We are in full agreement. The truth is not even philosophers are ready to handle the negative revolutionary nature of philosophy. We say we're fine with being refuted, but because people are emotionally identifying with their ideas, when it happens they become defensive and emotional. People aren't ready for the reality of the actual thing. What results is that those who are doing the work of philosophy (which is almost always negative) end up getting persecuted by emotion.

So religion, if not animism, goes on the postulational side, right? We say things like, the Greeks explained the behavior of the oceans by having an ocean-god, the behavior of the skies by having a sky-god, volcanoes get a volcano-god, and so on. In the same way that science posits gravity to explain why apples fall to the earth, the Greeks posited Aeolus to explain the winds. Same thing. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's pretty much what I had in mind. Thanks for reminding me of Sellar's. I did read PSIM years ago, which is not to say I understood it all. I think I'll revisit it.

From the first I liked Sellar's distinction between the "space of reasons" and the "space of causes". When we talk about the behavior of people and the "higher" animals, we generally explain it in terms of reasons. These reasons can be understood as being postulated as invisible motivational entities with the overarching invisible motivational entity being the will.

And I can already hear you saying "that's exactly what it is", so please stop and think about how theoretical frameworks work, what is involved a positing a new type of entity, and so on. Maybe you could find another source besides me to explain how science works. Maybe you can come back and tell me I'm all wrong. We've probably already reached the limits of my understanding here, so I'd be happy to stipulate that I have no more to offer by way of further explanation. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I do agree that science posits (and discovers) new types of entities (and phenomena), so I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong. :smile:

Compare my door example to the discovery of Neptune: one involves postulating a person at the moment not visible to you because he is occluded by a solid object; the other involves the prediction of the existence of an as-yet unobserved planet based on mathematics, within a framework that includes gravity as described by Newton's equations. In a sense, the deduction is careful or systematic common sense, just math and inference, but the framework is not common sense, it's Newtonian physics. — Srap Tasmaner

This made me think of a situation where you find a rope hanging through a hole in a door, and when you pull on it it pulls the opposite way. In this thought experiment you have no way of checking who or what is behind the door, but you would postulate that there is a person or a dog or some other animal there pulling on the rope. I would think of the discovery of Neptune along similar lines. Gravitational effects on other known Planets are detected, so another planet, at present invisible is posited to explain the observed effects.

which is not to say I understood it all — Janus

I'm starting to get the hang of it, but holy cow...

the discovery of Neptune — Janus

The key there is that there are equations and the equations describe a force not like anything else in the universe. That's your framework. With rough carefully done observations, you can, as the saying goes, do the math. But observations alone won't get you there. The prediction of a planet is not the big posit here, but gravity.

The prediction of a planet is not the big posit here, but gravity. — Srap Tasmaner

True, but gravity is also felt? Even the so-called "primitives" knew that things fall to earth, and would have been aware of the force acting on their own bodies in the extra effort needed to walk uphill, for example. This is always already an intimately familiar invisible force, no?

Part of the problem is the limited format of things like twitter, youtube and reddit, these formats lend themselves, not to quality, but to misinformation, they literally give an advantage to pathological personality types. — JerseyFlight

Although it can have its criticisms, the new Netflix documentary "the social dilemma" does shed light on how the social media and search engines further dissent by narrowing results to the person's preconceptions.

I agree that the format is not encouraging to thoughtful discussion. And I'd say both aesthetically and behaviourally. The UI is meant for little text. It can be seem by comparing the recent media with older ones, like blogs and even Orkut. And there's a sense of urge, an almost pavlovian conditioning of receiving the next reward. It is very difficult to concentrate on a single demanding matter when you have a plate full of distractions.

That documentary just made this mechanism more evident for me, but I have a longing from some fruitful forums and discussions on some of the old platforms that always made me find these aspects of the new media insufficient.

I doubt this line of thinking is worth the effort, since some of the precursors are lost to time. Suppose some ancient philosopher said, "It is in the nature of most things to fall when released but of some to rise"; is that for or against the idea that we've always known what gravity is? I wouldn't bother unless I were doing history of science.

I was thinking more along the line that we all feel the effect of gravity. We also feel (and see) the effects of the wind and feel the effects of the sun; which in the first case is an invisible entity and in the second is the effect of a visible entity at a distance by invisible means (as, like the sun, is also the case with fire).

I wouldn't say we've always known what gravity is (or even that we really do now), but that we always have (by acquaintance) known its effects.

Really like this thread. Like an oasis of reason and humility in a desert of egoic, prideful and arrogant irrationality.

Will watch the video and respond appropriately soon. I just wanted to share my preliminary reaction to the thread.

we always have (by acquaintance) known its effects. — Janus

Jolly. Sellars's thing is that the postulated entities explain correlations often already known. Which, yeah, of course.

:up:

:cool: