What are the methods of philosophy?
In a previous thread I posed the question of whether philosophy makes progress or not. But how do philosophers go about pursuing such progress? What methods do we use to do philosophy?
I think it is frequently not by solving but by dissolving an apparently intractable problem, showing it to actually be a conflation of several different problems. Each of those problems will have its own solution, which are frequently closely related to the different contradictory answers to the conflated singular problem that has since been clarified into multiple problems. More generally, philosophy makes headway best when it analyzes concepts in light of the practical use we want to put them to, asking why do we need to know the answer to some question, in order to get at what we really want from an answer to that question, and so what an answer to it should look like, and how to go about identifying one.
In analyzing concepts and teasing them apart from each other, philosophy makes extensive use of the tools of mathematical logic. But in exhorting its audience to care to use one of those teased-apart concepts for some practical purpose, instead of endlessly seeking answers to the uselessly confused and so perpetually unanswerable question that they may be irrationally attached to as some kind of important cosmic enigma, philosophy must instead use the tools of the rhetorical arts. Thus philosophy uses the tools of the abstract disciplines, mathematics and the arts, to make progress in its job of enabling the more practical sciences to in turn do their jobs of expounding on the details of what is real and moral.
I think it is frequently not by solving but by dissolving an apparently intractable problem, showing it to actually be a conflation of several different problems. Each of those problems will have its own solution, which are frequently closely related to the different contradictory answers to the conflated singular problem that has since been clarified into multiple problems. More generally, philosophy makes headway best when it analyzes concepts in light of the practical use we want to put them to, asking why do we need to know the answer to some question, in order to get at what we really want from an answer to that question, and so what an answer to it should look like, and how to go about identifying one.
In analyzing concepts and teasing them apart from each other, philosophy makes extensive use of the tools of mathematical logic. But in exhorting its audience to care to use one of those teased-apart concepts for some practical purpose, instead of endlessly seeking answers to the uselessly confused and so perpetually unanswerable question that they may be irrationally attached to as some kind of important cosmic enigma, philosophy must instead use the tools of the rhetorical arts. Thus philosophy uses the tools of the abstract disciplines, mathematics and the arts, to make progress in its job of enabling the more practical sciences to in turn do their jobs of expounding on the details of what is real and moral.
Comments (59)
I agree with you in some ways. The more time I've spent with philosophy, the more I find some of the less experienced forum philosophers (and my own earlier incarnations as a self-crown philosopher) to be chasing their own tails, prisoners of a vocabulary that they take for granted, even as they flail about ever so critically within that vocabulary. IMV, this philosophy is sub-normal, inferior to a common sense that sniffs something bogus without being able to articulate just where things go wrong.
In some ways your approach continues to wave them away. The 'important cosmic enigmas' are also known as or at least entangled with issues of prime concern. Of course philosophy can retreat from these difficult issues into a kind of bland technicity, but that's a long way from Socrates, for better or worse.
I agree that the art of rhetoric is important, and I suggest that it's always been central. The quasi-technical arguments that a certain kind of philosopher relishes occur within 'irrational' paradigms or dominant images that set the terms for more detailed debate. The philosopher/sophist dichotomy is hardly itself technical and indeed shamelessly rhetorical or a piece of 'sophistry. '
Quoting Pfhorrest
I like the dissolving approach too, though I think of it in terms of shining light on the contingency of a 'vocabulary' or paradigm that is enacted unwittingly as necessary. For this reason and others, I suggest that 'anything goes' is a less wrong approach. As philosophers we are always trying to constrain or dominate the future within our current, fragile vocabulary. We can't see the 'assumptions' that currently blind or constrain us, because they aren't explicit and because they have not yet been articulated. Such articulation is how future philosophers will liberate themselves from our prejudices in order to enjoy their own.
And all of this applies to 'my' own attempt to dominate the future which is already dated, already canonical 20th century philosophy.
Quoting path
I think that if we analyse what Socrates was doing in the 5th century BC we will find a straight line with the philosophy of the 21st century: to analyse and criticise language. Dissolving problems, if you will. What language? Any language, but especially the language of the search for meaning. Against the ontological pretensions, I believe that the foundations of philosophy lie in a basic question: What to be done?
Continuing with Socrates, I believe that the main method of philosophy is not rhetorical but dialectical. Large discourses with persuasive rhetorical intentions - in a sophistic way - are the negation of philosophy. Any book on philosophy that manipulates opposing ideas to improve its own is a false philosophy. An honest philosopher always dialogues with his rivals, concedes their points and tries to criticise his thesis with the same rigour as those of others.
Quoting Pfhorrest
If that, then the synthesis of them should follow, or, the synthesis of them and something else subsumed under them, in order to complete a method.
For the most part....agreed. Although it must be said, Quoting Pfhorrest is a natural proclivity of reason itself, the search for the unconditioned, the bottom line, the terminus of infinite regress. But even so, you’re correct, insofar as practical reason curbs the irrationality of pure reason taken to promote impossible human experiences.
I don’t mean to suggest we turn away from “cosmic enigmas”, just that we don’t mistake our own confusion for those profound depths in need of plunging.
Quoting David Mo
I don’t mean “rhetorical” in a sense that implies sophistry or opposes dialectic. I just mean it as in caring about the style and presentation and other non-rational aspects of communication, above and beyond just being technically correct in your logic. To quote myself:
[quote=“The Codex Quaerentis: On Rhetoric and the Arts”]I like to use an analogy of prescribing someone medicine: the actual medicinal content is most important of course, but you stand a much better chance of getting someone to actually swallow that content if it's packaged in a small, smooth, sweet-tasting pill than if it's packaged in a big, jagged, bitter pill. In this analogy, the medicinal content of the pill is the logical, rational content of a speech-act, while the size, texture, and flavor of the pill is the rhetorical packaging and delivery of the speech-act. It is of course important that the "medicine" (logic) be right, but it's just as important that the "pill" (rhetoric) be such that people will actually swallow it.[/quote]
Quoting Mww
I’m not sure what you mean here. If we’re teasing apart concepts that had been wrongly confused with each other, what then would synthesizing them back together again (in a better way?) be like?
The only way to analyze concepts is with other concepts; the human representational system knows no other way. If it be granted the definition validates the conception (experience or logic validates the synthesis of conceptions; reason validates the synthesis of conceptions to other representations in a transcendental system), then analyzing the definition usually distinguishes the application of conceptions, rightens the wrongly confused. It becomes a valid judgement that the object a posteriori, or thought a priori, belongs to the conception under which it is subsumed. The object “wing”, e.g., does not belong to the conception of a “dog”; the thought of “blue” is not qualitatively necessary to the conception of “triangle”.
