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Quiop's avatar

I don't think I would be a suitable collaborator on any of these topics, but I would be interested to read about many of them! A few thoughts:

4. IANAL, but there has to be a well-developed body of law concerning mitigation and responsibility, right? It might be useful to approach this question at least partly from a jurisprudential angle, rather than from the perspective of abstract moral philosophy alone.

9. Doesn't some sort of Wittgensteinian move get you most of what you want here? e.g. "Instead of talking about knowledge, we should talk about the (social?) conditions under which knowledge claims are advanced and/or taken as valid." The problem is that mainstream analytic epistemology seems to have mostly rejected this sort of move. Timothy Williamson, for example, sees it as a sign of progress that metaphysicians and epistemologists since the 1970s generally spend their time debating claims about X, rather than about the meaning(s) of "X". I don't understand why he thinks this is progress; it strikes me as just a retreat into dogmatism. And there is no point arguing with dogmatists: the only thing to do is to seek out alternative interlocutors.

But really, it's your "exotic" proposals that I find most intriguing:

10B. One way this might be true is that elevating canonical texts to higher authority can make them more esoteric, which opens up greater space for interpretation. Compare: "This book gets a lot right, even if it gets a few things wrong. For example, it is wrong about [...], because [...]" vs. "Our sacred book appears to say something that is obviously wrong, but since it is sacred, it can't be wrong: what it actually *means* is [...]" Once you get sufficiently comfortable with the latter move, your hermeneutic prowess can liberate you from the tyranny of the text. Is this the sort of thing you are talking about?

10D. Yes, and: The structure of narratives makes people more likely to believe in AI risk.

10E. (Until recently it had never occurred to me that debates over logical axioms might be anything other than merely verbal.)

10F. Are the practical implications that you have in mind psychological, epistemological or (morally) normative?

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Nathaniel Joseph's avatar

https://philpapers.org/rec/QURTMW this paper relates to one of the points made

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