Yes. As in the chapter cited, there is no particular minimal integer number of hairs you can have and still not be bald, which God could determine but we don’t (yet) know.
Conversation
So, even with perfect knowledge the best one can do is to say whether or not a given person is bald, but one can never give a complete account of how this was determined?
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Well, there are many people who you’d say “I guess he’s bald-*ish*” or “somewhat bald” or something. There’s a “gray area.”
This is not a matter of incomplete knowledge; you could inspect him as closely as you like and it wouldn’t make a difference. It’s in the world, not map.
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So the problem isn’t a lack of knowledge, or of perception, cognition, computation or reasoning. There just are people whose baldness is indeterminable. Even assuming a metaphysical being without human constraints doesn’t get around this problem.
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Yes, exactly. That’s what “nebulous” means. It’s “an ontological term, not an epistemological one.”
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Would you go the other extreme to Donald Hoffman’s position that ontology is entirely a matter of perceptual adaptive fit and that entities only exist in relation to fitness to survival purposes? Ie reality is one big nebulous blob that we carve up in ways that help us survive?
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I am very sympathetic to that position. Pinker has an even more solipsistic version, reducing ontology to evolved linguistic convention. What gives me pause is the existence of sharp-edged things like fundamental constants that don’t seem to be a matter of adaptive efficiency
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Think David C would say ontological nebulosity needn't be true of fundamental physics to be true of the eggplant-sized world. So not "mere" convention, but we get at these sharp ontologies through evolved faculties meant for eggplant-sized world.
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So epistemologies that assume eggplant-sized world has to be sharp like fundamental physics are false.
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That’s almost too reasonably scoped, to the point of tautology. Also slightly worryingly self-referential (nebulousity becomes a nebulous proposition that holds within a nebulous scope of mostly nebulous things)
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I’m not sure any strict Bayesian non-nebulous rationalists exist. So in order to not be a strawman, this has to be a stronger critique: something like “reality is too nebulous for rationalist methods to work at all. It’s not just a minor correction but a crippling undermining.”
This, I do buy, but I don’t think anyone has effectively demonstrated yet. Which is why rationalists get upset and accuse such criticisms of being strawman ones
I don’t take a position myself. I have no dog in the fight, and don’t think the 3Ds have finished training their dogs.



