It looks like I’ll finally have some free time this week, so I thought I’d ask if anyone was down with something a little weightier than the usual drivel. No offense, anyone.
Hmmmm. Anyone want to talk about how philosophy is about 90% understanding language and about ten percent being aware of your assumptions? Maybe I should leave a percent or two aside for letting everyone else know how smart you are - it’s a long standing tradition.
Oh, maybe I’m wrong. You gotta leave about ten percent for sneaking in your political view.
Whaddaya say - what’s the percentages? Politics, assumptions, language, reaffirming what your mom told you about how smart you are…
Did I leave anything out?
How about how philosophy is an eliminative process. You hear something like “morality is all about what’s good and bad” and you think - “that’s incorrect”. So you go about listening to all these ideas about morality and then you throw out all the stuff that clearly garbage and then you look at what might or might not be garbage and then you’re left with something that makes sense and then you find out what the assumptions are that this entails and then you figure out how to state this without being a self-contradicting tool and then if you’re really serious you keep the politics out of it.
So 10% politics, 10% assholery 10% being aware and 90% understanding language.
We’re already touching on some pretty serious philosophical problems here.
I couldn’t find the smiley of the guy w/ the popcorn, so I tried to express something here in language that could indicate to the reader my mentality and the objects I was considering at the time the idea of the popcorn smiley came to me. How’s my language Faust?
It’s pretty good. Take the example of the non-standard english word, “assholery.” It appears to be just the right word for the meaning you wish to convey. This is important to the philosopher. While I am not ready to call it a technical usage of the word, there is that potentional.
I’ve always felt like there was a lot to be done in the field of sticking prefixes and suffixes on places they aren’t conventionally supposed to go. If we want our language to convey the most nuance it could in the future be shown to be vital that we butcher it in this way so I try and do it as often as I can.
There is language, then there is the world of expression. Do you include the world of expression in your categories of language? One is connected to the other, but the world of expression is generally the human’s “real world”, too.
Not everyone is political, but authority is all part of that good old fashioned dogmatism which some people love.
I thought I remembered something long ago, from a documentory about how mother bats in large amounts in caves, they find their babies based on how the baby sounds even though there is a ton of sounds at once. For survival, they have been able to filter out the over 99% crap and find that one perfected sense then apply instinct to it. We probably have to do that as best we can with the sophistry and religion and politics and just plane old spam in the culture’s mass media these days, but I think human beings are far less precise than bats in many ways. Elimination is like how our body’s blood filters and has an immune system. It’s a big part of our life but we need to evolve it more asap in my opinion.
On a barley related note, one of my favorite passtimes on these boards used to be watching someone explain the difference between morality and ethics. I may have read one or two attempts that make something like sense. I might not have. I bet someone, somewhere has snagged an A on a paper from some dufus prof who just wanted a job where he didn’t have to cut his hair.
I’m sure if i looked hard enough, I could find some course catalog listing of a class named The Morality if Ethics.
Now that’s serious.
I should have named the thread that. Would have had 500 views and thirty replies by now. All in earnest, to be sure.
What I wanted to name it was “Most of this shit doesn’t even mean anything…”
I think humans have this kind of thing in philosophy. I’d call it grand error.
I just made a little text about my definition of morality. I called it a cognative-additive and a modification to our sense energy and the forms it produces between our parts.
No, not everyone. Most philosophy is just politics in frilly underwear, though. The good stuff isn’t, in any immediate sense. You pretty much have to trhow out everything before the 19th Century and 95% of what happens on this board, though.
yeah, the important stuff is eliminative. Most people, including most philosophers, aren’t serious enough about philosophy for that, though.
I’ll try to explain:
What I mean bu the world of expression, is the world of sensations and thoughts which are expressed in language and other forms of self expression. It itself is a world. There’s so much in it that people can have it as their own world, or they use it so often that it is the person’s world. Without language it wouldn’t exist, because language is symbols used to express things, so in a way, language is expression. That is why i called it the human-world, instead of just calling it the world.
I believe in moral-skillfulness. It’s allot like meaning-skillfulness. Skill with morals and meanings. But a moral is a value instead of a meaning, even though value itself is a type of meaning. Sadly the moral skill of most races and species is fairly low. It produces the illusion that there is no value.
I know why they exist. Although, most moral philosophers have had to pretend that they don’t know - or in many cases - they don’t actually know.
Moral philosophy is, qua philosophy, all about language. When Rawls wrote that big fist book, he was writing a big long definition. When Plato wrote The Republic, he was writing a campaign speech. Rawls sought to clarify what we mean (or what we best mean) when we say “Justice”. Plato was just bullshitting people. But bullshit, if done well, is mostly a language skill.
Even if you want a serious discussion of morality/language, how do you avoid the relativists who refuse to accept any definition except their own? A perspectivist still has the problem of moving from narrow language specificity to anything applicable generally. I suppose one can always fall back on pragmatism; if it works, leave it the fuck alone. But even that won’t satisfy most people because the moral imperative isn’t language, it’s a “thing”.
I knew you’d get sucked into this, tent. You’ll never learn…
The moral imperative, if i understand you correctly, is a very complex, errr, umm, complex. Those “relativists” usually don’t know what the fuck I am talking about when I call philosophy “eliminative”, and so will not generally accept a minimal description for morality. Like most people, they never get to that specificity. So I never get the chance to address the problem of applicability. Fuck knows, i have tried. The major problem is not that they are relativists - but in that specific aspect of relativism - it’s not philosophy to begin with. Trying to do philosophy without an ax to grind is pretty much like trying to fuck a water balloon without a pecker.
I mean, the whole issue of applicability, tent - no one even listens. Some of this philosophy stuff you have to have a certain instinct for. You have ti have a feel for it. You can’t just “figure out” everything. That’s why Wittgenstein is such a rack star. he’s full of shit, but he gets great style points.
He’s really fucking full of shit, though. There’s a guy that knew it was all about language, but just didn’t know how it was all about language. All he did was to fuck…
Faust I’m not pretending I think I’m one of the ones who really doesn’t know why they exist. I see em out there, and I get the things people try and do with them, but I don’t get why.
I get what you’re saying about style points. The main reason I liked Lewis so much is because he made me laugh.
When you say, “problem of applicability” are you speaking loosely or so you mean the general problem of how to apply language or how language applies to ______ or what?
But that is the problem here. I’ve gotten kicked from pillar to post trying to get across that philosophy isn’t philosophizing. I fucking hate philosophy even as I know what doing it means. It’s damned hard work and I’m still trying to figure out why anyone would want to do that. Think about it: How does one make language specific enough to take “morality” from an encompassing definition to an actionable principle? And in what perspective and context? Talk about pissing up a rope! (I watch Larry too)