As I see it, both PoMo and AP are essentially reductionist and never escape that monism - whether they fetishise the monism of the one or the many. — apokrisis

I don't know if you include Hegel in PoMo, but Braver's charting of the journey of 'anti-realism' from Kant to Hegel to Heidegger to Derrida features holism prominently. I can't help but think you are politicizing PoMo, and no doubt some of these thinkers have been applied to politics. To me the big theme that starts with Kant is mediation in terms of an impersonal concept scheme. This 'lens' or 'mirror' metaphor evolves from thinker to thinker. For Kant it was fixed and ahistorical. For the rest, not. In Saussure, every language user has an (imperfect) copy of the language system in his brain. For Feuerbach, thinking is not a function of the individual. I think in terms of a distributed, self-updating operating system...

Interesting discussion so far.

Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds. — Richard Feynman

:chin:

Interesting discussion so far.
Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
— Richard Feynman — 180 Proof

Nice vid.

Maybe scientists don't care, but I want insight on whether to trust or not trust the emission from this or that institution. Also don't like to just settle for the drift of concepts (such as scientists is whatever people called scientists are doing just now.) A cynic might say that we can't help being seduced by technology that gives us what we want. Perhaps that's mostly correct. A certain kind of pragmatist might take technology as the essence of science/knowledge. Its objectivity would just be the fact that it works independently of its users' trust in it, while god-talk and placebo pills would be something else.

Anyway, I'd love to get your input on this thread...

I don't know if you include Hegel in PoMo, but Braver's charting of the journey of 'anti-realism' from Kant to Hegel to Heidegger to Derrida features holism prominently. — jas0n

Obviously I like that Hegel tried to take a dialectical approach and Kant was also a systems thinker. And there is the Naturphilosphie lineage, with guys like Schelling. But if anti-realism is just another word for idealism, then it’s not solving any problems.

My own line would be Anaximander => Aristotle => Peirce. And I wouldn’t feel as if I was missing much just sticking to those three.

In Saussure, every language user has an (imperfect) copy of the language system in his brain. For Feuerbach, thinking is not a function of the individual. I think in terms of a distributed, self-updating operating system — jas0n

How language structures thought is complicated. A subject for some other day.

For him , in the beginning there was the mark , trace , gramme, differance ( these terms are interchangeable).
They refer to an identity , subject or ipseity divided within itself in the very act of returning back to itself to repeat itself. Put differently, in order to constitute itself , the ‘I’ must borrow from what is other than itself. In this way there is at once a formal, transcendental , structural aspect to the mark ( that a meaning is being carried forward by being repeated or reflected back to itself) and an empirical, genetic aspect( in the very act of repeating itself or turning back around to glimpse itself it is exposed to alterity). This origin is not a vagueness or an indeterminacy but an undecidability . The mark is undecidable because there is no question of choosing between presence and absence, genesis and structure, form and content , the ideal and the empirical. Both are indissociable in a single mark. This is the complexity of the origin, its hinged articulation. — Joshs

This reads like utter gibberish. Can you give an explanation with a concrete example.

Start with the mark I just made by stabbing the spatulate tip of a stick into a wax tablet. What next?

Derrida writes — Joshs

I thought it couldn’t get worse and it did.

Really. Please try and put the essential idea into an intelligible form with concrete examples.

My own line would be Anaximander => Aristotle => Peirce. And I wouldn’t feel as if I was missing much just sticking to those three. — apokrisis

Well I'm not really trying to talk you in to checking them out. I just think Braver found a nice way to string them all together. They're all talking about the tribal mind, you might say. And this tribal mind 'is' the intelligible structure of the world in some sense (like a discrete sign system imposed on an otherwise undifferentiated continuum.) I do plan on reading more Peirce.

This passage from Ari is quoted in Of Grammatology.

Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.

Loaded with ore. First we have pure-concept => speech => writing. We have the 'same mental experience' with suggests Kant, especially w/ the last part. Our experiences are 'images' of some other kind of thing.

I've only really looked at Ari's ethics and poetics. Liked the ethics, can't remember the poetics it's been so long.