I don’t think we’d normally synthesize back together conceptions we’ve already analyzed as being mutually contradictory with respect to a singular object. We could, I suppose.....hey!! I’m here to tell you there’s a dog in the outer reaches of Mongolia (innermost inaccessible Peru....whatever) that has wings. Not altogether impossible, but chances of knowledge of it is vanishingly small. On the other hand, there is historical precedence: the object “man” was once contradictory to the conception “walking on the moon”.
Right. And I agree with you in many ways. But my issue would be that there's no clean break between form and content. Roughly speaking, I think the philosophy/sophistry distinction is itself a piece of sophistry, at least when taken beyond ordinary loose talk.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Fair enough, but this touches the first point. Some of us are invested in a certain image of the intellectual. It's in our interest to interpret issues in one direction or another. Figuring out what is confusion and what is a genuine enigma is the hard part, and it's hard for me to see it as a technical an objective issue. We get something like objectivity within a speech community that has already agreed on standards.
Loosely, 'strong' philosophy is abnormal discourse that makes a normal discourse possible. This might also help you see where I'm coming from.
[quote=Rorty]
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey are in agreement that the notion of knowledge of accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation, needs to be abandoned. For all three, the notions of "foundations of knowledge" and of philosophy as revolving around the Cartesian attempt to answer the epistemological skeptic are set aside. Further, they set aside the notion of "the mind" common to Descartes, Locke, and Kant — as a special subject of study, located in inner space, containing elements or processes which make knowledge possible. This is not to say that they have alternative "theories of knowledge" or "philosophies of mind." They set aside epistemology and metaphysics as possible disciplines. I say "set aside" rather than "argue against" because their attitude toward the traditional problematic is like the attitude of seventeenth century philosophers toward the scholastic problematic. They do not devote themselves to discovering false propositions or bad arguments in the works of their predecessors (though they occasionally do that too). Rather, they glimpse the possibility of a form of intellectual life in which the vocabulary of philosophical reflection inherited from the seventeenth century would seem as pointless as the thirteenth-century philosophical vocabulary had seemed to the Enlightenment. To assert the possibility of a post-Kantian culture, one in which there is no all-encompassing discipline which legitimizes or grounds the others, is not necessarily to argue against any particular Kantian doctrine, any more than to glimpse the possibility of a culture in which religion either did not exist, or had no connection with science or politics, was necessarily to argue against Aquinas's claim that God's existence can be proved by natural reason. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey have brought us into a period of "revolutionary" philosophy (in the sense of Kuhn's "revolutionary" science) by introducing new maps of the terrain (viz., of the whole panorama of human activities) which simply do not include those features which previously seemed to dominate.
[/quote]
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/rorty/
I agree with you. I'd just say that this image of the honest philosopher was not given to us from on high. It is itself one of the results of dialogue, a kind of sediment. It become a part of our somewhat overlapping identities as philosophers.
At the same time, it's somewhat platitudinous. The devil is in the details. I wager that we will never be done figuring out what we mean by 'rational' or 'critical.' Individually we'll probably always have people who think they have it all essentially figured out, which is perhaps the driving fantasy after all. People will wear that mask with more or less irony and playfulness, more or less genuine openness to threatening alternative vocabularies and perspectives. What I dislike about the pejorative use of 'sophistry' is it's one way we might hide ourselves from such perspectives. It's in our interest to keep our network of beliefs and desires sufficiently stable. We all need some rhetoric at times to protect our fragile identity from the gaze of other who won't play by our rules and see us as we see ourselves.
It seems to me then, @path, that that pejorative sense of “sophistry” is quite what you seem to be against, as it involves a kind of closed-minded disinterest in finding out if you were wrong, and more interest in showing everyone that you were right all along.
Well 'sophistry' is a token in our mostly automatic language games, so I won't pretend to dominate it by fiat from the outside, as we philosophers tend to do. That said, I do value dialectic, which involves a certain risk, if sincere. Where we may differ is in your assumption that there is a correct answer.
Life is not math. To be Socratic and know that one does not know is to never be complacently sure that one is on [s]the[/s] a right path, or a less wrong path. Other, different paths might be equal or better. Maybe there is no Method that can save me from doubts about my 'final vocabulary.' Perhaps the torch that lights my way also necessarily blinds me. To be/see one world is to foreclose, ignore, fend off some other. And we always arrive too late for 'pure' reason.
Some nice quotes:
[quote=link]
Over and against traditional conceptions of truth, Gadamer argues that truth is fundamentally an event, a happening, in which one encounters something that is larger than and beyond oneself. Truth is not the result of the application of a set of criteria requiring the subject’s distanced judgment of adequacy or inadequacy. Truth exceeds the criteria-based judgment of the individual (although we could say it makes possible such a judgment). Gadamer explains in the last lines of Truth and Method that “In understanding we are drawn into an event of truth and arrive, as it were, too late, if we want to know what we are supposed to believe” (490). Truth is not, fundamentally, the result of an objective epistemic relation to the world (as put forth by correspondence or coherence theories of truth). An objective model of truth assumes that we can set ourselves at a distant from and thus make a judgment about truth using a set of criteria that is fully discernible, separable, and manipulable by us.
...
In part II of Truth and Method Gadamer develops four key concepts central to his hermeneutics: prejudice, tradition, authority, and horizon. Prejudice (Vorurteil) literally means a fore-judgment, indicating all the assumptions required to make a claim of knowledge. Behind every claim and belief lie many other tacit beliefs; it is the work of understanding to expose and subsequently affirm or negate them. Unlike our everyday use of the word, which always implies that which is damning and unfounded, Gadamer’s use of “prejudice” is neutral: we do not know in advance which prejudices are worth preserving and which should be rejected. Furthermore, prejudice-free knowledge is neither desirable nor possible. Neither the hermeneutic circle nor prejudices are necessarily vicious. Against the enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice” (272) Gadamer argues that prejudices are the very source of our knowledge. To dream with Descartes of razing to the ground all beliefs that are not clear and distinct is a move of deception that would entail ridding oneself of the very language that allows one to formulate doubt in the first place.
[/quote]
https://www.iep.utm.edu/gadamer/#SH1c
I was referring to Plato's vision of sophistry. (True sophistry was something else.) In Platonic interpretation sophists are individual relativists.Therefore, discourse - all discourse, in fact - is not aimed at finding some kind of truth, but only at persuading the listeners. In that sense, the Sophistry is a real and present problem for all those who think that some kind of truth must be sought in philosophy, even if it is never found in its pure state.
