No, seriously.
Just kidding. Anyway, I think I’ll leave this sort of stuff to the professionals. 
But I do enjoy reading ideas like this.
James - your latest comments are outside the scope of my thesis. Hope you don’t mind if i do not respond.
Moreno -
I’m not sure what you mean, either. I just mean that an artist can paint without knowing color theory or the chemistry of paint, or that a musician can play without knowing music theory or the physics of a trumpet.
The epistemologist asks just what knowledge is, and about how, or if, we can attain it. The scientist just uses a method to attain knowledge that does not have any “ultimate” or certain grounding - he attains knowledge as defined by science. The philosopher may ask - “just what is scientific knowledge?” - but the scientist doesn’t have to.
In other words, we may ask what makes a fish a fish, and how we know it’s a fish, and how certain we are that it’s a fish. While we as philosophers are doing all that, the fisherman gets in his boat, finds a fish, catches a fish, eats the fish and shits out the part of the fish that he cannot digest, dies, gets buried at sea and becomes food for a new generation of fish.
Fause I don’t mind Hume, I just hate Nietzsche for the same reason I hate Phish, the fans are just unbearable.
Lewis does go on in some length about the importance of maximum specificity in language, and I don’t think abstraction necessarily entails generalization in a way that disolves all particulars. I’ll be like you right now and say this post doesn’t include everything I have to say, because God knows I can get off topic pretty quickly.
and I would say that if they are good at it, they have tacit knowledge, in those cases, about aesthetics. The musician, if talented, would have tacit knowledge of some kind of music theory. I suppose by talented meaning that others appreciated what was produced. Even, tacit knowledge, of some of the physics of the trumpet. Those parts related to what the trumpeter is modifying with certain goals in mind.
But perhaps this has nothing to do with where you are going.
Yaah, two quibbles. On the way to becoming a working scientist, he probably dealt with epistemology. Not as a philosopher would, but more informally - by philosophical ideas of formality. Why a study is flawed or sound due to epistemological issues. Two, I would guess they still have to think somewhat, over the span of their career about epistemological issues. When can non-observables be considered to have been soundly inferred and are the criteria the same for observables? How much can I think this is supported due to coherence with current theory? I would think there at least occasional comparison with research ideals, especially when new kinds of phenomena are being considered. IOW I would bet that the people first hitting QM phenomena they found really strange did even explicitly talk to each other about epistemology - though likely not with the jargon philosophers would use.
That example I have no quibbles with.
Smears -
Fause? Have you been drinking? You seem to be slurring your words a bit.
I’ll see if i can find something on that. Gotta link?
moreno -
Y’okay. Sure. Music theory has mostly been the codification of practice. There were “blue” notes before there was any theory of blues.
Care to give an example?
I don’t think so. As far as i know, non-observables are inferred mathematically. if the math leads you there, that’s where you go.
But again, of we are talking about the epistemology of your average six year old, I’m not sure we even have a quibble. I don’t include that in eomia.
The ultimate dichotomy seems to me - existence and nonexistence. What’s above this? The ultimate singularity - “I think, therefore, I am”.
Existence is one side, nonexistence the other. To me, it seems like knowledge is founded on a huge conditional statement. All information is thrown into the bucket of existence, or nonexistence. It’s all for the purpose of the self, which each one of us believes in. We go into the existence bucket.
Existence is one way. Not two. So there’s only one path it follows. If we understand the mechanics of the path, we can predict where and how we’ll interact with it.
Nonexistence isn’t false, it’s just an alternative. But in existence, there’s only one alternative by it’s very structure.
Dichotomy is a product of existence, but doesn’t apply to existence itself. Existence is not a dichotomy, it is the only way. Nonexistence, doesn’t exist, therefore, is irrelevant. This is how the path unfolds.
Determinism, determinism, determinism.
