Alright, I'm going to try and simplify things here somewhat, all of these paragraphs of text are getting to me. I think the basic hypothesis being circled here is that philosophy is lagging because it deals with people-stuff (which is primarily qualitative and dynamic), and science, math, etc. have made great progress because they primarily deal with stuff-stuff (which is primarily quantitative and mechanistic). Over the past so-and-so years, humans have gotten progressively better at dealing with quantities and complicated mechanical systems, which has led to sizeable breakthroughs in non-philosophical fields, but limited progress in philosophical ones.
The big question, then, is where the troubles specifically lie with philosophy. Is the lack of progress simply a failure to apply our quantitative knowledge appropriately? Or are quantitative breakthroughs useless to begin with, and the lack of progress means we should be taking a different tact?
To add to the conversation a bit, it might also be worth considering the necessary methods of implementing a breakthrough. Maybe the floundering of philosophy is directly tied to a lack of trustworthy, understandable philosophers which people earnestly ask for advice, rather than any particular flaw in method.
I don't agree that philosophy focuses on people-stuff, or that science focusses on stuff-stuff. Science covers a range of topics, from highly thing-focussed in the hard sciences, to highly people-focussed in the soft sciences, like psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Philosophy is similarly broad, covering impersonal subjects like logic, epistemology, and metaphysics, as well as the more psychology-adjacent subjects of ethics and aesthetics.
What philosophy is missing is an effective process or set of rules everyone can agree on. In basketball, the severity of a foul depends on judgments of intent, and such judgments are notoriously difficult to make clearly, yet the process hangs together well enough that people buy tickets in droves and hang onto the edge of their seats as the clock runs out. In science, the data may sometimes be evaluated one way and sometimes another, and not only publication bias but deliberate p-hacking and the possibility for outright fraud weakens the strength of conclusions drawn, yet again the process hangs together well enough for people to accept the results as meaningful.
In philosophy one looks for "tension" between ideas, builds hand-wavey arguments in the form of this very comment, and begs the reader to accept a certain line of reasoning. But every step along the way is treacherous and contestable, and even if you generously assign a probability for every step in the path of 95% correct, after 14 steps we're already more likely to have sunk into the swamp, with no way of knowing we're lost.
In basketball, records can be reviewed to recheck contestable calls. In science, findings can be rechecked with fresh data and fresh researchers. There are obvious truth-tests that are grounded in empiricism. But in philosophy, I say this, she says that, you say something else, and there's no convergence, just a constant swirl of ideas.
After more than a year of consideration since first writing the post you're responding to, I'm confident philosophy needs to be more math-like. Mathematics is essentially an exploration of intellectual realms where, at the higher levels, the powerful empirical methods of science are either unnecessary or impossible. But why are mathematics beyond geometry and artithmatic still successful without being tethered to empiricism? Because the processes work in the lower levels where we can safely check that 3 + 4 = 7, and we simply extend the processes to realms like non-repeating decimals, the square root of negative one, and Laplace transformations. When we prove something in lower mathematics, it works. When we prove something in calculus or higher mathematcs, it's often extremely hard to check whether it's true empirically, but no matter; we trust the methods because they're the same thing we can see working with lower mathematics.
Philosophy should do this. The real trouble is convincing anyone else it makes sense, particularly since they can make muddled counterarguments against the idea using the same essentially philosophical reasoning I'm using here to try to prop up the idea to begin with. Moreover, philosophers aren't interested in having the slim prestige they offer one another further undermined, and regular people aren't interested enough in philosophy to care. I'll continue writing about it, putting everything together in a clearer post in the next month or so, but I'm aware of what little effect this will have. Perhaps if I returned to university yet again, earning a shiny PhD in philosophy over several more years, and gradually gained the respect of my new peer group, I might make some slow headway, but in the meantime I'm not sure who's earning money to support my children. C'est la vie!
Oi. I thought I had a decent idea of what you meant when you said "philosophy" or "science", but it is clear that I do not. There's far too much overlap here, for my tastes.
If I can't meaningfully differentiate between the two fields, then I can't accurately diagnose whether one of them has been unusually devoid of progress, much less the potential methods we can use to remedy the lack thereof. Which drives me back to my initial position of 'science and philosophy are closely intertwined, and the modern era has brought about significant progress in both.'
You're probably right, there are areas of philosophy which would greatly benefit from a more mathematical approach. That said, I don't think you're the first philosopher to put that idea forward. In fact, from the (admittedly small) pool of knowledge I have regarding philosophers, your thesis is a majority opinion. Philosophers are a logical, mathematically-minded bunch. And wouldn't you know it, that mindset has yielded some pretty fantastic results! So um, keep up the good work, I suppose. You are in good company.
Try not to get too bummed out when chatting with folks on the internet (or in academia) that don't adhere to mathematical rigor. It's counterintuitive for a lot of people, and genuine progress doesn't require unanimity. Heck, most of the time it doesn't even require a majority. The importance is to build and maintain communities which do hold those principles in high regard, and are willing to use them to figure things out. When they bound forward, the rest of the world will have to follow, or else be left fading in the dust.
Anyway, thanks for the prolonged and sporadic chat, hope I wasn't too much of an annoyance. Enjoy your weekend!
Alright, time for part two. The second big issue that needs to be overcome is the abstract nature of the philosophical concepts being discussed. Now, this isn't inherently a problem, when we're trying to progress a field. Mathematics is highly abstract, after all, and we've had plenty of progress there. The difference is that math is a highly mechanistic field of study. Abstraction exacerbates the difficulties already present in solving a dynamic system.
"Good" might mean the ability to live an enjoyable existence, or maximizing the happiness of all individuals, or removal of pain and suffering, or eating a delicious slice of apple pie. Or all of these things, or none of these things, or some of these things. If the philosophy of good and bad was a mechanistic system, then all we would have to do to figure out which items belong is to solve the equation. But since it is dynamic, the equation is reliant on us.
I actually might have misspoken about the state of science, in my last comment? It's possible that science is also a dynamic system, but manages to make progress by dealing primarily with concrete phenomena. Mathematics seems to be the inverse, mechanistic and abstract, which is likely why we made progress so much more quickly in that field. Dynamic systems make everything difficult.
So I guess if we're trying to push philosophy forward, that gives us a couple of solid role models. If we can find portions of philosophy which are mechanistic in nature, then we can make progress the same way that mathematicians do. This would probably apply to the realms of logic and argumentation, I believe. Conversely, if we can find portions of philosophy which are concrete, then we can make progress the way that science does. Make a hypothesis, test to see if it holds up. This might be underexplored? Philosophers cling a little too tightly to their thought experiments, in my experience. This leads to things like the trolley problem being used as a method of demonstrating the irrationality of the human mind, rather than a failed hypothesis for how morality functions.