But signs have their meaning only differentially (in relation to other signs), and the entire context/system drifts, so that the 'same' salute or secret handshake is not quite the same, anymore than the 'same' knight on a chessboard maintains some constant 'meaning' as the game advances. — jas0n

Kind of , except that I’d say there no ‘entire context’ for Derrida. That’s a structuralist notion, the idea of a centered structure, or distributed operating system, a dance of elements a camera could
capture as some overarching logic. Context for Derrida begins and ends with the singular mark. The drift originates with time, not interpersonal language , from one element to the next to the next. What differentiates Derrida’s thinking of sign from authors like Foucault is not the differential relation between signs , it’s the spilt within the sign. The sign is already an in-between, a transit , even before it’s relation to other signs.

Let’s translate this into something more concrete. Using your metaphor of the dance or a distributed system, how would we parse the ‘dance’ that takes place on this philosophy forum among its participants, or just between you and me in the present discussion? Is it a dialogical ping-pong game, with your words affecting , shaping and changing my experience as I read them and my response doing the same for you? Is there an overall third-person ( or perhaps second person) logic that can be employed to depict the organizational dynamics of this I-thou system , or the larger system that includes all participants in a thread?

Foucault would say yes, Derrida would say no. He and Heidegger wouldnt deny that we can point to cultural
hegemonies and world-views, but they wouldn’t analyze these in such a way that they would take the overarching group dynamic as primary or even complementary to the personalistic perspective.

Let’s translate this into something more concrete. — Joshs

Yes please.

how would we parse the ‘dance’ that takes place on this philosophy forum among its participants, or just between you and me in the present discussion? — Joshs

Curious that you would answer me in this roundabout fashion.

Is there an overall third-person ( or perhaps second person) logic that can be employed to depict the organizational dynamics of this I-thou system , or the larger system that includes all participants in a thread? — Joshs

Well my presence in this particular dynamic is now most marked by its absence. And I must make sense of that by seeking some larger point of view - a judgement about whether this a deliberate act, even a provocation, or the opposite, some benign and contingent event. You simply forgot/didn’t read/meant to reply separately.

So I see nothing but a web of organisation dynamics that has the usual social complexity of any game. PF has some kind of rules of conduct, some kind of shared spirit and mission, to which all its participants would contribute in terms of their own contingencies of personality, experience and habit.

Even on PF, which is as about as informally structured in terms of “how to productively behave” as it gets, some larger pattern of engagement emerges over time. And the expectations and agendas of participants are reciprocally shaped by that.

Foucault would say yes, Derrida would say no. He and Heidegger wouldnt deny that we can point to cultural
hegemonies and world-views, but they wouldn’t analyze these in such a way that they would take the overarching group dynamic as primary or even complementary to the personalistic perspective. — Joshs

So does that mean the personal is always primary, and also never complementary, to the public? Is that the thesis you wish to defend?

Seems dead in the water to me. But I await the supporting evidence. Along with a stab at translating the difference between Derrida’s binary hinge and Peirce’s triadic switch.

The Wiki entry on “trace” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trace_(deconstruction) - shows that a plain English account of Derrida’s project is perfectly possible.

As an analysis of how language functions, it is perfectly familiar. But as a diagnosis of the human condition it is wilfully perverse.

The structure of language is what makes us human. It is the species defining characteristic. So to deconstruct that structure as a way to reach some more authentic - because unconstrained - state is bonkers.

The Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment taken to its next level. Irrationally opposed to rationality, and in the process, making the case for rationality ever stronger.

Curious that you would answer me in this roundabout fashion. — apokrisis

Didn’t mean to ignore you. Was dreading the task of simplifying Derrida’s verbiage.

I see nothing but a web of organisation dynamics that has the usual social complexity of any game. PF has some kind of rules of conduct, some kind of shared spirit and mission, to which all its participants would contribute in terms of their own contingencies of personality, experience and habit.

Even on PF, which is as about as informally structured in terms of “how to productively behave” as it gets, some larger pattern of engagement emerges over time. And the expectations and agendas of participants are reciprocally shaped by that. — apokrisis

But it seems to me that the shared agreed on rules and shared spirit only really exists as it is animated and redefined each actual engagement at each moment of time by individual participants. It is not that the interchange that is now taking place is constrained by norms that it is placed inside of, but rather my overall sense of the identity of PF is reshaped as the current interchange unfolds. What the forum stands for may change for me in a good way or a bad way, making me more or less enthusiastic about wanting to continue participating, or may inspire me to change my strategies of argumentation, or become more or less intense or serious. I may become more or less
focused on politically or empirically or spiritually oriented topics on here due to the unfolding interchanges. Other participants, meanwhile, are forming their own changing attitudes and interests. Is there some meta-level or vantage from which to characterize how the site ‘as a whole’ changes along with each participant’s changing experience of it , one that wouldn't simply be one more subjective perspective?

