[lapcat]

> So to me MacIntyre is a bit more famous than Rorty.

What you mean is that you know MacIntyre better than Rorty. To be famous is literally to be known about by many people, so there's no such thing as "famous to me".

I don't judge fame by my own familiarity, otherwise many obscure people would be "famous" and many famous people "unknown".

> But my sense is that that's a bit unrepresentative among not-really-philosophers, and probably quite a lot unrepresentative among actual philosophers.

Indeed.

[gjm11]

Yes, obviously strictly speaking "famous to me" makes no sense. On the other hand, you correctly understood what I meant, and I made it clear at the outset ("One pair of data points") and at the end ("my sense is that that's a bit unrepresentative") that I understand that my own state of familiarity isn't anything like definitive and am not attempting to "judge fame by my own familiarity". So I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make that actually needed making.

I mean, if you want to complain about people making judgements of relative fame on insufficient evidence, fair enough. But I'm having trouble figuring out why my comment is the one that requires that complaint, when the other three people in this thread passing judgement on the relative fame of Rorty and MacIntyre (1) in no instance give any more evidence than I did, and (2) in fact give no indication at all of where their opinion comes from.

(I actually don't think I quite do mean "that [I] know MacIntyre better than Rorty", though I agree that that's the specific thing I gave a bit of kinda-quantitative evidence about. I think what I actually meant is more like "I have heard more about MacIntyre than about Rorty". That correlates well with who I know more about, for obvious reasons, and in this case it matches up OK, but there are philosophers I know more about than either but who I would consider less famous even with the yes-I-know-strictly-incorrect "to me" qualifier; for instance, I have read zero books by M. or R. but one by Peter van Inwagen, but I have hardly ever heard other people talking about him and I think I encountered his work while browsing bookshop shelves. I know Inwagen better than MacIntyre but I hear about MacIntyre much more often. Again, I admit that you couldn't reasonably have got that distinction from what I actually wrote; to whatever extent I'm offering a correction it's a correction of my previous unclarity, not of any perceived misunderstanding on your part.)

[lapcat]

> So I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make that actually needed making.

My point is that the anecdotal data of one person is completely worthless. And for what it's worth (nothing), my own personal anecdotal data is the opposite of yours, so we cancel each other out. I would also note that the commenters on a MacIntyre obituary are an extremely biased sample.

> the other three people in this thread passing judgement on the relative fame of Rorty and MacIntyre (1) in no instance give any more evidence than I did, and (2) in fact give no indication at all of where their opinion comes from.

It's true that I've offered no empirical evidence for my claim. My objection to you is that you offered your own personal experience as a data point, whereas I did not, and indeed deny that my experience is data: "I don't judge fame by my own familiarity". I actually have no wish to get into a long argument about the relative fame of two persons and was mainly just reacting to the ridiculous, "20 years after Rorty's death, he's largely forgotten", which by the way was not supported with evidence either (and was not even numerically accurate, because Rorty died 18 years ago). In any case, another commenter did mention how Rorty has entered into the wider culture in at least one respect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074114

[gjm11]

The value of one person's anecdata is in fact not zero. I agree it's small. That's why I festooned what I said with caveats about how my own experience need not be representative, etc., etc. But it's not zero, which is why I thought it worth saying anything.

(Zero plus zero plus zero plus ... plus zero equals zero. But if you ask 1000 people and they all say "I've heard of X but not of Y" or "I've heard of them both but heard more about X than about Y" then you have, in fact, got pretty good evidence that X is more famous than Y. Even if they're in the comments on an article about X, which of course I agree will give you a biased sample.)

Anyway, I think this argument is taking up something like 10x more space than it actually deserves and don't propose to continue it further.

[lapcat]

> The value of one person's anecdata is in fact not zero. I agree it's small.

It's less than zero. It's negative. Taking a very biased, unrepresentive anecedote and presenting it as positive evidence for some conclusion is fallacious and misleading. It's worse than presenting no data at all. You should have no confidence in a broad conclusion based on an anecdote.

> But if you ask 1000 people and they all say "I've heard of X but not of Y" or "I've heard of them both but heard more about X than about Y" then you have, in fact, got pretty good evidence that X is more famous than Y. Even if they're in the comments on an article about X, which of course I agree will give you a biased sample.

I couldn't disagree more. If you ask 1000 randomly selected people, that's pretty good evidence, but it's not good evidence if the sample is highly biased.