'act as if' and useless philosophy

[Cerril]

This is more of a topic of discussion so I decided to give it its own post. Basically the idea is that there are a lot of philosophical questions that are quite pointless to talk about because no matter what the truth is or what we can know, we act as if things are a particular way. In fact, to act otherwise would be widely regarded as insanity.

Examples include the fundamental dilemmas of epistomology ('it cannot be demonstrated that the future will resemble the past,' 'what is it to know something,' 'what qualifies as justification for a belief.') and metaphysics ('the nonexistence of supernatural entities [that cannot interact with reality as we know it] cannot be disproven,' 'there is no way to tell that you are not just a brain in a jar/imagining reality/dreaming/being fooled by an omnipotent and capricious being,' and pretty much all skepicism when taken to the extreme [and often logical conclusion]).

Variations on questions such as these take up a whole lot of time in amateur philosophy and after awhile I got pretty sick of dealing with them. That's not to say I don't mind discussions; in fact, pointless discourse is a great way to spend my time. But those people who feel that 'you can't prove me wrong' is a great philosophical discovery or argument get tiresome pretty quickly. So I came up with 'act as if' to deal with those discussions as soon as I realize the other participant isn't about to try to take the discussion any further.

Of course I'm not as well read as I might be, I'm curious if anyone else has seen this put more formally and with maybe even an actual name? Or has anyone encountered situations where this sort of attitude can get you into trouble logically speaking?

[PairTheBoard]

"act as if" is used in 12 Step Recovery programs quite a bit - sometimes translated to "fake it till you make it". Don't believe in prayer? Try it anyway, what can it hurt. A lot of people claim to have started this way and later say they came to believe in what they were just faking in the beginning.

PairTheBoard

[Cerril]

Oof, I see where the term could be misleading. What I meant is to treat something as true if we have no reasonable choice but to act as if it is true. I can't prove that you understand what I'm saying (or much at all about the outside world), but I have essentially no choice but to act as if it is true.

It's more a path of belief following action, rather than action for its own sake, but I think I either need to clarify my thoughts in the future or rethink my phrasing to avoid running into that snag. Thanks!

[Jman28]

I brought up a question similar to this in a Philosophy class last year.

The answer I got, and am satisfied with was (very loosely paraphrased) that Philosophy is about finding/searching for truth or the right way to think about things. Whether or not that truth has any real consequence or is likely to be found is not what's most important to Philosophers.

I didn't express that as well as it was expressed to me, so maybe the actual example will help.

We were studying probability theory, and I noted to the professor that almost all of the real life examples we used would've gotten practically the same result using a much simpler method than the one we were studying. Therefore, it was almost always right in real world situations to disregard this more accurate method.

The professor explained that we as philosophers were interested in finding the absolutely correct way to calculate probability, and not the most practical way.

In conclusion, philosophers are looking for truth, not practicality.

Did that make any sense?

[daryn]

we use this in physics. it's called the uniqueness theorem, usually used in electricity and magnetism, more precisely laplace's equation. you just assume a bunch of stuff and if you find A solution, then that is THE solution.

maybe this is confusing but if you know what i'm talking about, you understand.

[Cerril]

Yeah.. Heh, I wouldn't bring this up in a philosophy class; after all, we're there to learn about precisely this sort of stuff, so calling it pointless is pretty silly. I have mentioned it once or twice to my instructors, outside of class, and they usually agree that in any practical sense the conclusions we're forced to are pretty irrelevant (the 'persistent skeptic' being answered by this is the prime example). Of course I've always found the point of philosophy as a discipline to be more about being able to understand and interpret arguments, to think clearly, and to explain clearly and write well. So discussing thorny subjects with nonintuitive (and often useless) answers has merit.

[jdl22]

I know nuff all about physics but I know what you mean because it's also very common in Economics. I had trouble dealing with this at first because I studied math as an undergrad and if you don't know what's going on it feels like circular logic.

