As a child I decided to do a philosophy course as an extracurricular activity. In it the teacher explained to us the notion of schools of philosophical thought. According to him classifying philosophers as adhering either to school A or school B, is typical for Anglo thought.
It deeply annoys me when Americans talk about Democrat and Republican political thought and suggest that you are either a Democrat or a Republican. The notion that allegiance to one political camp is supposed to dictate your political beliefs feels deeply wrong.
A lot of Anglo high schools do policy debating. The British do it a bit differently than the American but in both cases it boils down to students having to defend a certain side.
Traditionally there's nearly no debating at German high schools.
When writing political essays in German school there’s a section where it's important to present your own view. Your own view isn't supposed to be one that you simply copy from another person. Good thinking is supposed to provide a sophisticated perspective on the topic that is the synthesis of arguments from different sources instead of following a single source.
That’s part of the German intellectual thought has the ideal of 'Bildung'. In Imprisoned in English Anna Wierzbicka tells me that 'Bildung' is a particularly German construct and the word isn't easily translatable into other languages. The nearest English word is 'education'. 'Bildung' can also be translated as 'creation'. It's about creating a sophisticated person, that's more developed than the average person on the street who doesn't have 'Bildung'. Having 'Bildung' signals having a high status.
According to this ideal you learn about different viewpoints and then you develop a sophisticated opinion. Not having a sophisticated opinion is low class. In liberal social circles in the US a person who agrees with what the Democratic party does at every point in time would have a respectable political opinion. In German intellectual life that person would be seen as a credulous low status idiot that failed to develop a sophisticated opinion. A low status person isn't supposed to be able to fake being high status by memorizing the teacher's password.
If you ask me the political question "Do you support A or B?", my response is: "Well, I neither want A or B. There are these reasons for A, there are those reasons for B. My opinion is that we should do C which solves those problems better and takes more concerns into account." A isn’t the high status option so that I can signal status by saying that I'm in favour of A.
How does this relate to non-political opinions? In Anglo thought philosophic positions belong to different schools of thought. Members belonging to one school are supposed to fight for their school being right and being better than the other schools.
If we take the perspective of hardcore materialism, a statement like: "One of the functions of the heart is to pump blood" wouldn't be a statement that can be objectively true because it's teleology. The notion of function isn't made up of atoms.
From my perspective as a German there's little to be gained in subscribing to the hardcore materialist perspective. It makes a lot of practical sense to say that such as statement can be objectively true. I have gotten the more sophisticated view of the world, that I want to have. Not only statements that are about arrangements of atoms can be objectively true but also statements about the functions of organs. That move is high status in German intellectual discourse but it might be low status in Anglo-discourse because it can be seen as being a traitor to the school of materialism.
Of course that doesn't mean that no Anglo accepts that the above statement can be objectively true. On the margin German intellectual norms make it easier to accept the statement as being objectively true. After Hegel you might say that thesis and antithesis come together to a synthesis instead of thesis or antithesis winning the argument.
The German Wikipedia page for "continental philosophy" tells me that the term is commonly used in English philosophy. According to the German Wikipedia it's mostly used derogatorily. From the German perspective the battle between "analytic philosophy" and "continental philosophy" is not a focus of the debate. The goal isn't to decide which school is right but to develop sophisticated positions that describe the truth better than answers that you could get by memorizing the teacher's password.
One classic example of an unsophisticated position that's common in analytic philosophy is the idea that all intellectual discourse is supposed to be based on logic. In Is semiotics bullshit? PhilGoetz stumbles about a professor of semiotics who claims: "People have an extra-computational ability to make correct judgements at better-than-random probability that have no logical basis."
That's seen as a strong violation of how reasoning based on logical positivism is supposed to work. It violates the memorized teachers password. But is it true? To answer that we have to ask what 'logical basis' means. David Chapman analysis the notion of logic in Probability theory does not extend logic. In it he claims that in academic philosophical discourse the phrase logic means predicate logic.
Predicate logic can make claims such:
(a) All men are mortal.
(b) Socrates is a man.
Therefore:
(c) Socrates is mortal.
According to Chapman the key trick of predicate logic is logical quantification. That means every claim has to be able to be evaluated as true or false without looking at the context.
We want to know whether a chemical substance is safe for human use. Unfortunately our ethical review board doesn't let us test the substance on humans. Fortunately they allow us to test the substance on rats. Hurray, the rats survive.
(a) The substance is safe for rats.
(b) Rats are like humans
Therefore:
(c) The substance is safe for humans.