For example, Rorty. According to him, there is no truth in philosophy. Philosophical discourse only aims at persuading new generations when a particular discourse becomes old. In my opinion this view is dangerous because it omits the fact that behind a language there is always an ideology. Changing discourses without a critical analysis of ideologies is pure conformism and marketing that left relations of domination intact. And this is an unconventional problem.
I only disagree that "rhetoric" necessarily refers to that. To quote myself again from immediately before my previous quote:
I don't know if certain doses of rhetoric are necessary. But I think that turning philosophy into rhetoric is dangerous. Even if it's a parody, the outcome is to turn thought into tweets. Short and forceful discourses that let no space of calm thought. This is the new rhetoric for the 21th century.
I think we're talking about some good stuff, and I want to articulate my position so that you can see that it's not about correctness for me. There is something like a desire to win, but there's also a desire to keep the game going.
For me the ambivalent/ironic position is connected to a realization of thrownness, of how history lives in us, constraining us while making us possible.The earnest philosopher (the totalizer who has it all tied up in a nice little bundle, his existence and ours) ignores that he was shaped by a past that also limits what he can see and understand. For him there is no darkness. The other is falsely assimilated, creatively misunderstood. Now I think we all misunderstand and live in a certain darkness. The ironic and ambivalent aphorist just tries to work the 'laughter of the gods' into his aphorisms. Maybe they aren't universal truths for everyone. Maybe they are graffiti of uncertain utility to others, poems in the form of metaphysical propositions. Tristam Tzara comes to mind. Can we grind him into the dust of earnest, technical propositions? Or is he one more voices who opens various possibilities for us? Tone is crucial here.
Anyway, here's a nice quote that I relate to how our history shapes us, how we don't start from zero, how we wake up already invested and biased with particular tools in our hand to work with.
[quote=link]
His point is that in as much as tradition serves as the condition of one’s knowledge, the background that instigates all inquiry, one can never start from a tradition-free place. A tradition is what gives one a question or interest to begin with. Second, all successful efforts to enliven a tradition require changing it so as to make it relevant for the current context. To embrace a tradition is to make it one’s own by altering it. A passive acknowledgment of a tradition does not allow one to live within it. One must apply the tradition as one’s own. In other words, the importance of the terms, “prejudice” and “tradition,” for Gadamer’s hermeneutics lies in the way they indicate the active nature of understanding that produces something new. Tradition hands down certain interests, prejudices, questions, and problems, that incite knowledge. Tradition is less a conserving force than a provocative one. Even a revolution, Gadamer notes, is a response to the tradition that nonetheless makes use of that very same tradition. Here we can also perceive the Hegelian influences on Gadamer to the extent that even a rejection of some elements of the tradition relies on the preservation of other elements, which are then understood (that is, taken up) in new ways. Gadamer desires not to affirm a blind and passive imitation of tradition, but to show how making tradition our own means a critical and creative application of it.
I understand your concern. I don't like the level of public discourse either. I'm just saying that even decent discourse (the kind we like) is not 'pure reason.' I don't think we have or ever will have mechanically certain standards for sorting the wheat from the chaff. We do have taste and skill, even if we can never perfectly articulate them.
To my eye the difference between them seems not* one of ignoring vs acknowledging, but of fighting vs giving in. The “earnest” philosopher can acknowledge that he is inevitably biased and that attaining complete objectivity is impossible, but still try to bracket out his biases and get as close to objectivity as he can. The “ironic” philosopher, on the other hand, sees that inevitability and impossibility as an excuse to not even try to do the best he can, and reads the “earnest” philosopher’s attempts as foolish or even arrogant.
*Rather than this dichotomy being either the way you say it is or the way I say it is, perhaps we should apply the tactic of dissolution here too, and recognize that these are two different dichotomies. There ARE some who don’t acknowledge their biases and the impossibility of total objectivity, and some who do. Among those who do, there are those who try anyway, and those who just give up. Clear examples of the three are the naive religious folk who think God gives their lives meaning, the Absurd Hero of Camus, and the existential nihilist.
My entire philosophy is actually structured around that kind of division, finding the ways that various answers to each philosophical question fall along those lines, eschewing both the fideistic and the nihilistic approaches, and championing the way analogous to that Absurd Hero.
Note how the ironic philosopher is interpreted as making excuses. That's the kind of folk-psychology I associate with 'sophistry.' We would like to install some Rational Method, but we are already being politicians to do so. It's this primacy of the sophistical or the political that I'm pointing at.
So, sure, the ironist is a lazy hipster. Then Mr. System is a square who fends off the impossibility of his project by re-describing objections as the rationalizations of a lazy hipster. As soon as the unconscious is introduced, we're already in Nietzsche's back yard. If my opponent can lie to himself, then why can't I? Why is my organ, my evolved brain, so reliable? Why is my quest for the 'objective truth' genuine and not self-serving or tribe-serving ? And if rationality is always self-serving and never pure, then how is this vision of impure reason to be trusted? 'I might be lying to myself.' I might decide later that I was missing something. I might decide even later that the previous decision was a temporary loss of nerve, that I was right the first time.
This is the drama of life for finite minds. There are books we will never read, some that are not yet written. So there are objections we'll never get to address, contradictions in our worldviews that we won't live long enough to notice. The totalizer denies that surrounding darkness. He might decide that everything is Information or whatever. One magic word to rule them all, which allows us to dominate or neutralize the future from the present in terms of a neutralized past. The past is 'neutralized' as we pretend it does not constrain us.
[quote= Nietzsche]
That which causes philosophers to be regarded half-distrustfully and half-mockingly, is not the oft-repeated discovery how innocent they are—how often and easily they make mistakes and lose their way, in short, how childish and childlike they are,—but that there is not enough honest dealing with them, whereas they all raise a loud and virtuous outcry when the problem of truthfulness is even hinted at in the remotest manner. They all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic (in contrast to all sorts of mystics, who, fairer and foolisher, talk of "inspiration"), whereas, in fact, a prejudiced proposition, idea, or "suggestion," which is generally their heart's desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event. They are all advocates who do not wish to be regarded as such, generally astute defenders, also, of their prejudices, which they dub "truths,"—and VERY far from having the conscience which bravely admits this to itself, very far from having the good taste of the courage which goes so far as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn friend or foe, or in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule.
[/quote]
Some nice stuff in this thread.
Thanks!
Very sharp words, but the (non)curious thing is that Nietzsche believed that his truth about the truth was the true truth and he defended it so passionately that he went so far as to say true brutalities.
May the god of the philosophers save us from the relativists who only preach the relativism of others.