Here's an example from my quailifying exams a couple weeks ago:
I need to show that certain function exists, is bounded and continuous and unique. To do so you write the equation as a transformation (it's recursive so this works). For the theorem to work the transformation must map continuous bounded functions to continuous bounded functions so here you have to assume that the original function is continuous and bounded. Then using two theorems (Blackwell's and CMT) there exists a unique bounded continuous function satisfying the original equation.

Similarly Nash equilibria in game theory are found the same kind of way. Assume the first player uses strategy X. If player two knows 1 plays X then her best response is Y. If 1 knows 2 is playing Y then his best response is X and it works. It's not exactly the same but similar. People not exposed to game theory often ask irrelevant questions like "but why would 1 play X that doesn't make any sense?" You just have to assume this and make it so 2 is playing as if 1 were playing X. The ability to think in this way is important in solving these problems.

[Emmitt2222]

[ QUOTE ]
Oof, I see where the term could be misleading. What I meant is to treat something as true if we have no reasonable choice but to act as if it is true. I can't prove that you understand what I'm saying (or much at all about the outside world), but I have essentially no choice but to act as if it is true.


[/ QUOTE ]

This sounds like Ockham's razor (http://phyun5.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/node10.html), the most logical explination is the correct one. Since you study philosophy though I may just be mentioning something you are fully aware of and you are talking about something completely different. If this is the case then I need more clarification.

[Cerril]

I'm actually describing situations where you have no reasonable choice in where to act. Ockham's razor often is used to differentiate between a reasonable and unreasonable choice, but it can be used more broadly as well

I'll give you the most standard example. It's a pretty common argument among extreme skeptics that we can't prove anything about the world outside ourselves (whether a tree is really what we see, or whether it is something entirely different and our senses are fooling us; or whether we aren't just dreaming the entire world; or the various brain in a jar/matrix/etc. scenarios). Without going too much into details (since I'm probably just saying things everyone here already knows), it involves the idea that no matter how likely it seems that other people exist, there are always possible alternatives that would provide us with exactly the same stimuli and appearance.

The simple response is that if the skeptic really believes that the world isn't real (or even seriously doubts it), there isn't much point in trying to prove anything to anyone. Not only that but an objective proof requires something identifiable truths about the world.

The bottom line is that even the most persistent skeptic is required to 'act as if' there is a real world and that it roughly corresponds to how we experience it. Of course they are welcome not to, but that would fairly quickly produce a dead (or at best mute) skeptic.

These sorts of problems arise all over the place in philosophy, and are really annoying once you identify them. They're usually interesting problems -- for example, to someone who hasn't encountered persistent skepticism regarding just about anything, it can be an amusing exercise to go through the arguments -- but they aren't going to produce interesting results. You end up just having to leave the answer hanging and go on as if you never encountered the problem in the first place... at best. At worst, you end up having to end your discussion then and there.

I ran into this sort of argument (ones which can be answered by 'act as if') in a few unexpected situations during religious and moral philosophy, and even aesthetics to a lesser degree -- you can discuss whether the context is important to the quality of a work of art all you want, but if you absent the context or can't tell the difference (as in the case of a skilled forgery or newly discovered work by an unknown artist) then you either have to judge the piece as if the context weren't essential, or you can't say anything about it at all.

Hopefully that clears up what my meaning is. Obviously the actual terminology leaves something to be desired, but that's why I'm opening the floor here.

[Cerril]

I think I see... in both cases you're talking about situations where you know alternatives may exist, but you still have to act as if one particular solution is correct. In fact, these are even better examples (if I understand correctly) than you find in philosophy..

In philosophy you tend to deal with absolutes, and very rarely in measurable percentages, but these examples are ones where (especially the Game Theory example, though if I misread the Uniqueness theorem that it may be the case there as well) there is quite a reasonable chance for one of the alternatives to be true. When there is an optimal strategy when the opponent plays in one way and no optimal strategy when they play in other ways (and the first way is optimal for them as well), then you have to act as if the opponent will always play in the first way.

This also reminds me of DS's examples in gambling that he used in his Pascal's Wager and Sklanskyanity post. Sometimes you have to act as if something is true, even when the likelihood is slim (though those situations are rare, and almost nonexistent in many other fields)