This still leaves us with difficulties advancing the field in areas which are both dynamic and abstract, but I'll think on it, see if I can come up with something down the line. In the meantime, is this helpful at all? Does this open up any solid lines of inquiry, that you can think of? I'm mostly just spitballing here, keeping things broad. If you've got some specific examples to test, that might help to figure out if this is a viable framework, going forward.
So first of all I'd like to thank you for your ideas up to this point. I've spoken with people both on and offline, and they either try to argue that there are no problems in philosophy, or (more commonly) just don't have any ideas at all, and it's good to have anyone to talk to at all.
Now regarding your idea that philosophy discusses systems that are somehow more complex or dynamic than math or science: There is a sense in which social problems are indeed more complicated than physical ones. As someone with an interest in both physics and psychology, I don't think physics is more highly regarded because it is harder, but because the dynamic (yes, science does deal with dynamic systems) behavior of physical objects is much easier to model mathematically than the behavior of intelligent beings. Psychology is so difficult to investigate that we're mostly left groping after statistics that even describe a single person, let alone predict what that person will do over the long term.
However, I don't think that philosophy even has to be about humans per se. I've been spending a great deal of time considering dialetheism, which is just about the simplest question one could consider: Does a binary set {true, false} accurately model truth values for propositions, or, do we need a ternary set {true, false, dialetheia} to handle the situation? (See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/ if this is new for you.)
Notice I'm not even asking "do dialeteias exist?" I'm just trying to ask "can we rely on classical logic which uses binary truth values and thus rejects contradictions?" Forget complex interactions involving people, philosophers are still chewing over basic ideas like dialetheism.
Thinking more specifally about what you've written, you describe mathematics as mechanistic and abstract; does that give us some kind of opening? Is there nothing mechanistic in philosophy? Many mathematical arguments feel extremely close to what philosophers would do, like Goedel's Incompleteness theorem, but their arguments have been wildly successful, while philosophers are still stuck arguing with Plato. What if philosophy were able to somehow begin with some abstract axioms like mathematics did; but what would the axioms be?
I really think that philosophy and mathematics are (or ought somehow to be) closer to one another than to any physical or social science. But maybe they aren't; maybe math always had a means for checking its claims about number by counting out buckets of apples, or cutting apples in halves and thirds, and showing physically and visually what was going on? If so, that could be harsh for the prospects of philosophy, at least without having a way of checking a philosophical claim.
But maybe that's not true; maybe mathematics can be taken as a purely abstract realm without any connection to the real world; maybe mathematics succeeded simple by having such a narrow focus on just about the least interesting thing you could talk about, which is number. If that's true, then might philosophy be able to progress by narrowing its scope in a similar way?
Thinking about these two fields, it's like... it's as though mathematics was successful because the only things it really tried to talk about for thousands of years were *quantities,* while philosophy has always wanted to talk about *qualities.* What do you think about that?
Hey, glad I can be of some service! Apologies for the leisurely reply rate, I usually have to work myself up a bit to talk philosophy, and I've been some combination of busy or not in the mood recently. I am pretty good at keeping conversations like these in the back of my mind, though, so rest assured you'll get something from me eventually.
I haven't heard of dialetheism before. The link you provided is pretty in-depth, so I stuck to reading the intro for the time being. First impressions on my end aren't great. It seems like one of those ideas that accidentally make the thinker stupider, long-term. Even if there are statements which are contradictorily, simultaneously true, that doesn't mean that it is a good idea to approach the world as though there are statements which are contradictorily, simultaneously true. Investigating contradictions is a primary method of discovery and advancement in basically every field known to man. When philosophers are allowed to just hand-wave contradictions, they lose philosophical progress that would have been gained by investigating and attempting to reconcile those contradictions.
If dialetheism wants street cred in my head, it will need to demonstrate some amount of value that is gained down the line, something which can only be achieved by assuming that certain statements are contradictorily true. Something palpable, to offset the fairly obvious advantages of the more traditional model. Kind of like quantum physics, which was really dumb until it wasn't!
But back to the subject at hand. You might have picked up on something, with quantity versus quality. Recently, a little lightbulb went off in my head that you can't really... interpret a number. One point zero seven is always exactly the same. If you want 1.07 to change, then you have to alter it in some way. Add a "cm" at the end, or tack on a negative sign, or change it to 1.08. You have to make it visibly different in order to make it meaningfully different. Quantities are uniquely hyper-specific. Meanwhile, an apple (green and sour) is an apple (red and succulent) is an apple (brown and rotten).
Now that I think about it, we might be a step or two behind, here. It seems like philosophers have invested tons of time into trying to make philosophy more like math. There's a focus on non-contradiction, a list of logical fallacies, and detailed accounts of inductive and deductive reasoning. Heck, the first step of most philosophical arguments it to strictly define your terms, to avoid the exact sort of verbal ambiguity which I just mentioned. That probably means that the philosophers of yore saw the same issues, and the modern norms of philosophical debate are how they tried to fix them.
Maybe I'm off here, but I think there's a solid assertion to be made that philosophers have succeeded in making philosophy more mechanistic. If that method has led to a dearth of philosophical progress, but a blossoming of progress in other fields (i.e. math), then that probably means that there's some sort of mismatch going on. Making things more mechanistic is a viable path forward in other fields, but may just lead to a dead end in the specific fields which philosophy wants to study. The question that follows is, what would be a better path? Stuff like relativism takes a hard pivot away from mechanistic philosophy, but pivots so hard that it can't make credible claims about much of anything. Surely there's a middle path here? Some way to retain the ability to make concrete claims about things like morality and beauty, but without pinning them down as a discrete number value?
It's weird to say this, but maybe philosophy needs to learn from quantum physics? Maybe morality is a fluid value until it is directly observed, so to speak. Every situation has a clear, morally upright path, but until all the individual circumstances have crystallized, the morality is unknown. Much like an unobserved electron, there is simply a a cloud of moral possibility- one that shrinks and changes shape, the more we discover about the situation.
So, to pull on my previous example, an apple is simultaneously green/red/brown and sour/succulent/rotten, until we knuckle down and take a look at the thing. Philosophers have historically tried to advance philosophy by restricting the apple to a single one of its states before talking about it, which aids clarity and specificity, but restricts their ability to make overarching breakthroughs, or understand basic, all-encompassing principles. Instead of discussing the apple as a whole, they are limiting themselves to a small portion of it.
As a brief side note: Maybe all of this ties to the awkwardness with newer philosophies like utilitarianism? Despite claiming the mantle of an overarching moral ideology, both advocates and critics of utilitarianism seem to fixate on weirdly singular, specific events which occur quite rarely in the real world. Those events are then treated as a guiding principle, even in situations which only bear a passing resemblance.