But it seems to me that the shared agreed on rules and shared spirit only really exists as it is animated and redefined each actual engagement at each moment of time by individual participants. — Joshs

That is presumed by the structuralist metaphysics here. Nothing "exists" except as a persistent and self-sustaining dynamical balance. An autopoietic system. A process. A Peircean Thirdness of habit.

I've said it a thousand times. It is totally part of the metaphysics of structure that the whole shapes the parts. And the parts in turn - reciprocally, in complementary causal fashion - construct the whole.

So the internet carves out some space - the enclosure that has the dialogic structure of a discussion board. We all enter knowing what kind of thing to do. Say something ... that gets a response. Sparks up some chain of back and forth that keeps going until it peters out.

This internet space even has a name - a proud boast. It is "The Philosophy Forum". Not even merely "a" philosophy forum. Standards have been set. This is philosophy central ... for all comers.

And then folk arrive, attracted to the free (or at least, minimally regulated) possibilities for personal expression that such a space affords. Havoc ensues. Any kind of randomness gets expressed. But also then chaos exerts its own constraints. Patterns emerge.

If I enter passionate about Nietzsche, and you enter passionate about what you make for your lunch and the chooks in your garden, then some kind of thermalising equilibrium results. For both of you to persist in interaction within the one space, you have to make some kind of connection that is some balance of these two interests. At the very least, you have to be able to fake a tolerance for Nietzsche-speak and chook-speech while each takes turns. But also there may be some degree of interest in how the two topic intersect as some Venn diagram.

This is just like injecting a particularly hot or cold particle into a vessel of particles at some common equilibrium state of temperature and pressure. After a few dozen bounces of the other particles - which have some characteristic bell curve distribution of momentums states - the hot particle would have cooled towards the average, the cold particle heated up to the same general statistical distribution.

So even as whacky and "human" an example as this discussion board can be concretely reduced to the principles of thermodynamics - thermodynamics being based on the metaphysics of self-organising emergence or dynamical balance.

It is the same irreducible triadicity of Thirdness - of global constraint shaping local degrees of freedom, and those local degrees of freedom (re)constructing that global state of constrain - all the way down to the ground. The same metaphysical model accounts for existence as persistence, the top-down stabilisation of bottom-up contingency, whether we are talking of social systems or fundamental particles.

OK. Passionate feelings expressed for the 1001th time. :grin:

What the forum stands for may change for me in a good way or a bad way, making me more or less enthusiastic about wanting to continue participating, or may inspire me to change my strategies of argumentation, or become more or less intense or serious. I may become more or less focused on politically or empirically or spiritually oriented topics on here due to the unfolding interchanges. Other participants, meanwhile, are forming their own changing attitudes and interests. — Joshs

Exactly. We agree on the self-organising dynamic. So let's get back to the question of why Derrida's deconstruction is a project worth entertaining.

Is there some meta-level or vantage from which to characterize how the site ‘as a whole’ changes along with each participant’s changing experience of it , one that wouldn't simply be one more subjective perspective? — Joshs

If you reduce all systems to a thermodynamic basis, that then gives you some simple metrics. We could seek the equivalent of the forum's temperature and pressure. We could look for whatever macro-quality labels the Gaussian average of its microstates. Or given this is the internet and we are also dealing with a space that is only weakly closed, we might have some further discussion about whether we ought to apply a more powerlaw or scalefree analysis to the phenomenon in question.

So yes, it is pretty easy to imagine how to start quantifying the forum's structure - its fabric of interaction - in a model theoretic way. The objective part of the exercise is what any competent social scientist ought to be able to do.

The question that is subjective would be "why bother?". That is, who cares? And what isn't already so obvious that it needs a more exact mathematical description?

I mean why are we all still here - given a discussion board is a crude mechanism for enforcing the aggressive back and forth of the normal academic machine?

Being an academic, being an intellectual, means operating the impersonal dichotomising device of dialogic argument. Lumping and splitting. Finding whatever counts as the "other" view that you can most disagree with - and thus defining your own position as the only truly agreeable one.

