Fuzziness and instrumentalism
I've been deep in distractions lately--is that the good life?--and have about eight backed-up things that I've been meaning to put here.
Vagueness and fuzziness keep coming up on the interweb and the places I browse, like in this discussion (with a grad student in my Nietzsche class, randomly) and on this sweet blog. My understanding is that "vague" is what the philosophy of language people use when they are using a word that is semantically linked to a concept that cognitive scientists would be happy to call fuzzy because they have no problem taking cues from artificial intelligence people.
The general idea is that we can have concepts for whom membership is not a binary event. This has been empirically confirmed in a strong way.
This (along with typicality effects) is one of the reasons why classical concept theory, in which every concept has necessary and sufficient properties, fails.
A problem for philosophy: A lot of philosophy is hung up on trying to find out hard-edged, theoretic definitions of things like "truth," "justification," "knowledge"...we could extend this to "ethical" most likely. Often, these definitions are compared to and judged against our intuitive notions of these--our unadulterated concepts.
What if these concepts are fuzzy? Then hard-edged rules will not be able to capture the structure of the concepts. We will endlessly chase definitions around an intuitive bush.
Solution: We have to (a) stop considering our concepts of these things sacred. There is nothing so special about them that they ought to ground any sort of normative discussion. Then we have to (b) replace intuition-matching with another standard. What should the standard be?
We should use our deductive, theoretic powers in a way that is motivated. Motivated by what? It doesn't matter--we could always have multiple theories motivated in different ways. But what's important is that we recognize that our theories are built, as artifice, as instruments, to fulfill the purpose we give it. The philosophical project, like any other human project, ought to be recognized as an instrumental one.
*NOTE: The above is not really an argument. It's wee-hour-I-don't-want-to-study-for-a-statistics-exam-blather.
Vagueness and fuzziness keep coming up on the interweb and the places I browse, like in this discussion (with a grad student in my Nietzsche class, randomly) and on this sweet blog. My understanding is that "vague" is what the philosophy of language people use when they are using a word that is semantically linked to a concept that cognitive scientists would be happy to call fuzzy because they have no problem taking cues from artificial intelligence people.
The general idea is that we can have concepts for whom membership is not a binary event. This has been empirically confirmed in a strong way.
This (along with typicality effects) is one of the reasons why classical concept theory, in which every concept has necessary and sufficient properties, fails.
A problem for philosophy: A lot of philosophy is hung up on trying to find out hard-edged, theoretic definitions of things like "truth," "justification," "knowledge"...we could extend this to "ethical" most likely. Often, these definitions are compared to and judged against our intuitive notions of these--our unadulterated concepts.
What if these concepts are fuzzy? Then hard-edged rules will not be able to capture the structure of the concepts. We will endlessly chase definitions around an intuitive bush.
Solution: We have to (a) stop considering our concepts of these things sacred. There is nothing so special about them that they ought to ground any sort of normative discussion. Then we have to (b) replace intuition-matching with another standard. What should the standard be?
We should use our deductive, theoretic powers in a way that is motivated. Motivated by what? It doesn't matter--we could always have multiple theories motivated in different ways. But what's important is that we recognize that our theories are built, as artifice, as instruments, to fulfill the purpose we give it. The philosophical project, like any other human project, ought to be recognized as an instrumental one.
*NOTE: The above is not really an argument. It's wee-hour-I-don't-want-to-study-for-a-statistics-exam-blather.