You seem better versed in philosophical movements than I am, does this seem on point to you, or am I just talking out of my butt? Surely there's been some philosophical progress over the past thousand years. Is it primarily in tiny little details that don't change much? What did the last philosophical revolution look like? Did it directly benefit from a more mechanistic outlook? Who knows, maybe all of these little insights can pile up on one another, and progress the field regardless. Maybe we just need someone to connect the dots!
Nice, this helps to narrow things down. Stealing a quote from the article: "What is the purpose of life? What is the meaning of beauty? What are the principles of logic? What is the difference between good and evil?"
I'm going to ignore the question about logic for the moment, mainly because it has some bleed-over into scientific and mathematical thought. But, looking through the other questions, I think the big issue at hand is the fact that philosophical systems tend to deal directly with dynamic systems, while science and company tend to deal with mechanistic ones. Which, umm... I'm making up terms here for clarity's sake, but think of a mechanistic system as one which involves a human trying to move a large rock, while a dynamic system involves a human trying to move another human.
Biology, physics, and math all exist pretty independent of humanity. If someone makes the claim that 2+2=18, or talks about how their third arm manipulates gravity, it's easy to dismiss them. Humans have extremely little control over these systems, and this is widely recognized to be the case. Morality, beauty, and purpose are different though. Even if humans don't have absolute control over what consitutes a kind act, or a beautiful painting, or a purposeful life, it's very difficult to argue that they don't have any control whatsoever. So, when philosophy tries to answer these questions, it isn't just dealing with the rote basics of reality. It is dealing with how those basics interact with humanity. Which means that, unlike with science and math, the correct solution can change, based on the people it is being applied to. In fact, it can change as a direct response to the solution being proposed.
This makes philosophy a much trickier thing to make progress in. Not only is it dealing with more variables, interacting in a less predictable fashion, but philosophy can essentially be vetoed by other human beings. The more you push, the more other people might push back. And, since humans do have some amount of control over the subjects in question, the pushback is often successful.
The big breakthrough for science was the strategic removal of the veto. People still get to veto scientific findings, but only under specific circumstances. Getting those circumstances right allowed the good stuff to flourish, while the garbage was weeded out. Philosophy probably needs the same thing (as you've mentioned). The question is, how to implement it. Unlike with most scientific inquiries, people have direct influence over most of the big questions which philosophy tries to answer, which makes the veto more reasonable for them to possess.
I uh, don't really have an answer right now, but I'm getting kind of tired of writing this comment, so I'll think about it, and leave things there for now. Feel free to contribute/correct me, if anything comes to you.
Many thanks for the quote of and link to Stove. I'd run across him before and had wanted to look into his commentary on induction in particular, but, unfortunately, that had fallen off the bottom of the "to read" list.
But he sure provides a rather damning indictment of much of philosophy, although I think he's periodically wide of the mark or misses a bet or two. As I'd basically said in a comment on "Not On Your Team", a salient one is in his more or less justified criticisms of various Trinitarians, of Hegel and Foucault, but of Plotinus in particular:
Plotinus: "... there is the Intellectual form of man, and there is man, there is the Intellectual form of horse and there is horse ..."
Moot of course exactly what ol' Plotinus was getting at there -- he may have been deep in his cups. But it seems related to a fairly new-on-the-scene perception and insight that there's a profound difference between the map and the territory, between the WORD for a thing being a symbolic representation, an "intellectual form" for that thing and the THING itself:
Unfortunately, far too many people -- even in philosophy -- seem to lose sight of the distinction, of the fact that words and labels for categories are just abstractions -- tools for thinking -- but not things in themselves. At least not to the same degree. But it is part and parcel of the too-common logical fallacy, the "sin" of reification, of turning abstractions into real things. Largely the theme of my kick at the kitty, my answer to that age-old question, the one that has puzzled philosophers, philanderers, and politicians from time immemorial, i.e., "What is a woman?" 😉🙂:
Offhand, it seems that much of philosophy is stumbling about in the dark -- maybe stuck in the footnotes to Plato, trapped underneath that particular "lamp". 🙂 Takes a while to find some durable principles and perspectives. As Stove emphasized or suggested, thinking is one thing -- particularly about food and shelter -- but thinking ABOUT thinking is an entirely different kettle of fish -- very easy to go off the rails. Apropos of which and ICYMI, you might be amused by a poem that Richard Feynman apparently used to emphasize the same point:
We often know HOW to do some things -- like how to tie a tie, how to think -- but when asked to EXPLAIN it, we're often at a loss -- left "in a ditch wondering how to run".
In any case and somewhat more broadly, I tend to agree with your "philosophy is the residuum of questions remaining after science (and I think, mathematics) provided humanity with answers." Apropos of which and ICYMI, you might enjoy an oldish essay by Richard Hamming -- of Hamming codes fame which I'm sure you've run across, died 26 years ago tomorrow, January 7th -- on "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics":
Hamming: "Our main tool for carrying out the long chains of tight reasoning required by science is mathematics. .... The earliest history of mathematics must, of course, be all speculation, since there is not now, nor does there ever seem likely to be, any actual, convincing evidence. It seems, however, that in the very foundations of primitive life there was built in, for survival purposes if for nothing else, an understanding of cause and effect. Once this trait is built up beyond a single observation to a sequence of, "If this, then that, and then it follows still further that . . . ," we are on the path of the first feature of mathematics I mentioned, long chains of close reasoning. But it is hard for me to see how simple Darwinian survival of the fittest would select for the ability to do the long chains that mathematics and science seem to require."
Those "long chains of close reasoning" seem close to our bedrock -- some reason to argue that our neurons and synapses function as logic gates:
Though reasoning ABOUT reason tends to be something of a hazardous process -- sort of like cutting off the branch one is sitting on ... -- maybe because our ancestors didn't have much need for it. 🙂 Or because it was something of a luxury. Though maybe more of a necessity these days than not, and for one "reason" or another.
You should look at Protagoras. He's one of the very, very few philosophers to admit that reason can be used to justify anything ("Protagoras was the first to claim that there are two contradictory arguments about everything"), and asserted, confusingly, that everything is true. He felt no shame in selling off his rhetorical tricks to students because he believed that debate itself is meaningless and can go nowhere. This is an extreme position, but it anticipates the entire history of Western philosophy. I think a deep dive into Hume and Kant with Protagoras in the background will give you some very rich food for thought here. I plan to do that in 2024, personally!
I'm familiar with Protagoras. My sense, though, is that like 99% of other philosophers I've encountered, he doesn't offer much by way of advice about moving forward. His skepticism about mathematics is particularly suspicious; I'm confident that math and the sciences are successful fields of inquiry.
I'm unaware of any university programs that teach Objectivism. Ayn Rand's books still sell well to poorly-socialized young men (like myself), but outside the circle of true believers, I don't know many people who take Objectivism seriously.
There are, however, hundreds of philosophy professors (and others) who take Rawls as their area of study.