The whole set-up is meant to enforce the strongest kind of personal disagreements so that we can all then arrive at the safe harbour of our own certitude. By accident, we find we arrive at some point where differences and no longer be found. And so then further interaction becomes dull. We drift away.

Of course this commitment to eternal disagreement is very odd behaviour for an essentially communal creature like the average human. Folk stumble into PF thinking it should be a happy and agreeable party. You need to have that stern academic training to think precisely the opposite.

So what ought to be the right metric that would make PF the kind of place you would most desire? I'm sure you have some vague idea of what would "make PF great again". And it could be more a low conflict place - a place of education where students learn how to accept given wisdom. Or it could be a more high conflict place - more like the actual bleeding edge of intellectual research. Or maybe you want more human contact, more talk about hobbies and friends.

Again, it is no problem that each of us may have a meta-goal for the forum - something that would describe its Goldilocks ideal state. The range of those meta-goals can then be thermalised to define that equilibrium state (really, such wisdom in a fairy tale!).

There is already the standard academic dichotomy to pluck out of the air - the spectrum spanned by the opposing poles of teaching and researching. That would be appropriate to the bold "this is a philosophical academy" banner place above the clubhouse door. The place is also just an internet clubhouse, so you would expect a lounge and chill out zone for those not that much interested in being taught, or doing research.

Does that capture meta-level vantage point view of what animates PF - the general structure that sets up some persistence of interaction?

And did Peirce or Derrida say it better!!??!! That is the burning issue, the challenge you seemed to want to take on. :up:

Pragmatism. What use is knowledge that ain't useful. — apokrisis

A mere tautology?

Even poetry is supposed to be useful according to its promoters. — apokrisis

Assuming this is correct, do you think their notion of 'use' is equivalent to yours? Is personal transformation or even mere pleasure a use in your book?

If the question was whether knowledge always has to be useful, then you would want to deconstruct the perfectly clear sense of the question by either disputing the definition of knowledge, and/or of use?

Seems legit. :up:

If the question was whether knowledge always has to be useful, then you would want to deconstruct the perfectly clear sense of the question by either disputing the definition of knowledge, and/or of use? — apokrisis

Not exactly. Since saying that knowledge, to be of any use, must be useful, is not really saying anything, but seems to indicate that you think knowledge must, or should, be useful, I sought an answer as to whether you considered personal transformation or pleasure to be uses or, if you like, to be useful.

Since saying that knowledge, to be of any use, must be useful, is not really saying anything, — Janus

But that is not what was said.

I said: One metaphysics to rule them all!

Jason said: Why? Is that level of metaphysical economy basic for some reason.

I replied: Pragmatism. What use is knowledge that ain't useful? Even poetry is supposed to be useful according to its promoters.

So here, the communal goal is defined as useful knowledge. And pragmatism is given as Peirce's univocal totalising answer that both dishes that up as epistemology, and also as a convincing ontology.

So rather than a tautology, it is a claim of maximal self-consistency. Metaphysics has its central dichotomy - epistemology and ontology. Peircean Pragmatism makes the two a mirror image, thus eliminating all other -isms.

And this shows in that even poetry is meant to be culturally instructive.

I mean, they even teach it in school. And no education authority feels it is there to spend good tax payer funds so you can sit in class pleasuring yourself.

The fact that you will reply that poetry is instead the radical device you chose to disrupt such an institutionalised notion of "self improvement", only goes to show how useful poetry might be in every sense. You too could be John Cooper Clarke speaking truth to power, using words to smash the system.

The fact that utility might be a two-way street is already the central feature built into my systems approach, as I now repeat for the 1002nd time.

The Establishment wants to mould you with its carefully chosen curriculum examples of poetry. It dishes up the poetry that wanted to smash the system of its own fondly remembered youth.

If you were a wild young romantic like me - and you, and Jason, and any kid with any balls at all - you would have dramatically refused to read a single set book, play or poem at school, while also showing them by still getting one of the best English marks in the country and nursing the ambition of shaking things down to the ground with your own artistic revolt.

I mean I was so proud of my art that I spent whole maths lessons carving and inking a design that covered the full desktop. My triumph was complete when I saw it sitting outside the woodwork class as some chore to be given a third former with a sander.