In my opinion, it is admirable the capacity of the one who tells the truth in a beautiful way. It makes our hair stand on end. But we must not forget that Beethoven's Ode to Joy has been sung to praise freedom, as the official song of the Europe of the Merchants and as the national consolation of the defeated Nazis (as told by Primo Levi). Consequently, does Pythagoras' theorem improve somewhat if it is sung with Bach's music or is it declaimed with rhetorical emphasis?
The philosopher must be committed to the truth, not to floral games. It is not bad at all that he calls our attention with beautiful phrases, but later, once we are awake, we better dedicate ourselves to see what is really behind the music.
To continue with what we were, Nietzsche is exciting. I've had to buy some Nietzsche's books twice because I had unbind them from reading them so much. But sometimes I think it's pure poison. And there seem to be many people who swallow the poison happy if it is flavored with honey. And that's the danger of rhetoric and aesthetics.
I'm very sorry, but in matters of form, I'm for pure Cartesianism.
I think you miss the point of 'ironic' in ironic aphorist. As one becomes intensely critically minded, one invariably turns this criticism back on itself. That's where the fireworks begin. And this is not even especially philosophical. We are all psychologists these days, suspecting others and even ourselves of rationalization. Are we masters in our own house? Is our evolved human brain fundamentally truth seeking? Or is it a tool 'for' survival and reproduction? What if knowing the truth (whatever that means exactly) was fatal? Isn't it more plausible that our noises and marks are more about useful than accurate representation? And is representation even the best way to think of the situation? Do other animals represent 'Reality' with the noises they make?
Quoting David Mo
But what if the truth is that the truth is caught up in floral games, is inseparable from floral games? What if this distinction between form and content is something of a myth? A myth that comforts a certain type of person? Or keeps a certain class in power?
Quoting David Mo
Note that you use metaphors of poison and honey here. I suggest that human cognition is largely metaphorical, or let's say meta-floral. In your speaking for pure Cartesian-ism...and against the poison/honey of rhetoric and floral games, you use figurative language.
What if a 'pure' non-figurative non-rhetorical language or rationality was a fiction from the very beginning?
In any case, I think it's cool that you read those books until they fell apart. I also think that they are honey-poison. Nietzsche (and philosophy like his) is thrilling and dangerous. That his work doesn't cohere, that we get the whole mess of his soul in its contradictory modes...is a virtue. Is he a creep, a saint, a mystic, a supremely critical mind? He's all of these things. He walked into the storm and forgot his umbrella.
On the 'I' that thinks and therefore is, here are some minimally floral comments:
[quote=Nietzsche]
Psychological history of the concept subject: The body, the thing, the "whole," which is visualised by the eye, awakens the thought of distinguishing between an action and an agent; the idea that the agent is the cause of the action, after having been repeatedly refined, at length left the "subject" over.
...
"Subject," "object," "attribute"—these distinctions have been made, and are now used like schemes to cover all apparent facts. The false fundamental observation is this, that I believe it is I who does something, who suffers something, who "has" something, who "has" a quality.
[/quote]
This. :clap:
@path What if the whole of one's systematic, "totalizing" philosophy boils down to / elaborates upon a principle along the lines of "be critical, but not cynical", where those terms are rigorously defined, and that principle's application to an organized variety of questions then laid out?
Hey, you don't ask too many questions without answering them?
I was very conscious of using metaphors. I am not opposed to the use of metaphors, nor to ironies, unless the thought gets caught up in them. The problem is inconclusive thinking. Not because it is always possible to reach some port, but because the journey is meaningless if it does not go somewhere.
I use metaphors because I'm not a philosopher among philosophers. I am not writing philosophy but comments in a forum of philosophy fans. Which are two different things.
The problem with philosophy is that it gets bored with itself. The spleen. So much effort for what? No First Cause, no essence, no ideal world, no Being as Being, no synthetic a priori... What a frustration! You get tired of playing Captain Ahab, sailing tirelessly through the seven seas in search of a white whale that no one sees until it kills you. So we let ourselves be carried away by the paradoxes, the ironies and the beautiful metaphors. It is weak thinking, which is the end of philosophy dissolved in pure poetry - almost always bad poetry, I am sorry.
I don't just call for Cartesian clarity and distinction but analytical pruning too. Or writing novels.
Are we speaking about the method of philosophy, is it not?
What I question here is this assumed 'clean' separation of thought from the metaphor and irony that otherwise taints it.
Quoting David Mo
I think humans creatively adapt to their natural and social environment. We seem to be an especially experimental species. Come back in 1000 years and who knows what we will be doing? On the other hand, sharks will probably be doing the same thing, assuming there's still an ocean.
Connected to this, we're also playful little monkeys. We like novelty, we like stimulation, we have vivid imaginations. Why should philosophy always already know where it is going? Why should philosophy not include experiments whose effects are not known ahead of time? Human nature is not fixed. It is not already here. As cultural, creative animals we are always a work-in-progress. We try new ways of talking about things. Some of them catch on. We get better at prediction and control and like to talk about it perhaps as getting closer to the truth...whatever that is supposed to mean beyond getting better at prediction and control.
Where are we going, we clever animals? As individuals we are going to the grave. As a species we are probably going gloriously and miserably to our extinction, be it one million years from now.
Is 'inconclusive thinking' just whatever isn't engineering ? But we can read even Nietzsche as an engineer, or at least as an inventor of new ways of talking. I don't think we can calculate the effect ahead of time of this or that verbal invention. Surely philosophy, when it catches on, has at least an indirect effect on ...conclusive thinking.
Quoting David Mo
But look how poetically you express this! And I enjoyed it. And is the above not a partial expression of your fundamental stance with respect to your existence? IMO, one's vision of what philosophy is and should be is a big part of that.
Or the impossibility of such a method. The method of philosophy is like the ice of fire. It you want to call foundational abnormal discourse something other than philosophy, I guess you can.
[quote=Rorty]
Normal discourse (a generalization of Kuhn’s notion of “normal science”) is any discourse (scientific, political, theological, or whatever) which embodies agreed-upon criteria for reaching agreement; abnormal discourse is any which lacks such criteria.
[/quote]
It's not a bad philosophy of life, but do you not see how individual personality is manifested in the admonishment to not be cynical? Philosophy has often been quite cynical. For many its thrill is tangled up in demystification, which we might think of as an asceticism.
As far as being critical, I'm with you. At the same time, I'm really not sure that it's the best way to live (or that there is a best way to live.) I don't advise strangers to be critical. I don't talk people out of their religion or politics. On this forum it's different. An investment in being critical is presupposed. So I feel OK with being loud about my personal solutions-in-progress to the problematic opportunity of existence.