Which, I suppose, just demonstrates the problem, as neither Rawls nor Rand can produce a livable society; Rawls creates the managerial society that Rand rails against.
This is a great comment, and I wish I had something more substantive to say in response than "I've encountered undergrad physicists and engineers who treated Rand's in same way as Maxwell" which I guess is the verbal equivalent of linking to the Chad Yes Meme https://i.imgflip.com/44bw8j.png
Great post. My intuition is the exact opposite. A lack of mathematical certainty is a feature, not a bug. Something as certain and prescribed as math and science is not capable of speaking to the totality of the human experience. To believe otherwise is to believe in ideology, which is far more powerful than any mathematics or science in reshaping the lived world of human beings, including the ideology of science itself.
"What philosophy is best? This, in any case, is not given; as if all one had to do was read through the major philosophies of history and one could see which one was the best. No, and some ideas which at some point could have given great power to man could lead to the greatest weakness when adopted today. And so it takes a certain capacity for perception, a certain ‘paideia’, an education of the instinct to see when thought is working in the service of life, and when it is turning men into caged animals. It takes a certain creativity, a will. In short, an ability to think, a superior intuition that can put doubt in the service of life and lead us to an affirmation of being, and not to an abyss of endless logo-centric questioning like some underground man."
Having said that, I don't think this operates as any form of criticism against your main points! My sense is that it's more of an intuition, a felt reality that operates more deeply than rational argument. On the other hand, maybe this is a great example of a Mcgilchrist-like manifestation of brain hemisphere difference. Who could say?
I'm not really complaining about the lack of mathematical certainty in philosophy. Science doesn't offer mathematical certainty, and science works wonderfully. I'm complaining about the contradictions, and the lack of credibility, inherent to philosophy.
There's nothing even approaching certainty in my philosophical discussion on beauty at https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/art-can-be-objectively-better-or . But that doesn't bother me in and of itself. What bothers me is that after that article is published, I look at it and say, privately, "This reads very nicely, it covers the bases pretty well, but do I really believe that this makes progress? Is there any perspective or position that it rules out? Is there any vista that it opens up?"
If you show that essay to a reasonable person who thinks art can't vary in quality, do they say "This changes my mind?" Do they say "This forces me into a difficult position?" Do they say, "This establishes some art has some kind of quality is some kind of way?" Do they say "This establishes a shared subjective human experience, but it doesn't establish quality as an objective feature of art in the universe?" Does a reasonable person who thinks art can't vary in quality even *exist* in the first place, or am I wasting my time thinking about them?
What am I supposed to be doing when I enter the realms of philosophy?
The same thing you do with every type of knowledge when you seek to be epistemically responsible: you apply the right method to the right type of truth in the hopes of transforming doubt into affirmation. You apply falsification to science that can be falsified, logical arguments to ethics, aesthetic epistemologies to beauty, etc. The same fundamental uncertainties apply to all of them.
This same dynamic plays out in science. For example, what do you do with science that is beyond falsification? If we are both equally knowledgable about quantum mechanics, and if you believe in many worlds and I believe in Copenhagen, what are you going to say in your article about many worlds that is going to force me in a difficult position? Are you wasting your time thinking about me?
Is it because there is some hope that a falsifiable fact will emerge in some future to definitely prove many worlds? That's fine, but the conversation has now shifted to a different category of epistemic justification, with it's own types of uncertainty and its own definitions of progress.
The more interesting questions I take from your article on beauty are things that are teasing out its own definitions of truth and progress: is the quality of an artwork exhausted by its capacity to stimulate? How is that contingent on time and place? Should vandalization that increases the stimulation of an art piece be praised as increasing its objective quality? How should variance between subjects be accounted for? What does stimulation say about quality when in conversation with other theories of beauty?
Your article about art is playing at the edges of a specific type of knowledge and truth, and in doing so is confirming that the world of art is a different game with different rules. I say well done!
> if you believe in many worlds and I believe in Copenhagen, what are you going to say in your article about many worlds that is going to force me in a difficult position? Are you wasting your time thinking about me?
I suspect I'm wasting my time *disagreeing* with you. And the possibility exists that I'm wasting my time trying to start over with philosophy. But:
> Your article about art is playing at the edges of a specific type of knowledge and truth, and in doing so is confirming that the world of art is a different game with different rules. I say well done!
I also have a sense that I did something there in an informal way that did really work. You're the second person to confirm that, so it starts to feel more solid, anyway. But here's Hume:
"Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty." (Hume 1757, 136)
And here's Kant:
"The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective."
These people are not dumb, but I think they *are* totally wrong, and all I can say is, "Well I considered an ensemble of functions with some greater-than signs, so uh, that means I win."
They use a different frame so the analogy may take some time to find within your approach to what I am pointing out, but remember, you and I are possibly re-inventing the (karmic) wheel.
Heads-up: there are two different types of ancient skepticisms, the later academic sceptics, whom the Pyrrhonist Sextus Empiricus called dogmatic but are the type most associate with the term, this annoys the pyrrhonists who feel they invented it... but hey that';s life. VHS versus beta max.
I am not a pyrrhonist per se because I do not 'get' the ataraxia/enlightenment as a goal thing.
[[ My 'blur' is an independent development which is much like the soteriological goal of ataraxia, but as part of calming the waters while holding the intentions in mind... so one can make real inquiries unfuddled by the thicket of language use and its philosophical digressions. My blur is a methodology of inquiry, not enlightenment, the attention to mind's processes is similar though. https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/slash-and-burn-is-a-category-killer]]
I'll also recommended again Christopher Beckwith's work in the Greek Buddha on Pyrrho & eastern thought. It's a re-framer, the details are argued about a lot. I feel Pyrrho/nism was a lost opportunity crushing by the history of imperial requirements in turning peeps into loyal believing obedient-bots.
Some neo-Pyrrhonists hang out at Doug Bates' FB page which has LOTS of PDFS on the subject.
they can end up arguing a little too much where the commas go, but they seem to enjoy it
[ancient Greek of course was written without punctuation as we know it... so,,,,]
I've never really studied the ancient Greeks, but as we have re-hashed what they have said so many times... might be good to look at the original hash I guess.
Alright, I'm going to try and simplify things here somewhat, all of these paragraphs of text are getting to me. I think the basic hypothesis being circled here is that philosophy is lagging because it deals with people-stuff (which is primarily qualitative and dynamic), and science, math, etc. have made great progress because they primarily deal with stuff-stuff (which is primarily quantitative and mechanistic). Over the past so-and-so years, humans have gotten progressively better at dealing with quantities and complicated mechanical systems, which has led to sizeable breakthroughs in non-philosophical fields, but limited progress in philosophical ones.
The big question, then, is where the troubles specifically lie with philosophy. Is the lack of progress simply a failure to apply our quantitative knowledge appropriately? Or are quantitative breakthroughs useless to begin with, and the lack of progress means we should be taking a different tact?
