Then making coffee is also philosophy. — Frederick KOH
Philosophy only in the sense of what's left after you take out the formal and empirical parts of your area of inquiry. Or to borrow from another phrase, "discipline of the gaps". — Frederick KOH
all human activities are practiced philosophically insofar as human worldviews, involving ethical, aesthetic and metaphysical assumptions, however tacit they may be, are always involved. — John
The difference is that you cannot "take out the formal and empirical parts of your enquiry" except in abstracto. And it is the in concreto that really matters. — John
There is no self-sufficient and uninterpreted use of the formalism of quantum theory that can be of any use in making predictions of empirical observations. — Pierre-Normand
Why limit your assertion to formalisms and quantum theory?
Why would your assertion not apply as well to plain prose in a less mathematical endeavor?
In fact why would it not apply to doing washing machine settings based on what the manual says? — Frederick KOH
The indispensability of human interpretation in the cognitive apprehension of empirical objets turns out to apply across the board, — Pierre-Normand
As long as we don't call all of it (the interpretation) "philosophy", which was my original point. — Frederick KOH
It sounds like you've forgotten that the logos is about reducing itself to the the truth, not being the truth. It's necessary for a representation of truth to do this, otherwise it contains non of that which is seeks to explain.The point is there is no reduction, no (supposedly) irreducible primary to which everything is reduced.
Truths are beyond a singular primary. Its objectivity is not formed by squishing everything into it, but rather by all sorts of different truths expressing it.
Rather, there are many irreducible primaries, sometimes in conflict, all at once-- it's not an irreducible primary that counts for everything, but merely a truth we might talk about. It's not an all encompassing viewpoint at all. There are viewpoints to which there is no truth at all. There are viewpoints where everything is reduced to an idea. — TheWillowOfDarkness
Scientist sometimes tend to be dogmatic and philistine, especially when they are faithful to the religions of scientism and reductionism. — Pierre-Normand
In that case, when they specialize in the science of hammers, they are happy to proclaim that the whole world is made up of nails and nothing else. — Pierre-Normand
When those research programs become "degenerative" (Imre Lakatos), then those scientists often are happy to ignore more productive areas of research, and they keep on hammering screws with a sledgehammer. — Pierre-Normand
I am very sure ornithologists agree with chemists and physicists about what birds are made out of. — Frederick KOH
So, this allegedly broad agreement among different sorts of scientists, regarding ultimate material composition, would be agreement about very little that is of significance to the understanding of the empirical world (unless one is a rather naive and uncritical reductionist). — Pierre-Normand
The last time things became degenerative, physicists rushed to the new paradigm. — Frederick KOH
What was this broad agreement (if there was one) like in 1000AD (or 1000CE if you like)?
Significance indeed. — Frederick KOH
access to uninterpreted empirical reality is impossible. — Pierre-Normand
I think where postmodernism fails is that it takes this limitation to be a warrant for a kind of indiscriminate relativism, that as there are no absolutes, in the traditional sense, and as science is a matter of falliballistic hypotheses, then all manner of truths are 'in the eye of the beholder', so to speak. — Wayfarer
Oddly enough, in the arts, my view has always been that modernism did the opposite to your claim; rather, it problematized 'truth'. If you take 'The waste land', Eliot presented a diverse range of voices with no clear overarching 'truth' at all (although later he became a Christian). If you take the novel, Woolf or Joyce or Dos Passos presented us with a plurality of subjective voices as against the Victorian era novel where you always knew what the author would think. If you take painting and sculpture, the Impressionists, Picasso and the Cubists inaugurated devastating assaults on old ways of truth-telling. Take 'The rites of Spring' and Schoenberg...where is the sanctuary of truth in all this?
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