That seems like an awfully binary, and therefore oversimplfied way of looking at things. I agree that knowledge is based on conditions, but I don’t think it’ll work out in the long run if you start saying things simply don’t exist. You’ve gotta think about it like this man, something can’t not exist. It may not exist here, or there, but it’s gotta exist somehow, or we wouldn’t have any concept of it, or ability to envision it, or even be able to have imaginary things in the world, and I know there are imaginary things in the world. So to talk about something at all, you’ve gotta assume existence, then from there determine the conditions to which its existence abides, then categorize it accordingly. Like unicorns exist, but only in an imaginary way, and nothing exists, but only if we’re looking for something and that particular something isn’t there.
Ah, but there is the point!
I say everything exists. Only nothing, doesn’t exist and is able to be disregarded for all intensive purposes.
I’ve yet to see anything in that can’t be reduced to 1/0. This is why I respect the invention of computers so much.
EDIT: Also, I think it was Einstein who said “If you can’t make it simple, you probably don’t understand it.”
You lost me Joe. Are you telling me that everything boils down to polar opposites?
Faust, I searched for abstract particular, and was shocked there was a wiki page for that. I remember reading this guy D.C. Williams, but at a time I was also reading alot of other guys, so like so often I can’t remember much of what I read was him, but I remember he was the Trope Theory guy, and I remember having this long definition of what a trope was, including the language, “abstract particular” “repeatable but not duplicable”, a bunch of stuff like that. Then I went on and searched for “trope” knowing that there used to be nothing about them in philosophy on wiki, and now there’s a whole chunk of a page about em, and it mentions D.C. Williams. You know sometimes I can’t even really articulate the crap I’ve read, or the things I think, so to just have it confirmed that D.C. Williams was the trope guy and that abstract particulars aren’t something I dreamed up while stoned really gave me a sense of validation.
It says, “trope theory in metaphysics”, so it’s going in your metaphysics thread now!!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trope_(philosophy#Trope_theory_in_philosophy_.28metaphysics.29
We are a something. Therefore, what interests us is all the other somethings. The things that occupy the bucket of existence, for that is where we reside. We reside on one side of the 1/0. Nothingness (unreality), resides on the other.
Nothing is only relevant to something, when something is trying to determine what else is something. A person only cares for reality, and not unreality. Comparing alternatives enables us to understand the distinction between, reality and unreality. 1/0.
It’s a big conditional statement. That’s all it’s ever been, and the first condition is that "If (I think, therefore I am…) then this is yada yada yada. If it isn’t, then we don’t care about what is, we only care about what isn’t. We’re interested in the bucket we occupy, that is all.
Fuck reality and unreality. It’s sides of the same coin. We ‘are’ - and that’s the foundation.
I think it boils down to singularity. For the alternative is completely irrelevant to us. Two alternatives, only one is true at a given instant.
Smears - I was asking for a link to Lewis’ treatment of the importance of maximum specificity in language.
Isn’t this part of the big tension between analytical and continental philosophy? Many analytic philosophers hold that science is no different from philosophy. However, the there are continental philosophers that believe metaphysical considerations ought to be further explored, and that there is more mystery than might ever be observed. This, they believe, is the folly of science. With regards to the counter-factual coin-toss example, scientific knowledge and theory might give a whole host of causes for why an event is probable, leading all the way towards the field that the newly discovered Higgs Bison particle creates! However, I’m not sure whether it is probable or not matters, for if one used classical mechanics (f=ma) then we would be using a more idealized system, not based on probability theory, unlike today’s “standard model”. So the “model” one is building off of is also important, too.
I think you may be right, that many scientists can go about their work week without any considering of EOMia. Nevertheless, one had to sit down in an armchair and speculate what exists, and create this novum organum, this “new method”. WIth information theories, mass-less theories preceding the big bang, and struggles within science, whether it be in psychology or physics, EOMia is still open to the scientists themselves, even if the scientific methods themselves are not interested in the debates. That alone gives hope to the formibility of the human mind over functional fixedness, which might entail that science too might change its method again someday. Science is at least as old as the Greeks, and if they didn’t get the method down to perfection, what’s to say we have?