To add to the conversation a bit, it might also be worth considering the necessary methods of implementing a breakthrough. Maybe the floundering of philosophy is directly tied to a lack of trustworthy, understandable philosophers which people earnestly ask for advice, rather than any particular flaw in method.
I don't agree that philosophy focuses on people-stuff, or that science focusses on stuff-stuff. Science covers a range of topics, from highly thing-focussed in the hard sciences, to highly people-focussed in the soft sciences, like psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Philosophy is similarly broad, covering impersonal subjects like logic, epistemology, and metaphysics, as well as the more psychology-adjacent subjects of ethics and aesthetics.
What philosophy is missing is an effective process or set of rules everyone can agree on. In basketball, the severity of a foul depends on judgments of intent, and such judgments are notoriously difficult to make clearly, yet the process hangs together well enough that people buy tickets in droves and hang onto the edge of their seats as the clock runs out. In science, the data may sometimes be evaluated one way and sometimes another, and not only publication bias but deliberate p-hacking and the possibility for outright fraud weakens the strength of conclusions drawn, yet again the process hangs together well enough for people to accept the results as meaningful.
In philosophy one looks for "tension" between ideas, builds hand-wavey arguments in the form of this very comment, and begs the reader to accept a certain line of reasoning. But every step along the way is treacherous and contestable, and even if you generously assign a probability for every step in the path of 95% correct, after 14 steps we're already more likely to have sunk into the swamp, with no way of knowing we're lost.
In basketball, records can be reviewed to recheck contestable calls. In science, findings can be rechecked with fresh data and fresh researchers. There are obvious truth-tests that are grounded in empiricism. But in philosophy, I say this, she says that, you say something else, and there's no convergence, just a constant swirl of ideas.
After more than a year of consideration since first writing the post you're responding to, I'm confident philosophy needs to be more math-like. Mathematics is essentially an exploration of intellectual realms where, at the higher levels, the powerful empirical methods of science are either unnecessary or impossible. But why are mathematics beyond geometry and artithmatic still successful without being tethered to empiricism? Because the processes work in the lower levels where we can safely check that 3 + 4 = 7, and we simply extend the processes to realms like non-repeating decimals, the square root of negative one, and Laplace transformations. When we prove something in lower mathematics, it works. When we prove something in calculus or higher mathematcs, it's often extremely hard to check whether it's true empirically, but no matter; we trust the methods because they're the same thing we can see working with lower mathematics.
Philosophy should do this. The real trouble is convincing anyone else it makes sense, particularly since they can make muddled counterarguments against the idea using the same essentially philosophical reasoning I'm using here to try to prop up the idea to begin with. Moreover, philosophers aren't interested in having the slim prestige they offer one another further undermined, and regular people aren't interested enough in philosophy to care. I'll continue writing about it, putting everything together in a clearer post in the next month or so, but I'm aware of what little effect this will have. Perhaps if I returned to university yet again, earning a shiny PhD in philosophy over several more years, and gradually gained the respect of my new peer group, I might make some slow headway, but in the meantime I'm not sure who's earning money to support my children. C'est la vie!
Oi. I thought I had a decent idea of what you meant when you said "philosophy" or "science", but it is clear that I do not. There's far too much overlap here, for my tastes.
If I can't meaningfully differentiate between the two fields, then I can't accurately diagnose whether one of them has been unusually devoid of progress, much less the potential methods we can use to remedy the lack thereof. Which drives me back to my initial position of 'science and philosophy are closely intertwined, and the modern era has brought about significant progress in both.'
You're probably right, there are areas of philosophy which would greatly benefit from a more mathematical approach. That said, I don't think you're the first philosopher to put that idea forward. In fact, from the (admittedly small) pool of knowledge I have regarding philosophers, your thesis is a majority opinion. Philosophers are a logical, mathematically-minded bunch. And wouldn't you know it, that mindset has yielded some pretty fantastic results! So um, keep up the good work, I suppose. You are in good company.
Try not to get too bummed out when chatting with folks on the internet (or in academia) that don't adhere to mathematical rigor. It's counterintuitive for a lot of people, and genuine progress doesn't require unanimity. Heck, most of the time it doesn't even require a majority. The importance is to build and maintain communities which do hold those principles in high regard, and are willing to use them to figure things out. When they bound forward, the rest of the world will have to follow, or else be left fading in the dust.
Anyway, thanks for the prolonged and sporadic chat, hope I wasn't too much of an annoyance. Enjoy your weekend!
Alright, time for part two. The second big issue that needs to be overcome is the abstract nature of the philosophical concepts being discussed. Now, this isn't inherently a problem, when we're trying to progress a field. Mathematics is highly abstract, after all, and we've had plenty of progress there. The difference is that math is a highly mechanistic field of study. Abstraction exacerbates the difficulties already present in solving a dynamic system.
"Good" might mean the ability to live an enjoyable existence, or maximizing the happiness of all individuals, or removal of pain and suffering, or eating a delicious slice of apple pie. Or all of these things, or none of these things, or some of these things. If the philosophy of good and bad was a mechanistic system, then all we would have to do to figure out which items belong is to solve the equation. But since it is dynamic, the equation is reliant on us.
I actually might have misspoken about the state of science, in my last comment? It's possible that science is also a dynamic system, but manages to make progress by dealing primarily with concrete phenomena. Mathematics seems to be the inverse, mechanistic and abstract, which is likely why we made progress so much more quickly in that field. Dynamic systems make everything difficult.
So I guess if we're trying to push philosophy forward, that gives us a couple of solid role models. If we can find portions of philosophy which are mechanistic in nature, then we can make progress the same way that mathematicians do. This would probably apply to the realms of logic and argumentation, I believe. Conversely, if we can find portions of philosophy which are concrete, then we can make progress the way that science does. Make a hypothesis, test to see if it holds up. This might be underexplored? Philosophers cling a little too tightly to their thought experiments, in my experience. This leads to things like the trolley problem being used as a method of demonstrating the irrationality of the human mind, rather than a failed hypothesis for how morality functions.
This still leaves us with difficulties advancing the field in areas which are both dynamic and abstract, but I'll think on it, see if I can come up with something down the line. In the meantime, is this helpful at all? Does this open up any solid lines of inquiry, that you can think of? I'm mostly just spitballing here, keeping things broad. If you've got some specific examples to test, that might help to figure out if this is a viable framework, going forward.
So first of all I'd like to thank you for your ideas up to this point. I've spoken with people both on and offline, and they either try to argue that there are no problems in philosophy, or (more commonly) just don't have any ideas at all, and it's good to have anyone to talk to at all.