Quoting path
And so I was asking your thoughts on a “totalizing system” of philosophy which is just that criticism applied systemically to everything, including itself.
...with the caveat about not being cynical either, in a sense that basically means giving things a chance, and not tearing them all down before you even begin.
This ties back to the thing I said earlier that you didn’t respond to:
Quoting Pfhorrest
One of those dichotomies is basically the critical-uncritical axis. The other is the cynical-uncynical axis. They are orthogonal to each other, and I think conflating them is the source of all our apparent disagreement here. The critique of the earnest philosopher is that they aren’t self-critical enough. The critique of the ironic philosopher is that they are too cynical. But you can be critical without being cynical, which breaks this entire bipartite model. You can be neither the earnest stereotype saying “This is the objective truth” nor the ironic stereotype saying “Finding objective truth is hopeless”, but instead an “Absurdist Hero“ toward philosophy itself, saying “It may be hopeless, but I’m trying anyway”.
Thanks. That's helpful. Yes, I like that. I do think that we can't genuinely doubt everything. Some beliefs are too basic in our culture, in our identity. For instance, we all just know that there is one soul or consciousness per skull. To what degree can I really question that without being locked up?
We use the word 'I' with a blind skill that we mostly don't notice. Critical thinking reveals that critical thinking can never be total.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I think I can meet you on this terrain. Your anti-cynicism seems close to my experimentalism. The issue with cosmic systems is that want to dominate the future from the present. They already know or pretend to know what will work or what is possible. As humans, we do want to neutralize the future. So such systems are comforting. And prediction and control is part of that. A metaphysical theory of philosophy (what it is and should) tries to neutralize the future of philosophy. It tries to foresee or dominate all that is possible in essence if not in detail.
From this angle, my objection to accusations of sophistry is that they are basically expressions of what you mean by cynicism. They'd like to rule out experiments ahead of time. Then we have philosophers in different traditions calling one another sophists. I've studied the clash of Derrida and Searle. I think Derrida is great but difficult and sometimes indulgent. It's because of some of his 'results' that his style is also more playful. If one breaks free from certain dogmatic assumptions (that form and content can truly be separated, that the serious/unserious distinction can and must be taken seriously), then one naturally explores new stylistic possibilities.
Sorry, I should have responded to that. It's good stuff.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, excellent stuff. Basically the ironic aphorist is (for me) close to the absurd hero. I'm not sure what to make of the existential nihilist. There is something deeply representational in us, so I do wonder if the recognition of bias 'must' include some concern with overcoming it. To know that I am biased is to know that I might be lying to myself. Are the people at piece with that? It might be a kind of modesty or playfulness is they say so. This goes back to whether we can cleanly separate the serious from the non-serious.
Quoting Pfhorrest
To me the ironic philosopher who bothers to read and argue philosophy is more or less implicitly the absurd hero. That said, I don't think that we as critical thinkers 'should' (by our own vague standards) take the representational paradigm for granted. In case I haven't emphasized it enough, I think one of the revolutionary ideas in philosophy moves beyond language as representation.
Instead of 'we will never quite mirror Ultimate Reality in words,' we get 'this whole framework of trying to mirror Ultimate Reality in words...is not the only option.' We can think of language as a tool that is not an eye or a mirror but instead a hand. If language is a blind hand that helps us cope, it's not a matter of correctness. It's a matter of more or less successful coping. What is success? We have to invent goals. We can also be representational in checking to see how well we've done in our pursuit of them. We don't have to reject the representational paradigm where it is effective. We don't have to represent it as impossible, though we may use the hand of language that way more or less consciously. To deconstruct frameworks requires inhabiting them to some degree, ironically or half-seriously.
Eh, the unity of personal identity can get pretty fuzzy and I’m far from the first person to talk about that.
Quoting path
I’ve often wished that English had different words for “I” etc that referred to one’s id, ego, and superego, as it would make talking about certain kinds of self-experiences much easier to communicate. (E.g. if I-ego am talking to someone about what I-id want to do even though I-ego know better, or how I-superego am always berating my-ego-self for reasons I-ego know are unfounded).
Yup, and this is a great example of what I mean by thrownness. We just grow up using 'I' in a certain way that we don't think to question till much later, if even then. As I see it, we can never get 'above' or see clearly all of the blind skill that constrains us in this way. As you and I deconstruct this taken-for-granted 'I'-talk, we're bound to be taking for granted some other kind of talk as we do so. At the same time, it's only these taken-for-granted conventions/habits that allow us to communicate or think at all. So we are blinded by our own eyes in that sense. Yet here I am, absurdly hoping to see around my own eyes. I am time or history trying to slip out of its own skin. Do we want to look down on time from eternity? Metaphorically it's like climbing a mountain to see things whole and from above and yet questioning whether this mountain has a peak...or why I decided beforehand that the view up there is better.
***
Stephen in Joyce's Ulysses says 'History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake.' I think that just sums up so much. While thinking about our conversation, I gave it a twist:
I am the history from which I am trying to awake.
You're the one who said it: poetry. (Bad poetry in my case. Writing in English costs me sweat and blood.)
So, philosophy is not poetry. What's the difference?
Of course, you can use metaphorical philosophical terms to innovate or change the philosophical outlook. Existentialists and postmodernists are brilliant at this. Anxiety, being there, deconstruction... But there is a difference. Poetry doesn't analyze its own demolition of language. The poet writes:
And he allows you to look for any sense in your way.
The philosopher writes:
And then he explains this. That is, the analytical task.
I think that rather than presenting the positive method of philosophy it is easier to say what philosophy is not: it is not science, poetry, religion, rhetoric... Why not?
One point: the characteristic of philosophy is that it is a kind of thought that questions itself. How many books of scientists are there who ask themselves what science is?
This implies a first conclusion: there is not a single philosophical method.
To be sure, we have two words for a reason. Philosophy is not poetry in the everyday sense of the terms. I wouldn't even say that philosophy is 'really' poetry in some complicated way. I just claim what you yourself admit, that metaphorical philosophical terms change philosophy. I agree with Rorty that metaphors and images are even dominant as the background or framework for careful arguments.
Quoting David Mo
That's a strong statement which is true of some poetry.
This reminds me of Derrida:
[quote=Eliot]
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.
[/quote]
There are more like this. Plenty of modern English poetry is not so easy to separate from philosophy. Poets arguably obsess over density. They want the 'music' and 'concept' to be fused together unforgettably. They are perhaps more willing to be suggestive. They aren't in the middle of a debate. So the social context is different, but stances on existence are captured.