It’s pretty late for me, I hope this wasn’t a ramble! ](https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/uploads/default/original/2X/7/7c349bf1053f368a5729d053e1e91215f22ce66c.gif "Brick wall"){kind=small}
Conditionals are also useful when we’re postulating how things should be (but aren’t).
Frank -
It appears to be. While I am the mortal enemy of metaphysics in general, my specific question is this - with all this exploring, I have yet to discern an actual use for logic that includes metaphysical considerations. It’s all well and good to formulate rules for logic that allow for eomic ideas - but I have never seen any real use for such a logic. That is, the writers seem to merely claim that their rules are better for capturing the way we talk - which seems intuitively to be “better”. But where do actual arguments using these rules lead us?
But how does this differ from a series of “regular” conditionals where we just plug in the different variables that we hypothesize may be true? That’s how science has worked for, well, forever. How would these “new” conditionals work better? This has never been explained, so far as I know.
Sure. or they could think about baseball in their free time, as well.
Of course. I just wonder how a system like Lewis’ might help. I mean - I get it - it doesn’t take too much to get famous in philosophy.
My real job here is to sniff out metaphysics, from whatever rock it might be hiding under, and expose it to the world. I think that some who study Lewis and his ilk do not realize that his work is born of metaphysical lust, and not really of any good-faith effort to improve logic.
Shit. I was so proud of myself for remembering the whole abstract particular thing. You know I’ve been doing some really crazy gardening. It’s like I’m Dutch in here. 3000 watts dude!
Here’s one where he talks about epistemology, and of course as you would expect he says alot of things like, “metaphysics”, “language”, maximally specific", “modal”, and “blah blah blah”.
It’s called elusive knowledge. I think it might relate loosely to what you’re talking about here, in that I think he’s trying to come up with sets of types of knowledge, or propositions that one would have to consider to have a functioning philosophical ontology. You know pretty much everything he writes boils down to the need for infinite, concrete, causally isolated possible worlds, and our goal is apparently to look around, and through some kind of method determine which world we are in out of all the possible ones. He’s a crazy dude.
Here’s the paper, I believe it’s pretty short, the format blows but google might be able to come up w/ something better.
philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/facul … eading.pdf
I think in one sense, he’s sort of defending the scientific view that it’s best to push forward in order to find out what mistakes you’ve made. Fallibilism ftw!
Now that paper is more a point made from a philosophical point of view, imo. Here’s one that sort of points to the distinction between two sets of people doing things differently because of variances in their need for epistemic certainty. Also, he talks about his cat Bruce, which is kind of funny because philosophers never do that.
But I’m interested in nothing. Even multiple nothings.
Faust my favorite part of reading Lewis was his jokes. The guy is hilarious. I dunno about all that making logic better stuff, or what kind of lust he had. I think he viewed the world much like you. He hated Alvin Plantinga, and was a self proclaimed atheist. He loved game theory. There’s a really funny paper about atheism, game theory and how Plantinga sucks its called, “evil for freedoms sake?”. Excellent bathroom reading.
Science, as the active pursuit of knowledge about the world, whether with the aim of predicting or creating or whatever other power we might want to ascribe to it, requires a methodology. That methodology has to be non-neutral in order to produce results - that is to say, it needs to define, select and order. Therefore, the eomia are at the very least implied, which makes them significant for assessing the science and its outcomes. As I always say of metaphysics, it is of the second order: it comes after knowledge and helps us to establish how we know what we know.
Certainly the terminology and some of the subject matter of metaphysics strays from this basic function and produces distracting and regressive ideas, but I don’t think this makes the basic function any less valid or important for helping us in our pursuit of knowledge.
That’s less than a resounding endorsement of epistemology, matty, but I rarely refuse the opportunity to attack any defense of metaphysics, so I’ll bite.
In short, epistemology asks “What can be truly known, and how would we know it?” Science asks “What must be false?”. Scientific knowledge is always knowledge by default - it always a thesis that has not yet been disproven.