Now regarding your idea that philosophy discusses systems that are somehow more complex or dynamic than math or science: There is a sense in which social problems are indeed more complicated than physical ones. As someone with an interest in both physics and psychology, I don't think physics is more highly regarded because it is harder, but because the dynamic (yes, science does deal with dynamic systems) behavior of physical objects is much easier to model mathematically than the behavior of intelligent beings. Psychology is so difficult to investigate that we're mostly left groping after statistics that even describe a single person, let alone predict what that person will do over the long term.
However, I don't think that philosophy even has to be about humans per se. I've been spending a great deal of time considering dialetheism, which is just about the simplest question one could consider: Does a binary set {true, false} accurately model truth values for propositions, or, do we need a ternary set {true, false, dialetheia} to handle the situation? (See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/ if this is new for you.)
Notice I'm not even asking "do dialeteias exist?" I'm just trying to ask "can we rely on classical logic which uses binary truth values and thus rejects contradictions?" Forget complex interactions involving people, philosophers are still chewing over basic ideas like dialetheism.
Thinking more specifally about what you've written, you describe mathematics as mechanistic and abstract; does that give us some kind of opening? Is there nothing mechanistic in philosophy? Many mathematical arguments feel extremely close to what philosophers would do, like Goedel's Incompleteness theorem, but their arguments have been wildly successful, while philosophers are still stuck arguing with Plato. What if philosophy were able to somehow begin with some abstract axioms like mathematics did; but what would the axioms be?
I really think that philosophy and mathematics are (or ought somehow to be) closer to one another than to any physical or social science. But maybe they aren't; maybe math always had a means for checking its claims about number by counting out buckets of apples, or cutting apples in halves and thirds, and showing physically and visually what was going on? If so, that could be harsh for the prospects of philosophy, at least without having a way of checking a philosophical claim.
But maybe that's not true; maybe mathematics can be taken as a purely abstract realm without any connection to the real world; maybe mathematics succeeded simple by having such a narrow focus on just about the least interesting thing you could talk about, which is number. If that's true, then might philosophy be able to progress by narrowing its scope in a similar way?
Thinking about these two fields, it's like... it's as though mathematics was successful because the only things it really tried to talk about for thousands of years were *quantities,* while philosophy has always wanted to talk about *qualities.* What do you think about that?
Hey, glad I can be of some service! Apologies for the leisurely reply rate, I usually have to work myself up a bit to talk philosophy, and I've been some combination of busy or not in the mood recently. I am pretty good at keeping conversations like these in the back of my mind, though, so rest assured you'll get something from me eventually.
I haven't heard of dialetheism before. The link you provided is pretty in-depth, so I stuck to reading the intro for the time being. First impressions on my end aren't great. It seems like one of those ideas that accidentally make the thinker stupider, long-term. Even if there are statements which are contradictorily, simultaneously true, that doesn't mean that it is a good idea to approach the world as though there are statements which are contradictorily, simultaneously true. Investigating contradictions is a primary method of discovery and advancement in basically every field known to man. When philosophers are allowed to just hand-wave contradictions, they lose philosophical progress that would have been gained by investigating and attempting to reconcile those contradictions.
If dialetheism wants street cred in my head, it will need to demonstrate some amount of value that is gained down the line, something which can only be achieved by assuming that certain statements are contradictorily true. Something palpable, to offset the fairly obvious advantages of the more traditional model. Kind of like quantum physics, which was really dumb until it wasn't!
But back to the subject at hand. You might have picked up on something, with quantity versus quality. Recently, a little lightbulb went off in my head that you can't really... interpret a number. One point zero seven is always exactly the same. If you want 1.07 to change, then you have to alter it in some way. Add a "cm" at the end, or tack on a negative sign, or change it to 1.08. You have to make it visibly different in order to make it meaningfully different. Quantities are uniquely hyper-specific. Meanwhile, an apple (green and sour) is an apple (red and succulent) is an apple (brown and rotten).
Now that I think about it, we might be a step or two behind, here. It seems like philosophers have invested tons of time into trying to make philosophy more like math. There's a focus on non-contradiction, a list of logical fallacies, and detailed accounts of inductive and deductive reasoning. Heck, the first step of most philosophical arguments it to strictly define your terms, to avoid the exact sort of verbal ambiguity which I just mentioned. That probably means that the philosophers of yore saw the same issues, and the modern norms of philosophical debate are how they tried to fix them.
Maybe I'm off here, but I think there's a solid assertion to be made that philosophers have succeeded in making philosophy more mechanistic. If that method has led to a dearth of philosophical progress, but a blossoming of progress in other fields (i.e. math), then that probably means that there's some sort of mismatch going on. Making things more mechanistic is a viable path forward in other fields, but may just lead to a dead end in the specific fields which philosophy wants to study. The question that follows is, what would be a better path? Stuff like relativism takes a hard pivot away from mechanistic philosophy, but pivots so hard that it can't make credible claims about much of anything. Surely there's a middle path here? Some way to retain the ability to make concrete claims about things like morality and beauty, but without pinning them down as a discrete number value?
It's weird to say this, but maybe philosophy needs to learn from quantum physics? Maybe morality is a fluid value until it is directly observed, so to speak. Every situation has a clear, morally upright path, but until all the individual circumstances have crystallized, the morality is unknown. Much like an unobserved electron, there is simply a a cloud of moral possibility- one that shrinks and changes shape, the more we discover about the situation.
So, to pull on my previous example, an apple is simultaneously green/red/brown and sour/succulent/rotten, until we knuckle down and take a look at the thing. Philosophers have historically tried to advance philosophy by restricting the apple to a single one of its states before talking about it, which aids clarity and specificity, but restricts their ability to make overarching breakthroughs, or understand basic, all-encompassing principles. Instead of discussing the apple as a whole, they are limiting themselves to a small portion of it.
As a brief side note: Maybe all of this ties to the awkwardness with newer philosophies like utilitarianism? Despite claiming the mantle of an overarching moral ideology, both advocates and critics of utilitarianism seem to fixate on weirdly singular, specific events which occur quite rarely in the real world. Those events are then treated as a guiding principle, even in situations which only bear a passing resemblance.
You seem better versed in philosophical movements than I am, does this seem on point to you, or am I just talking out of my butt? Surely there's been some philosophical progress over the past thousand years. Is it primarily in tiny little details that don't change much? What did the last philosophical revolution look like? Did it directly benefit from a more mechanistic outlook? Who knows, maybe all of these little insights can pile up on one another, and progress the field regardless. Maybe we just need someone to connect the dots!
Nice, this helps to narrow things down. Stealing a quote from the article: "What is the purpose of life? What is the meaning of beauty? What are the principles of logic? What is the difference between good and evil?"
I'm going to ignore the question about logic for the moment, mainly because it has some bleed-over into scientific and mathematical thought. But, looking through the other questions, I think the big issue at hand is the fact that philosophical systems tend to deal directly with dynamic systems, while science and company tend to deal with mechanistic ones. Which, umm... I'm making up terms here for clarity's sake, but think of a mechanistic system as one which involves a human trying to move a large rock, while a dynamic system involves a human trying to move another human.