I like Sartre. I like 'man is a useless passion.' It's grim. It's a powerful summary. I also think there are some killer lines in Existential Psychoanalysis. He uses the metaphor of a bird swallowing a rock for our relationship to scientific knowledge. We can and cannot claim it, even if we discover/create it. He writes about destruction as a form of appropriation, things like that. Perhaps you are familiar. Then there's Nausea. That's a great philosophical novel.
If someone writes a dry non-narrative paper on the ideas in Nausea, does it then become philosophy? If someone translates Plato into English iambic pentameter, does it cease being philosophy?
Quoting David Mo
Typically, yes. Philosophers make a case, or at least elaborate. But that's a convention. Wittgenstein gave us remarks. And what about La Rochefoucauld ? We get lots of little aphorisms that have a cumulative effect.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9105/9105-h/9105-h.htm#linkmaxims
I'm not against the analytical task, just to be clear. I just don't think that's the only way to go. It's one more approach that analysis might put into question. Maybe as philosophers we realize that we have been dogmatic in our notion of what analysis is or how it should be done.
Quoting David Mo
We agree that there is no single method. I haven't studied physics since I was an undergrad, but I do know that Wittgenstein was influenced by some scientists who did wrestle with what they were doing.
http://wab.uib.no/agora/tools/alws/collection-9-issue-1-article-62.annotate
My view is that 'philosophy' has no exact meaning but can be thought of as the name of a genre. For historical reasons both Plato and Wittgenstein are 'philosophers' while Harold Bloom is not. I just read a sociology classic (The Social Construction of Reality) that might as well be philosophy. And is Marx a philosopher or a sociologist? Who cares, right? We all just read books. Loose classifications are only good for so much.
I think maybe we agree that philosophy is more about a kind of self-questioning thinking that is tangled up with large issues. I'm tempted to say that every thoughtful person does at least some kind of informal or amateur philosophy.
This was the approach I took in the What Is Philosophy? thread that spawned the thread that spawned this one:
Quoting path
This ties in closely to the next two threads I intend to start, one of them on the faculty needed to do philosophy (spoilers: it’s personhood or sapience), and then another on who is to do philosophy (professional vs amateur, basically).
Caramba, what a long comment! Let me to get a time to read it.
For the moment I am surprised that it excludes ethics, which is a part of philosophy universally admitted by philosophers themselves. I'll take a closer look.
Starting here because we'll have to start somewhere.
I think we have to distinguish two things: morals and ethics.
Morality is a system of rules of what must be done, which starts from a more or less coherent idea of good.
Ethics is an explanation of the meaning of that good that is included in every system of morality.
One example: the Homeric world is dominated by the concept of success and honor. It is good what leads to triumph (of the warrior mainly) and gives him honor among his peers.
An ethical question: is the concept of Homeric virtue compatible with the morality of modern responsibility?
Non-philosophical question: was Homeric morality better?
Philosophical-ethical question: are there objective criteria for evaluating the morality of different cultures?
I don't think there is a scientific system of ethics because there is no way to prove empirically that good is this or something else. Hedonism, which you quote, is not a scientific system but a particular (philosophical) conception of what the moral good is. What experiment can prove this? You don't have to experiment at all to see around you that many people are not governed by the principle of pleasure. You don't have to experience anything to see that many of those who are governed by the principle of pleasure do things that others say are morally wrong. Ethical reflection is needed on this point, which according to your own criteria, will be philosophical (not experimental).
The question remains whether prescriptive moral activity can be philosophical or falls outside its scope.
I like this definition. It hits the spot.
In my opinion, when specialists in other fields are engaged in clarifying fundamental concepts that are not included in their own work, they are going into philosophy, even when they are using their own scientific knowledge. An example: when Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and others discussed the real content of quantum mechanics they were doing philosophy, and they knew it!
You and I have been over the ethics thing before, and it now sounds like you agree in principle with what I’m trying to say but disagree with how I say it: that philosophy’s role in normative questions is figuring out the foundational principles to use to figure out what is good or bad etc, not in actually deciding what in particular is good or bad.
The comment about hedonic experiences is meant to be analogous to empirical experiences, not saying that hedonism can be empirically proven. My philosophical views on how to answer normative questions end up saying to appeal to hedonic experiences to answer them, in a way analogous to how science appeals to empirical experiences to answer factual questions.
But that’s way beside the point of that whole bit, which is simply that philosophy isn’t JUST about normative questions, and not ALL normative questions are philosophy: philosophical and ethics aren’t synonymous.
I do see the advantages of this approach, but can we ever live this ideal separation of reason from empirical observation? Consider Hume's problem of induction. In terms of something like pure reason there is no apparent reason to trust experience at all. We live and seemingly can't help living a kind of animal faith in the uniformity of nature. To me, Hume made that animal faith visible to us. That's just one example.
To me it makes more sense to think of philosophy as concerned with the world or existence as a whole and then understand science as part of that world. They don't run side by side, each doing their own job. Philosophy in the strong sense places determines not only what science is but constantly tries to clarify its own task. It's the identity crisis of human existence. Any philosophy that can define itself would in that sense also die. Philosophy is always already metaphilosophy and meta-metaphilosophy, to put it aphoristically.
But the mere analogy doesn't go very far.
It seems that Hume or Kant lived very well with that separation of fact (ideal?). I trust science when I want to know what a galaxy is and I add philosophy when I want to analyze the scientific method. Where is the problem?
Quoting path
Okay. But how do you get reliable information from the world if not through the senses systematized into scientific knowledge? Pure reason? A sixth philosophical sense? Doesn't ring a bell.
This is becoming a topic for another thread, but I elaborate much further upon that analogy elsewhere:
With regards to opinions about reality, commensurablism boils down to forming initial opinions on the basis that something, loosely speaking, looks true (and not false), and then rejecting that and finding some other opinion to replace it with if someone should come across some circumstance wherein it looks false in some way. And, if two contrary things both look true or false in different ways or to different people or under different circumstances, commensurablism means taking into account all the different ways that things look to different people in different circumstances, and coming up with something new that looks true (and not false) to everyone in every way in every circumstance, at least those that we've considered so far. In the limit, if we could consider absolutely every way that absolutely everything looked to absolutely everyone in absolutely every circumstance, whatever still looked true across all of that would be the objective truth.
In short, the objective truth is the limit of what still seems true upon further and further investigation. We can't ever reach that limit, but that is the direction in which to improve our opinions about reality, towards more and more correct ones. Figuring out what can still be said to look true when more and more of that is accounted for may be increasingly difficult, but that is the task at hand if we care at all about the truth.
This commensurablist approach to reality may be called "critical empirical realism", as realism is the descriptive face of objectivism, empiricism is the descriptive face of phenomenalism, and what I would call a critical-liberal methodology is more commonly called just "critical" as applied to theories of knowledge.
With regards to opinions about morality, commensurablism boils down to forming initial opinions on the basis that something, loosely speaking, feels good (and not bad), and then rejecting that and finding some other opinion to replace it with if someone should come across some circumstance wherein it feels bad in some way. And, if two contrary things both feel good or bad in different ways or to different people or under different circumstances, commensurablism means taking into account all the different ways that things feel to different people in different circumstances, and coming up with something new that feels good (and not bad) to everyone in every way in every circumstance, at least those that we've considered so far. In the limit, if we could consider absolutely every way that absolutely everything felt to absolutely everyone in absolutely every circumstance, whatever still felt good across all of that would be the objective good.
In short, the objective good is the limit of what still seems good upon further and further investigation. We can't ever reach that limit, but that is the direction in which to improve our opinions about morality, toward more and more correct ones. Figuring out what what can still be said to feel good when more and more of that is accounted for may be increasingly difficult, but that is the task at hand if we care at all about the good.
This commensurablist approach to morality may be called "liberal hedonic moralism", as moralism is the prescriptive face of objectivism, hedonism is the prescriptive face of phenomenalism, and what I would call a critical-liberal methodology is more commonly called just "liberal" as applied to theories of justice.
When it comes to tackling questions about reality, pursuing knowledge, we should not take some census or survey of people's beliefs or perceptions, and either try to figure out how all those could all be held at once without conflict, or else (because that likely will not be possible) just declare that whatever the majority, or some privileged authority, believes or perceives is true. Instead, we should appeal to everyone's direct sensations or observations, free from any interpretation into perceptions or beliefs yet, and compare and contrast the empirical experiences of different people in different circumstances to come to a common ground on what experiences there are that need satisfying in order for a belief to be true. Then we should devise models, or theories, that purport to satisfy all those experiences, and test them against further experiences, rejecting those that fail to satisfy any of them, and selecting the simplest, most efficient of those that remain as what we tentatively hold to be true. This entire process should be carried out in an organized, collaborative, but intrinsically non-authoritarian academic structure.
When it comes to tackling questions about morality, pursuing justice, we should not take some census or survey of people's intentions or desires, and either try to figure out how all those could all be held at once without conflict, or else (because that likely will not be possible) just declare that whatever the majority, or some privileged authority, intends or desires is good. Instead, we should appeal to everyone's direct appetites, free from any interpretation into desires or intentions yet, and compare and contrast the hedonic experiences of different people in different circumstances to come to a common ground on what experiences there are that need satisfying in order for an intention to be good. Then we should devise models, or strategies, that purport to satisfy all those experiences, and test them against further experiences, rejecting those that fail to satisfy any of them, and selecting the simplest, most efficient of those that remain as what we tentatively hold to be good. This entire process should be carried out in an organized, collaborative, but intrinsically non-authoritarian political structure.
There is no practical problem. The philosopher can always try to get clearer about what we as humans even mean by 'knowing' and 'is.'
I suggest that the prestige of science is largely about its practical power. We can fly through the air at hundreds of miles per hour. We can talk with people across oceans. All of this is clear enough for us to respect the discourse associated with this. We are primarily practical beings, and science allows us to be 'lords and masters of nature.' Fair enough! But a philosopher can ask if we aren't just reacting to increased prediction and control by pasting on a hazy metaphysics.
To be clear, I know that we as practical creatures value technology that works more than a 'useless' pointing out of the haziness of our otherwise effective thinking. I myself earn money by working with technology. I'm paid for an 'exact' thinking that doesn't bother to question its position in a larger context. All of this connects to our current economic arrangement, which encourages a 'technical interpretation of thinking.'
I also reject pure reason and value the scientific method. I think it's OK, though, to question the representational paradigm. What do you think of instrumentalism, by the way? Optionally we can understand science as a central way of coping with our human situation. The equations and prosy background are a practical tradition for getting shit done. It's OK that we are endlessly hazy on our terms, because the gear works. That's enough for us, but we also like to dress it up as something more, as a kind of substitute for lost religion.
We should also do justice to its open-mindedness, its exposing itself to criticism. But these are also philosophical virtues.
There's a great consensus on the knowledge of facts: its purpose is to tell, predict and control the facts.
There is no similar consensus in ethics: there is no agreement on what might be called "good" that we can seek by different methods. You have decided that it is the experiences of pleasure. But there are many people willing to tell you that there are pleasures that are bad, not because they produce dissatisfaction but because they lead to higher order evil. There will even be people who will say that all pleasures are bad.
I'm afraid your argument is not going to be convincing to many experts and non-experts in ethics.
The problem with metaphysics is that it remains anchored in the scandal that Kant denounced: no progress, no agreement between metaphysicists. With that barrier, it's hard to convince anyone. Especially when today it is impossible to talk about the roots of reality and infinity without knowing quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.
I believe that Kant had perfectly pointed out the way: stop wondering about questions without answers and postulating contradictory entities and worry about looking for philosophy in the analysis of knowledge. This is the way to start.
Not very widespread among the popes of philosophy.
Philosophers don't convince others. At most they convince themselves.
On the other hand, you'll have to recognize that science is more than just machinery. Apted's pre-coordinated spins, time dimensionality, wave collapse, not to mention string theory, are more than beaters and gameboys. If you force me, even gravity theory seems like a metaphysical thing. The problem is that most scientists don't even realize what they're doing and think Einstein is a washing machine.
That's not unlike rejecting art because artists vary or all of religion because religions vary. It equates progress with consensus. Do scientists agree? Not a chance. The conflict is essential. Individual scientists contribute to things like Plandemic. Some are religious,etc.
Think also of rejecting all political theory because there is no consensus. Life is political, the clash of voices. Philosophy is tangled up in that. One might say that politics is applied philosophy, and that you are being a philosopher right now, disagreeing with me about the meaning/value of science and philosophy.
You still haven't clarified how scientific progress isn't more than increased prediction and control.
Quoting David Mo
Respectfully, that is a thoroughly metaphysical and contentious statement. Talk of the 'roots of reality' sounds good, but it's the same old metaphysics. What's reality made of? Our models? Our maps? We're right back in the anti-realist quagmire. I'm not 100% an instrumentalist, but I like it as a less naively metaphysical approach to science. It's at least aware of the issue.
My philosophical gripe is that people talk about 'reality' without really knowing what they mean. Actually I don't think we can ever be done figuring that out, but the first step (to me) is seeing how vaguely we are talking. Like maybe you'll answer 'the physical.' Then physicists study the physical and the physical is what physicists study.
