Would put slight caution around asking it anything more than "what should I read next about this?"
For whatever reason*, it is particularly bad at discussing philosophy I find. When I was grading philosophy 101, I would have probably given it a passing grade against the overall curve, but that's about it. Philosophy is a discipline of careful, sometimes jargoney, and always very couched assertions that can be easily misunderstood and appropriated. This is probably its greatest weakness, and in many ways this weakness is the progenitor of philosophy itself in the Western world, with Plato at the start (i.e. with the figure of the sophist, the paradox of a false wisdom).
- Maybe one reason: there is a huge amount of, lets say, "armchair philosophy" on the internet, compared to other disciplines. Many blogposts and tiny manifestos of people really excited by some out of context quote from Spinoza or whatever. And you start to really feel this part of the dataset when you ask about philosophy. Many strange takes and misunderstandings.
I asked it where moral relativism fit in with philosophy and it came back with this
Philosophy
Ethics/Moral Philosophy
Meta-Ethics: The study of moral thought, language, and properties
Moral Realism: Belief that there are objective moral facts
Moral Anti-Realism: Denial of the existence of objective moral facts
Moral Relativism: The belief that moral judgments are true or false only relative to some particular standpoint
I thought that was pretty good, what do you think?
Haha I think it's fine. I think its kinda cheeky answering you so literally, giving it an actual place to fit into :).
I don't doubt it can do, like, Wikipedia type classification ok, but that's not like really getting to the substance of anything! And, either way, its not like there is one decided-upon hierarchy of concepts like this people consciously work within. This is a fine picture to some, but others might contest, perhaps, that Meta-Ethics is the "study of moral thought, language, and properties." What is "moral language" anyway? Why is it meta relative to Moral Philosophy writ-large? Or perhaps one might argue that we need to think of meta-ethics as a sibling rather than child. The whole discipline is a mess of different thoughts and possible rebuttals and grand intellectual overturnings that will not be captured here. Maybe just try pasting that back into the prompt and asking "what's wrong with this picture?".
But like I said, its fine in that its fairly comparable to Wikipedia for utility, (with IMO a worse interface, but I get why people like it more).
Yea I don’t think it was trained on any hierarchy in particular, ChatGPT literally came up with this on the fly. There’s even more to it I didn’t include to keep the post small. Just really impressive to have a conversation with it that goes all sorts of places. I don’t know any philosophy professors so this is the next best thing.
For whatever reason*, it is particularly bad at discussing philosophy I find. When I was grading philosophy 101, I would have probably given it a passing grade against the overall curve, but that's about it. Philosophy is a discipline of careful, sometimes jargoney, and always very couched assertions that can be easily misunderstood and appropriated. This is probably its greatest weakness, and in many ways this weakness is the progenitor of philosophy itself in the Western world, with Plato at the start (i.e. with the figure of the sophist, the paradox of a false wisdom).
- Maybe one reason: there is a huge amount of, lets say, "armchair philosophy" on the internet, compared to other disciplines. Many blogposts and tiny manifestos of people really excited by some out of context quote from Spinoza or whatever. And you start to really feel this part of the dataset when you ask about philosophy. Many strange takes and misunderstandings.