Philosophers will often say that if you accept a certain position that you’re “biting the bullet.” This is usually invoked when the position in question is thought sacrifice plausibility for the sake of consistency.
Lance, this is a great post. It's a pet peeve of mine when people frivolously accuse others of biting the bullet to cast doubt on their views. For that reason I usually try to use the phrase when referring to my own views rather than other people's.
The charitable way to interpret "bite the bullet" might be something like: "this view is immensely unpopular with the demographic of people you are trying to convince (which could be other professional philosophers, or it could be laypeople if you're doing public philosophy). You're making a concession insofar as you're accepting you have to meet a lot more skeptical challenges to your position and do a bit more explaining to sway your target audience."
That's certainly charitable but I am not sure how accurate it is. It would be one thing to say that a view is unpopular among some group that you yourself don't belong to, but it's quite another to say that you are "paying a cost" to hold a view. This implies that you yourself have tacitly agreed, or at the very least that they are correct about some matter you don't necessarily agree to. So, if someone thinks there's a presumption in favor of a position, and I deny it, in saying I am "biting the bullet," I am allegedly "paying a cost": giving up something *I* supposedly want or should want.
Sorry, I didn't see this response. I am not a physicalist. I'm an empiricist and a pragmatist. I don't think there's some specific fundamental nature to reality. My views tend to be in practice quite similar to naturalists/physicalists but I don't endorse either view and tend to eschew as many analytic labels as I can.
I once had a professor who, when asked if he would "bite the bullet" on a desideratum held only by his dialectical opponent, replied "I'll bite all of the bullets, because to me they aren't bullets, they're sweet, sweet candies." And that really stuck with me.
Precisely. I recently heard Nathan Ormond (Digital Gnosis) describe some of what philosophers do as "narrative control." I think this is apt. They craft a narrative and imply this or that position is illegitimate or should be discarded accordingly.
That's a good term for it. Philosophers also control the narrative by arguing over which theory "captures all the data," where what a defines a legitimate datum is assumed rather than argued for. And if I reject too much of the "starting data" I'm told I'm "talking about something different."
Is the use of the term “data” supposed to be literal or metaphorical? If literal, I suspect that the past few decades of work in the philosophy of science on the theory- and value-ladenness of measurement would pose an epistemic problem to the moral realist. I don’t think the philosopher of science thinks we can abstract away from that contextuality; would the moral realist think we’d have to?
I don't know if it's supposed to be literal or metaphorical. It seems very strange to use that term to me. What's especially strange is that the methods they employ rarely engage with any empirical data. So the "data" they are working with doesn't appear to be based, for the most part, on any systematic efforts to obtain empirical information.
Lance, this is a great post. It's a pet peeve of mine when people frivolously accuse others of biting the bullet to cast doubt on their views. For that reason I usually try to use the phrase when referring to my own views rather than other people's.
The charitable way to interpret "bite the bullet" might be something like: "this view is immensely unpopular with the demographic of people you are trying to convince (which could be other professional philosophers, or it could be laypeople if you're doing public philosophy). You're making a concession insofar as you're accepting you have to meet a lot more skeptical challenges to your position and do a bit more explaining to sway your target audience."
That's certainly charitable but I am not sure how accurate it is. It would be one thing to say that a view is unpopular among some group that you yourself don't belong to, but it's quite another to say that you are "paying a cost" to hold a view. This implies that you yourself have tacitly agreed, or at the very least that they are correct about some matter you don't necessarily agree to. So, if someone thinks there's a presumption in favor of a position, and I deny it, in saying I am "biting the bullet," I am allegedly "paying a cost": giving up something *I* supposedly want or should want.
This essay includes the claim "I'm not a physicalist". Is that an editing mishap?
Are you asking whether I mistakenly said I wasn't a physicalist?
That was one passing thought, but I see that's not the case.
You seem to have many physicalist-friendly beliefs, so I was not sure where you stood. I suspect it would be clearer if I had read more of your stuff.
Sorry, I didn't see this response. I am not a physicalist. I'm an empiricist and a pragmatist. I don't think there's some specific fundamental nature to reality. My views tend to be in practice quite similar to naturalists/physicalists but I don't endorse either view and tend to eschew as many analytic labels as I can.
I once had a professor who, when asked if he would "bite the bullet" on a desideratum held only by his dialectical opponent, replied "I'll bite all of the bullets, because to me they aren't bullets, they're sweet, sweet candies." And that really stuck with me.
Precisely. I recently heard Nathan Ormond (Digital Gnosis) describe some of what philosophers do as "narrative control." I think this is apt. They craft a narrative and imply this or that position is illegitimate or should be discarded accordingly.
That's a good term for it. Philosophers also control the narrative by arguing over which theory "captures all the data," where what a defines a legitimate datum is assumed rather than argued for. And if I reject too much of the "starting data" I'm told I'm "talking about something different."
Russ Shafer-Landau and colleagues have been doing this with moral realism recently, talking about the "data."
Is the use of the term “data” supposed to be literal or metaphorical? If literal, I suspect that the past few decades of work in the philosophy of science on the theory- and value-ladenness of measurement would pose an epistemic problem to the moral realist. I don’t think the philosopher of science thinks we can abstract away from that contextuality; would the moral realist think we’d have to?
I don't know if it's supposed to be literal or metaphorical. It seems very strange to use that term to me. What's especially strange is that the methods they employ rarely engage with any empirical data. So the "data" they are working with doesn't appear to be based, for the most part, on any systematic efforts to obtain empirical information.