Of course my more sincere view is that science is more than technology. But to simply say that it studies reality is not very illuminating. Why doesn't literature study or reveal reality? Deciding what's so special about science, if anything, is philosophical and contentious. A person can of course get sick of wrestling with 'useless' issues and lean on Kant (a metaphysician, ultimately) as an escape from metaphysics. We can all fall back asleep. We all do fall back asleep. IMV we are never totally awake, always taken something for granted...and fending off those who try to wake us (impose their dreams on us.) We can and do pretend to have conquered existence with a neat little system. And even anti-systematic talk partakes in this, foisting openness as a closure.
Well arguably philosophy is just too complex for perfect transmission. It's as complex as life itself. Philosophers partially convince one another all of the time. And your anti-philosophy view is familiar to me. Everyone's version is a little different, but it's a recognizable inheritance. You have your influences just as I do. We were persuaded. We are recognizable types, reenacting an old battle.
But artists don't pretend to know the truth of what they paint. Some do, but that's their problem. As for priests, they're much worse than philosophers when it comes to scandals. Politics is not a form of knowledge. And don't make an example out of professional politicians. Plato already made them look bad and things haven't changed much since then.
:sad:
Don't overwhelm me with so much comment. I can't cope them so quickly. I'll get back to them when I can.
How might you address the attack on the myth of the given? Here's what it 'is' and a link to more detail.
[quote=link]
Antecedent to epistemology, Sellars’s treatment of semantics essentially constitutes a denial of what can be called a semantic given—the idea that some of our terms or concepts, independently of their occurrence in formal and material inferences, derive their meaning directly from confrontation with a particular (kind of) object or experience. Sellars is anti-foundationalist in his theories of concepts, knowledge, and truth.
[/quote]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/
More generally, attempts to create a method almost invariably lean on 'myths' that are taken for granted, uncritically inherited from the tradition. The critical thinking that would like to define critical thinking turns out again and again to be insufficiently critical.
I don't blame you if you just get tired of answering me. That's what we all do. We 'irrationally' or 'uncritically' ignore the fault-finding of our peers. (To be clear, I rate many of us here as far above average in that regard. So it's just that we mortals have limits.)
The part I wrote immediately after the part you quoted is the critical/falsificationist/anti-foundationalist part:
Quoting Pfhorrest
The experiences are the things we’re trying to explain with our theories, but they don’t uniquely determine any particular theory. Every theory (and piece thereof, including more simplistic concepts) is initially equally tenable, not because it’s grounded in some foundational beliefs but because the default initial state of everything is “tenable”: then we check each of the options for success against our objective (explaining our experiences) and eliminate those that fail.
Also, that bit about interpretation you quoted is meant mostly to spell out how science differs from just polling people on what they think they saw, and compare that to how I say to conduct a moral investigation vs just polling people on their desires.
No, for god's sake, I wasn't tired of your interpellations. I was overwhelmed by the amount of ideas you put out in a row and I thought and I think I can't answer all of them here. I have my limits. I'll try to select a few to give you an answer.
Quoting path
Quoting path
Quoting path
Quoting path
Quoting path
Of course, in the higher spheres of science, consensus is broken. But we have to admit that they still have nothing to do with the philosophical chicken coop where there is not even consensus on terminology.
What is special about science is its humility (pride is for positivists). That is to say, to limit itself to explaining a concrete field of knowledge and to leave the cosmic fantasies to the poets. Science is capable of saying "if x and y, then z" and it is right and it is not magic. A great deal that instrumentalist philosophy can only explain if it goes from humble to falling into the well of radical skepticism that satisfies no one except the stubborn ones who maintain it. Neither Dewey nor anyone else can be satisfied by saying "This works". Everyone, including Dewey when he lets his guard down, wants to know what's in there. I mean, they want to get to the roots of things, as much as possible.
And that's why we walk around wondering what could produce life on Earth and what's behind the collapse of the wave function. This is a metaphysical task, in the sense that theoretical scientists themselves have to go beyond scientific certainties to pose it. But I don't despise metaphysics. You have to be foolish to despise something that you have no choice but to do. I'm just asking for a cautious metaphysics. That is to say, not to pretend to function independently of the data that science provides and to move too far away from them.
So I'm not against philosophy. Just that it should be a philosophy that knows where to step, asphalt if it's asphalt and quicksand if it's quicksand. Those who hear the word "quantum mechanics" and start seeing the Holy Spirit make me nervous.
And, unfortunately, my experience with philosophers is that there are quite a few who see the holy spirit and have no idea what quantum mechanics is.
Thank you for the excellent reply. We're not so far apart after all. I think you are referring to quantum woo, which I also dislike. I studied some QM in school but wasn't a physics major. Feynman is one of my many heroes, along with laughing Democritus. I currently work on AI, or glorified statistics.
I've been talking about AI in other threads to try to demystify consciousness. [Or to join in the old game of trying to demystify consciousness.]
My objection to holy ghost philosophers is that they won't confess that it's just poetry. They could add that 'poetry' is a metaphysical concept, but they don't think of that.
I love science for exposing itself to falsification. It takes guts to make an unambiguous prediction. It takes guts to climb in a machine and hope to end up on the moon.
I also agree that instrumentalism isn't completely satisfying. I want the truth, without knowing exactly what it means to say that I want the truth.
Thank you for the undeserved praise. One has moments of inspiration... rather rare. But, in general, we tend to like what matches us. There is nothing to do about it., we're gregarious. And, as you say, we agree on quite a few things. A relief among the quarrelsome tendency of the philosophy forums.
I forgot this: I really liked the two final verses of Eliot that you include. They make you think. I have a very good friend who is also a great poet, I think, and a complex metaphysician in a pack. That is, his verses shake you up and make you think about man, time and the celestial vault. But he once wrote an article about Ausiàs March, a medieval poet, and I didn't like it that so much. Too obvious, too flat, too simple. My personal impression is that he was very good at handling complexity and irresolution, and not so good at giving clear explanations. This is the difference between poetry and philosophy.
Of course, I didn't tell him that. You have need to be a little hypocritical to keep friends.
Quoting David Mo
I like your sense of humor!
Quoting David Mo
They somewhat sum up what Derrida means to me. I know you don't like him (probably his style), but I can't help mentioning him, because I think he's deep beneath his gimmicks.
Quoting David Mo
What I like is a friendly, playful, creative quarrel. If we challenge one another in a spirit of respect (easier said than done) then we all end up better than when we started. This place can be truly amazing at its best.