[MiroF]

This comment started out good but then stumbled in to some odd critique of philosophy as being incapable of dealing with unknowable things when indeed that seems to be perfectly within the purview of philosophy.

Humes Problem of Induction, for instance, is exactly an example of philosophical practice grappling with these unanswerables.

[whatshisface]

So, Hume didn't stop ethical philosophers from trying to derive morals, he only stopped some of them. Wittgenstein and Borges didn't stop philosophers from trying to "beat" language games using only language: they only stopped some philosophers. I'm not saying that there aren't visionary heroes who realize that some discussions aren't going to go anywhere for fundamental reasons; instead, I'm highlighting the fact that even when they do, "all of philosophy" almost never reaches a consensus about quitting the debate. In math, when they deduced that the Axiom of Choice was always going to be an axiom, everybody quit looking for ways to confirm or refute it. I think it's a weakness of philosophy that similar things can't happen.

[MiroF]

Hume's problem of induction is not about deriving moral principles (I believe you got it confused with the "is-ought" dichotomy.) Most philosophers have largely given up on giving a rational deductive basis for why we should believe in induction, so if anything that seems to be a perfect example of what you're describing.

I don't think the nature of quantum reality is anywhere near as settled. For decades, we thought that it was impossible to test local hidden-variable theories. Thank god some people were still working on the problem!

[paganel]

I might have read Hume the wrong way, but for me he was one of the few philosophers who basically said “there’s no way for us to know for sure” which can be approximated to “we don’t know”.

My favorite philosopher however remains Heraclitus, had we chosen to go his way we might have had less stupid questions, like “is the cat in the box dead or alive?” and instead we might have straight up came up with the answer “the cat is dead, alive and all the states between dead and alive, and we’re fine with that”. Unfortunately Aristotle was not fine with accepting the many “states” of the world “happening” all at the same time and went for the binary True-False way, bad-mouthing Heraclitus in the process. We certainly did manage to build a more efficient society by following Aristotle’s way but I think we have reached a local maximum, or it certainly looks that way. Maybe reverting to the pre-Socratics will help us go over this local maximum.

[MiroF]

It's terms like "local maxima" that make me realize how useful math knowledge is in conveying easily understandable concepts quickly. I perfectly understood what you meant, but don't think I could convey the concept in less than 10 words without a reference to "local maxima" or being "over-optimized"

[SomeOldThrow]

> Humes Problem of Induction, for instance, is exactly an example of philosophical practice grappling with these unanswerables.

Hume's problem of induction is arguably the last substantial thought on the subject, right up through Popper's bridge problem.

[kerkeslager]

> This comment started out good but then stumbled in to some odd critique of philosophy as being incapable of dealing with unknowable things when indeed that seems to be perfectly within the purview of philosophy.

What does it mean to "deal with" unknowable things in this case? If philosophy is claiming this as their purview, what are they going to do with it? I'd posit philosophers have two options:

1. Say, "I don't know." This is the better option, in my opinion, because it's honest, but scientists already said that, so why do we need philosophers to say the same thing? You can speculate beyond this and posit it from the beginning as "if this thing we don't know is true is true, then it would have this effect". But in other fields this would generally be a very low-value sort of discussion--respectable institutions would not, for example, give a lot of funding to scientific experiments which presuppose unstudied phenomena. You'd study the unstudied phenomenon first and come to conclusions there before moving on to further experiments which presuppose it. Philosophy isn't hurting anything by taking this approach, but it's not adding anything to what science has already done.

2. The second option is, you do what philosophers do all-too-often: simply present your speculation as fact, perhaps hiding a "I don't actually know" in a footnote somewhere so you can point to it when criticized. A common variant of this is teaching ridiculous ideas as equally valid, and then saying you're just teaching history of philosophy when criticized. This is how, for example, you get the categorical imperative taught in schools: it's trivial to come up with counterexamples where everyone behaving a certain way would be horrible, but if you point this out, philosophers will often simply say that they're just teaching Kant because he's historically important. Yet Kantian ethics are taught right next to much more realistic ethical ideas, and students often can't differentiate which ones make any sense and which ones don't. This would be like teaching flat earth-ism in science class, and then saying "it's history of science" when criticized. It's a motte and bailey argument[1] and it's dishonest and harmful to rational thought.

It seems to me that science has taken us as far as it's useful to go with regard to determinism, and philosophy has nothing of value to add on the subject.

Hume's Problem of Induction isn't comparable here. In that case, Hume is asking a question which science hasn't/can't ask, which is somewhat useful. I don't think, however, that Hume really answers the question, and I don't think it would be useful to pretend that we know the answer. In the case of Hume's Problem of Induction, philosophy adds the question but not the answer: with superdeterminism, science has already asked the question, and philosophy can't answer it any better, so philosophy has nothing to contribute.

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey