplyDeleteAt the extreme example, if Dennett was teaching Phil 101? Folks would be expecting him to be on the test. It's a little bit the point.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols I can imagine him excluded from Phil 101, as that tends to focus on Dead White Men. But if it was a class on Philosophy of Consciousness or Cog Sci, it would be criminal to omit him.
ReplyDeleteYou don't have to agree with him (although you largely should) but you can't ignore him. I'd say the same for people I generally disagree with, such as Searle or even Nagel or Chalmers.
(Note that "The Simpsons" has a philosophical in-joke in the form of Superintendent Chalmers and Principal Skinner.)
William Nichols University of Pittsburgh, main campus. Specifically 1993 would have been the year.
ReplyDeleteIf I took a phil course* was Dan and I didn't get to hear his own work? I'd be pissed.
ReplyDelete* Note: Specifically exclude, say, Ancient or Modern or anything where there are standard texts. Also, I doubt Dan would be teaching those. If he wound up teaching a 101 course, I'd expect it to be leading up to Dan.
Oh Wait.
ReplyDeleteMatt, U Pitt is in the top 50 Philosophy schools. It is entirely possible you had someone teaching a course who was a goddamn legend.
Oh, yes, I am aware. I think it was top 10 back then.
ReplyDeleteI had a similar thing at Cornell with Comp Sci and Astronomy. Of course, I was aware that Carl Sagan was a big deal, but at that young age I didn't really "get" it about Computer Science but kind of inferred it from the textbook (written by the professor) and its content. It was brilliant stuff.
ReplyDeleteBut honestly, I do not know or remember if the Philosophy professors I took classes from were hot stuff. I was young and no one bothered to tell me how the heck anything in the world worked. Everyone just assumed everyone knew (I did not).
All I really remember was:
1) The "aha" moment I realized, from the professor's lecture notes, that each lecture from here on out was going to be a newer better argument for an Absolutely Perfect Being showing what was wrong with the previous argument and fixing those problems. I realized that every semester there was going to be a new lecture tacked on the end...like a sad FIFO pipeline of intellectual failure.
2) One classmate who believe carrots had consciousness. At the time, I thought that was ridiculous. I have since come to realize that I was unwittingly suffering from the baggage of my homo sapiens instincts. Like others, I was obsessed with figuring out what was so special about human consciousness that elevates and distinguishes us from other beings/objects. At the time, I was enchanted by research into animal self awareness (how some primates and other animals can recognize themselves in a mirror). But why was I even trying to make this distinction? Because it felt instinctively obvious and because I was seeking to morally justify the way we care more about human lives than dead objects or even animals/plants we slaughter for food.
I mean...it was really just motivated thinking, driven by baseless instinctive intuition. Like New Atheists, I thought I was being all objective and rational and logical...in reality, I was driven by irrational instinctive intuitions and just as vulnerable to falling into bigoted racism/sexism/etc as the New Atheists.
In retrospect, I feel let down by the fact that our class (including the professor) was not open minded to her assertion that carrots have consciousness. Or maybe that's just how I remember it because I was not open minded to it. And yet, in the years since then we have discovered that plants do actually have senses and do actually have pain and panic responses. That's something that seems obvious in retrospect, but really we should have considered it possible back then. After all, we've known for ages that plants react to the position of the Sun throughout the day, and vines are able to reach out and search space for footholds. And of course, the fascinating Venus Flytrap.
But I was just so blinded by instinct, and I utterly failed to see my own blindness.
Of course, one might be tempted to scoff that these plants are just doing chemical reactions and such. But that's all animals including ourselves do. Just what, precisely, is the difference between seeming to have intent and actually having intent? I'm no longer convinced that there's any meaningful difference. So, I'm more and more inclined to give a videogame AI or a Roomba the benefit of the doubt. Or even a dumb rock. Or even a dumb electron.
If we hadn't been so dismissive... If I hadn't been so dismissive, all those years ago in that Philosophy class. Well, maybe I would have learned something more.
Isaac Kuo
ReplyDeleteThere you go again being possibly the nicest, most humble person in social media.
Thanks, Cherch Cherch! But honestly, I am not. I get irritable very often, and I did blow it with my interaction with Steve S
ReplyDeleteStill, I try to be better... to a limited extent. There's a limit to how "nice" I am willing to be with trolls/nazis/etc.
Nazis deserve a very precise amount of niceness, ie none.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols
ReplyDeleteAgreed.