Elijah Millgram: commitment

Transcript context

…No, of course not, but people may not be truth seekers, right? That’s a rather obvious conclusion. No, no, no. So, I’m a philosopher. My best conversation partners are other philosophers who I think are truth seekers and who I have enormous respect for. But it’s not exactly that one of us thinks that the other one is the smarter one; it’s not like that. Some of these people I’ve known for, I guess, 40 years now, and we have overlapping interests. So we have regular conversations, and mostly neither of us convinces the other; what happens is our views evolve. I talk to my philosophical conversation partner. I’ve come up with an objection to her view or her argument, and she goes home and comes back. And her argument has changed and the view has changed, but not to agree with me. But she has an objection to my view and my argument, and I take the point. I go home, but I come back not agreeing with her. I come back with a — my view has mutated to swallow the objection, going in a different — right? And I have a new argument. Maybe philosophers are a special case, but these conversations — the really productive, interesting ones — they don’t seem to produce agreement. But isn’t that proof that you are all, and we are all, not truth seekers? If you are truth seekers, the evolution of your views should be a random walk. Your views evolve, but in unpredictable ways. What I observe empirically is people move bit by bit toward a new position, and in essence, their position a week later from today is somewhat predictable — at least the direction of change from their position now. Maybe people are more interested in being interesting, a word you used, and they’re just not that much truth seekers, because the evolution should then be a random walk.…

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