• Is Philosophy the "Highest" Discourse?
    ↪J
    [quote][/quote]
    Thank you for your welcome!!
    That's a good point, and my example was loosely worded. Better to have said, "An acoustician conducts their research in complete independence of what theory may do with it, and it will not be possible to find any relevance for that theory to their work." Is it still clear that relevance isn't symmetric? I suppose this wording is slightly more deniable, because by shifting modal ground and talking about what is and isn't possible, we have to meet a higher bar. But let's not get caught up in extreme and/or unlikely cases. The idea was to question whether relevance is symmetric in a much more powerful and common way -- so that @fdrake's conclusion about what we've calling the Q recursion is true. I think his argument necessitates a near-perfect match of symmetries in order to go through. But perhaps he'll weigh in on this.

    I think the matter of contention isn't whether the relevance is symmetric or not, but more so the extent to which that symmetry is met. X having a relation with Y doesn't necessitate that Y is relevant to X to the same degree, denying @fdrake’s (6th) Premise, but I guess that sort of makes it a trivial matter.

    Well, that's the question, and I think you need to do more than restate it as a conclusion. At issue would be "the connection X has with it" -- how does that show the relation must be symmetrical?

    With regards to how it shows that a relation must be symmetrical, I'd have to think more on this - it seemed to me, prima facie, that X's connection w/Y indicated that Y was, in some regard, relevant to X - but upon fleshing out this practically, I'm not sure that this is the case. When we say relevant, I think a distinction needs to be made between a use of the word in ordinary language, if we mean ' important ' or something similar, then I'd have to agree with you and say that last statement of mine doesn't hold - even in a purely relational sense, I'm unsure I can prove this - and it seems like the awareness of such a relation is enough of a decisive factor to determine symmetrical relevancy or not, especially with conscious beings such as ourselves.
  • Is Philosophy the "Highest" Discourse?
    I want to return to this loose end. Am I right that we can avoid the conclusion in (8) by denying (4), the symmetry of relevance? Apart from it being a good thing not to have to conclude (8), I think there are independent reasons for denying (4). Consider this example: The natural acoustic properties of tones are relevant to Western music theory, but the reverse isn't true. An acoustician can conduct their research in complete independence of what theory may do with it. The only way I see that we can get "relevance" to be symmetric here is to define it as such, so it means something like "possibility of making eventual connections." But that seems much too broad, and misses the interesting questions about why we care about relevance in the first place.
    ↪J


    This is an interesting take, although I'm not sure it denies relevance, or atleast the reflexivity of such. As far as I can tell, all it does is show that an awareness of said relevance isn't necessary to produce a desired result.
    Insofar as Y exists, and X is relevant to Y, Y will always be relevant to X due to the connection X has with it.
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