Biology, physics, and math all exist pretty independent of humanity. If someone makes the claim that 2+2=18, or talks about how their third arm manipulates gravity, it's easy to dismiss them. Humans have extremely little control over these systems, and this is widely recognized to be the case. Morality, beauty, and purpose are different though. Even if humans don't have absolute control over what consitutes a kind act, or a beautiful painting, or a purposeful life, it's very difficult to argue that they don't have any control whatsoever. So, when philosophy tries to answer these questions, it isn't just dealing with the rote basics of reality. It is dealing with how those basics interact with humanity. Which means that, unlike with science and math, the correct solution can change, based on the people it is being applied to. In fact, it can change as a direct response to the solution being proposed.
This makes philosophy a much trickier thing to make progress in. Not only is it dealing with more variables, interacting in a less predictable fashion, but philosophy can essentially be vetoed by other human beings. The more you push, the more other people might push back. And, since humans do have some amount of control over the subjects in question, the pushback is often successful.
The big breakthrough for science was the strategic removal of the veto. People still get to veto scientific findings, but only under specific circumstances. Getting those circumstances right allowed the good stuff to flourish, while the garbage was weeded out. Philosophy probably needs the same thing (as you've mentioned). The question is, how to implement it. Unlike with most scientific inquiries, people have direct influence over most of the big questions which philosophy tries to answer, which makes the veto more reasonable for them to possess.
I uh, don't really have an answer right now, but I'm getting kind of tired of writing this comment, so I'll think about it, and leave things there for now. Feel free to contribute/correct me, if anything comes to you.
Many thanks for the quote of and link to Stove. I'd run across him before and had wanted to look into his commentary on induction in particular, but, unfortunately, that had fallen off the bottom of the "to read" list.
But he sure provides a rather damning indictment of much of philosophy, although I think he's periodically wide of the mark or misses a bet or two. As I'd basically said in a comment on "Not On Your Team", a salient one is in his more or less justified criticisms of various Trinitarians, of Hegel and Foucault, but of Plotinus in particular:
Plotinus: "... there is the Intellectual form of man, and there is man, there is the Intellectual form of horse and there is horse ..."
Moot of course exactly what ol' Plotinus was getting at there -- he may have been deep in his cups. But it seems related to a fairly new-on-the-scene perception and insight that there's a profound difference between the map and the territory, between the WORD for a thing being a symbolic representation, an "intellectual form" for that thing and the THING itself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
Unfortunately, far too many people -- even in philosophy -- seem to lose sight of the distinction, of the fact that words and labels for categories are just abstractions -- tools for thinking -- but not things in themselves. At least not to the same degree. But it is part and parcel of the too-common logical fallacy, the "sin" of reification, of turning abstractions into real things. Largely the theme of my kick at the kitty, my answer to that age-old question, the one that has puzzled philosophers, philanderers, and politicians from time immemorial, i.e., "What is a woman?" 😉🙂:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/what-is-a-woman
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/mutually-assured-cancellation/comment/46639828
Offhand, it seems that much of philosophy is stumbling about in the dark -- maybe stuck in the footnotes to Plato, trapped underneath that particular "lamp". 🙂 Takes a while to find some durable principles and perspectives. As Stove emphasized or suggested, thinking is one thing -- particularly about food and shelter -- but thinking ABOUT thinking is an entirely different kettle of fish -- very easy to go off the rails. Apropos of which and ICYMI, you might be amused by a poem that Richard Feynman apparently used to emphasize the same point:
"A centipede was happy quite, until a toad in fun
Said, 'Pray, which leg comes after which?'
This raised his doubts to such a pitch
He fell distracted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run."
http://www.feynman.com/science/what-is-science/
We often know HOW to do some things -- like how to tie a tie, how to think -- but when asked to EXPLAIN it, we're often at a loss -- left "in a ditch wondering how to run".
In any case and somewhat more broadly, I tend to agree with your "philosophy is the residuum of questions remaining after science (and I think, mathematics) provided humanity with answers." Apropos of which and ICYMI, you might enjoy an oldish essay by Richard Hamming -- of Hamming codes fame which I'm sure you've run across, died 26 years ago tomorrow, January 7th -- on "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics":
https://math.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Hamming.html
Of particular note therefrom:
Hamming: "Our main tool for carrying out the long chains of tight reasoning required by science is mathematics. .... The earliest history of mathematics must, of course, be all speculation, since there is not now, nor does there ever seem likely to be, any actual, convincing evidence. It seems, however, that in the very foundations of primitive life there was built in, for survival purposes if for nothing else, an understanding of cause and effect. Once this trait is built up beyond a single observation to a sequence of, "If this, then that, and then it follows still further that . . . ," we are on the path of the first feature of mathematics I mentioned, long chains of close reasoning. But it is hard for me to see how simple Darwinian survival of the fittest would select for the ability to do the long chains that mathematics and science seem to require."
Those "long chains of close reasoning" seem close to our bedrock -- some reason to argue that our neurons and synapses function as logic gates:
The Cerebral Code: https://williamcalvin.com/bk9/index.htm
Though reasoning ABOUT reason tends to be something of a hazardous process -- sort of like cutting off the branch one is sitting on ... -- maybe because our ancestors didn't have much need for it. 🙂 Or because it was something of a luxury. Though maybe more of a necessity these days than not, and for one "reason" or another.
You should look at Protagoras. He's one of the very, very few philosophers to admit that reason can be used to justify anything ("Protagoras was the first to claim that there are two contradictory arguments about everything"), and asserted, confusingly, that everything is true. He felt no shame in selling off his rhetorical tricks to students because he believed that debate itself is meaningless and can go nowhere. This is an extreme position, but it anticipates the entire history of Western philosophy. I think a deep dive into Hume and Kant with Protagoras in the background will give you some very rich food for thought here. I plan to do that in 2024, personally!
I'm familiar with Protagoras. My sense, though, is that like 99% of other philosophers I've encountered, he doesn't offer much by way of advice about moving forward. His skepticism about mathematics is particularly suspicious; I'm confident that math and the sciences are successful fields of inquiry.
I'm unaware of any university programs that teach Objectivism. Ayn Rand's books still sell well to poorly-socialized young men (like myself), but outside the circle of true believers, I don't know many people who take Objectivism seriously.
There are, however, hundreds of philosophy professors (and others) who take Rawls as their area of study.
Which, I suppose, just demonstrates the problem, as neither Rawls nor Rand can produce a livable society; Rawls creates the managerial society that Rand rails against.