The problem with `Rats are like humans` is that it isn’t a claim that’s simply true or false.
The truth value of the claim depends on what conclusions you want to draw from it. Propositional calculus can only evaluate the statement as true or false and can’t judge whether it’s an appropriate analogy because that requires looking at the deeper meaning of the statement `Rats are like humans` to decide whether `Rats are like humans` in the context we care about.
Do humans sometimes make mistakes when they try to reason by analogy? Yes, they do. At the same time they also come to true conclusions by reasoning through analogy. Saying "People have an extra-computational ability to make correct judgements at better-than-random probability that have no logical basis." sounds fancy, but if we reasonably define the term logical basis as being about propositional calculus, it's true.
Does that mean that you should switch from the analytic school to the school of semiotics? No, that's not what I'm arguing. I argue that just as you shouldn't let tribalism influence yourself in politics and identify as Democrat or Republican you should keep in mind that philosophical debates, just as policy debates, are seldom one-sided.
Daring to slay another sacred cow, maybe we also shouldn't go around thinking of ourselves as Bayesian. If you are on the fence on that question, I encourage you to read David Chapman's splendid article I referenced above:
To the extent that using prior information about the world is useful in understanding the future, it's sort of nonsensical to say someone shouldn't think of themselves as Bayesian. To the extent someone is perhaps ignoring a correct methodological approach because of a misguided/misunderstood appeal to Bayesianism, that's fine.
For example, back in the academic world I worked on research forecasting the U.S. yield curve. We did this using a series of non-linear equations to fit each day (cross-section), then used filtering dynamics to jointly capture the time-series. Figuring out a way to make this already insanely complex model work within a Bayesian framework wouldn't only be perhaps too hard, but not particularly useful. There is no nice quantifiable information that would fit in a prior, given the constraints we have on data, math, and computational ability, that would make the model formally Bayesian.
Having said that, to the extent that we tweaked the model using our prior information on less structured scientific theories (e.g. Efficient market hypothesis) -- it certainly was Bayesian. Sometimes the model worked perfectly, computed perfectly, but something didn't match up with how we wanted to map it to reality. In that sense we had our own neural-prior and found the posterior less likely.
It's really hard for me to see under what model of the world (correct) Bayesian analysis could be misleading.
I think the claim that people can make correct judgements at better-than random probability that have no logical basis is nonsensical. Lots of this sort of writing and theorizing of the world is from a time, and from people, who existed before modern computational powers and machine learning. In the past the view was that the human mind was this almost-mystical device for processing reality, and we had to ground our beliefs in some sort of formal logic for them to follow. At least in my experience from working with stuff like neural-nets, I only see vast amounts of information, which our brains can filter out to predict the future. To reason from analogy, sometimes when doing some sort of ML problem you'll add a bunch of data and you have no logical clue why it would improve your model... But then your predictions/classification score increase.
In this context what does it even mean to call this logical or non-logical? It's nothing more than using past observed information patterns to classify and predict future information patterns. It's strictly empirical. I can't think of any logical decomposition of that which would add meaning.
Is there ever a case where priors are irrelevant to a distinction or justification? That's the difference between pure Bayesian reasoning and alternatives.
OP gave the example of the function of organs for a different purpose, but it works well here. To a pure Bayesian reasoner, there is no difference between saying that the heart has a function and saying that the heart is correlated with certain behaviors, because priors alone are not sufficient to distinguish the two. Priors alone are not sufficient to distinguish the two because the distinction has to do with ideals and definitions, not with correlations and experience.
If a person has issues with erratic blood flow leading to some hospital visit, why should we look at the heart for problems? Suppose there were a problem found with the heart. Why should we address the problem at that level as opposed to fixing the blood flow issue in some more direct way? What if there was no reason for believing that the heart problem would lead to anything but the blood flow problem? What's the basis for addressing the underlying cause as opposed to addressing solely the issue that more directly led to a hospital visit?
There is no basis unless you recognize that addressing underlying causes tends to resolve issues more cleanly, more reliably, more thoroughly, and more persistently than addressing symptoms, and that the underlying cause only be identified by distinguishing erroneous functioning from other abnormalities. Pure Bayesian reasoners can't make the distinction because the distinction has to do with ideals and definitions, not with correlations and experience.
If you wanted a model that was never misleading, you might as well use first order logic to explain everything. Or go straight for the vacuous case and don't try to explain anything. That problem is that that doesn't generalize well, and it's too restrictive. It's about broadening your notion of reasoning so that you consider alternative justifications and more applications.