This is a great comment, and I wish I had something more substantive to say in response than "I've encountered undergrad physicists and engineers who treated Rand's in same way as Maxwell" which I guess is the verbal equivalent of linking to the Chad Yes Meme https://i.imgflip.com/44bw8j.png
Great post. My intuition is the exact opposite. A lack of mathematical certainty is a feature, not a bug. Something as certain and prescribed as math and science is not capable of speaking to the totality of the human experience. To believe otherwise is to believe in ideology, which is far more powerful than any mathematics or science in reshaping the lived world of human beings, including the ideology of science itself.
I was just reading a great post that included an aside that captured this more eloquently than I could:(https://tolma.substack.com/p/culture-of-the-self):
"What philosophy is best? This, in any case, is not given; as if all one had to do was read through the major philosophies of history and one could see which one was the best. No, and some ideas which at some point could have given great power to man could lead to the greatest weakness when adopted today. And so it takes a certain capacity for perception, a certain ‘paideia’, an education of the instinct to see when thought is working in the service of life, and when it is turning men into caged animals. It takes a certain creativity, a will. In short, an ability to think, a superior intuition that can put doubt in the service of life and lead us to an affirmation of being, and not to an abyss of endless logo-centric questioning like some underground man."
Having said that, I don't think this operates as any form of criticism against your main points! My sense is that it's more of an intuition, a felt reality that operates more deeply than rational argument. On the other hand, maybe this is a great example of a Mcgilchrist-like manifestation of brain hemisphere difference. Who could say?
I'm not really complaining about the lack of mathematical certainty in philosophy. Science doesn't offer mathematical certainty, and science works wonderfully. I'm complaining about the contradictions, and the lack of credibility, inherent to philosophy.
There's nothing even approaching certainty in my philosophical discussion on beauty at https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/art-can-be-objectively-better-or . But that doesn't bother me in and of itself. What bothers me is that after that article is published, I look at it and say, privately, "This reads very nicely, it covers the bases pretty well, but do I really believe that this makes progress? Is there any perspective or position that it rules out? Is there any vista that it opens up?"
If you show that essay to a reasonable person who thinks art can't vary in quality, do they say "This changes my mind?" Do they say "This forces me into a difficult position?" Do they say, "This establishes some art has some kind of quality is some kind of way?" Do they say "This establishes a shared subjective human experience, but it doesn't establish quality as an objective feature of art in the universe?" Does a reasonable person who thinks art can't vary in quality even *exist* in the first place, or am I wasting my time thinking about them?
What am I supposed to be doing when I enter the realms of philosophy?
The same thing you do with every type of knowledge when you seek to be epistemically responsible: you apply the right method to the right type of truth in the hopes of transforming doubt into affirmation. You apply falsification to science that can be falsified, logical arguments to ethics, aesthetic epistemologies to beauty, etc. The same fundamental uncertainties apply to all of them.
This same dynamic plays out in science. For example, what do you do with science that is beyond falsification? If we are both equally knowledgable about quantum mechanics, and if you believe in many worlds and I believe in Copenhagen, what are you going to say in your article about many worlds that is going to force me in a difficult position? Are you wasting your time thinking about me?
Is it because there is some hope that a falsifiable fact will emerge in some future to definitely prove many worlds? That's fine, but the conversation has now shifted to a different category of epistemic justification, with it's own types of uncertainty and its own definitions of progress.
The more interesting questions I take from your article on beauty are things that are teasing out its own definitions of truth and progress: is the quality of an artwork exhausted by its capacity to stimulate? How is that contingent on time and place? Should vandalization that increases the stimulation of an art piece be praised as increasing its objective quality? How should variance between subjects be accounted for? What does stimulation say about quality when in conversation with other theories of beauty?
Your article about art is playing at the edges of a specific type of knowledge and truth, and in doing so is confirming that the world of art is a different game with different rules. I say well done!
> if you believe in many worlds and I believe in Copenhagen, what are you going to say in your article about many worlds that is going to force me in a difficult position? Are you wasting your time thinking about me?
I suspect I'm wasting my time *disagreeing* with you. And the possibility exists that I'm wasting my time trying to start over with philosophy. But:
> Your article about art is playing at the edges of a specific type of knowledge and truth, and in doing so is confirming that the world of art is a different game with different rules. I say well done!
I also have a sense that I did something there in an informal way that did really work. You're the second person to confirm that, so it starts to feel more solid, anyway. But here's Hume:
"Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty." (Hume 1757, 136)
And here's Kant:
"The judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective."
These people are not dumb, but I think they *are* totally wrong, and all I can say is, "Well I considered an ensemble of functions with some greater-than signs, so uh, that means I win."
>Philosophy, is the walk on the slippery rocks.
>Religion, is a lie in the fog.
>I'm not aware of too many things.
>I know what I know if you know what I mean.
>I-yeah-eah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfWXkiJw__0
"And lastly, my instincts also say that asking my readers for ideas may help. Does anyone have any ideas?"
I discovered Pyrrho of Elis and the neo-pyrrhonist about a year ago about a month before I started on my substack, which was 11 months ago or so,
it's partly why my writing is all over the place as I try to take note of it.
Your post here actually examples a couple of the modes they use/used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhonism#Modes
They use a different frame so the analogy may take some time to find within your approach to what I am pointing out, but remember, you and I are possibly re-inventing the (karmic) wheel.
Heads-up: there are two different types of ancient skepticisms, the later academic sceptics, whom the Pyrrhonist Sextus Empiricus called dogmatic but are the type most associate with the term, this annoys the pyrrhonists who feel they invented it... but hey that';s life. VHS versus beta max.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextus_Empiricus
I am not a pyrrhonist per se because I do not 'get' the ataraxia/enlightenment as a goal thing.
[[ My 'blur' is an independent development which is much like the soteriological goal of ataraxia, but as part of calming the waters while holding the intentions in mind... so one can make real inquiries unfuddled by the thicket of language use and its philosophical digressions. My blur is a methodology of inquiry, not enlightenment, the attention to mind's processes is similar though. https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/slash-and-burn-is-a-category-killer]]
I'll also recommended again Christopher Beckwith's work in the Greek Buddha on Pyrrho & eastern thought. It's a re-framer, the details are argued about a lot. I feel Pyrrho/nism was a lost opportunity crushing by the history of imperial requirements in turning peeps into loyal believing obedient-bots.
Some neo-Pyrrhonists hang out at Doug Bates' FB page which has LOTS of PDFS on the subject.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/Pyrrhonism
https://www.middlewaysociety.org/books-philosophy-books-pyrrhos-way-by-douglas-c-bates/
(not Doug Bates the statistician)
they can end up arguing a little too much where the commas go, but they seem to enjoy it
[ancient Greek of course was written without punctuation as we know it... so,,,,]
I've never really studied the ancient Greeks, but as we have re-hashed what they have said so many times... might be good to look at the original hash I guess.
"Being honest, this is really the way I think of mathematics—not, ultimately, as a rational discipline, "
this is what I mean by "logic is a hindsight", the emprirical version would many mini-hindsights one has to fit each other.