So sure knowledge is useful. Knowledge is power. And society is an organism that flourishes to the degree it is a win-win of top-down wisdom shaping bottom-up free creativity.

And that essential dynamic is something to be expressed over all scales of human organisation. Social democracies hope to strike a balance between a general state education - that includes poetry - and also a tolerance for individuals acting up in ways that seem anti-social, but in fact are the making of some of its most productive and creative citizens.

There is also nothing against an individual themselves combining both poles of the dynamic - being both wise and creative, habitual and exploratory, rooted in the past and focused on the future .... keep adding your own slogans ...

So yes. One metaphysics to rule them all! Why the hell not? It certainly looks to always work, never fail.

Whereas pluralism? Not so much.

Context for Derrida begins and ends with the singular mark. — Joshs

Paradoxical click bait, which is not to say that such gnomic absurdities can't be transformed dialectically into either commonplaces or slight advances on the source material. This kind of rhetorical onanism is why people hate Derrida and company.

The drift originates with time, not interpersonal language , from one element to the next to the next. — Joshs

Ah yes. This is our favorite point of disagreement. As I see it, you demand on implosion. Everything is self, self, self...while I insist that bodies in the same world are more or less foundational.

Is there an overall third-person ( or perhaps second person) logic that can be employed to depict the organizational dynamics of this I-thou system , or the larger system that includes all participants in a thread? — Joshs

There's just lots of bodies talking/typing, projecting themselves as candidates for partial assimilation. No one can grasp all perspectives or even a fraction of human knowledge, but philosophers battle against this finitude by focusing on the big picture, grand narratives, the master discourse. A continuation of theology by other means...

Foucault would say yes, Derrida would say no. He and Heidegger wouldnt deny that we can point to cultural
hegemonies and world-views, but they wouldn’t analyze these in such a way that they would take the overarching group dynamic as primary or even complementary to the personalistic perspective. — Joshs

True or false or too ambiguous to decide, I can't help but read this as more insistence on the preciousness of the particular personality. I've granted that we are all snowflakes, that we can live alone in the woods and write manifestoes. But he we are trying to hammer out a consensus, impose 'ourselves' (fused inheritance) on that larger dynamic. We are showing off our dance moves, as if compelled. Movement is toward the other, the tribe.

while I insist that bodies in the same world are more or less foundational. — jas0n

Yep. In case you hadn't seen it, this is Peirce's theory of truth as the limit of communal inquiry.

The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth.

And while I am at it, the Pragmatic Maxim:

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

And in regards to Derrida:

The very first lesson that we have a right to demand that logic shall teach us is, how to make our ideas clear; and a most important one it is, depreciated only by minds who stand in need of it.

And in advance of Popper:

“…out of a contrite fallibilism, combined with a high faith in the reality of knowledge, and an intense desire to find things out, all my philosophy has always seemed to me to grow.

In fact this whole set of lecture notes on Peirce and his grave misrepresentation by the likes of Rorty and Russell makes a damn fine response to the concerns raised in the OP.

Catherine Legg is great.

Yep. In case you hadn't seen it, this is Peirce's theory of truth as the limit of communal inquiry. — apokrisis

Ah yes, I was influenced by that too. Our thinking seems to be directed toward an ideal community (a better version of the current one.) The very notions of rationality and truth 'demand' or 'imply' a community in the same world. What can it mean to be wrong or irrational if I'm alone ? And what is meaning itself supposed to mean if I'm alone?

In fact this whole set of lecture notes on Peirce and his grave misrepresentation by the likes of Rorty and Russell makes a damn fine response to the concerns raised in the OP. — apokrisis

I'll check it out. Nice final quote too.

While I'm on the sins of Pomo, and the virtues of Peirce and Vygotsky, the Continentalists have an uncanny knack of picking the wrong guy.

Just as they went for Saussure over Peirce for their general semiotics, they went for Bakhtin over Vygotsky for their particular model of how speech is the tool that structures thought.

Bakhtin pushed the open-endness of personal dialogue, Vygotsky was about the social closure of communal habits of thought.

So Saussure and Bakhtin weren't wrong about the half of the elephant they were describing, but they failed to give the full holistic account like Peirce and Vygotsky.

But then as a I said earlier, even until the 1990s, you really had to dig to discover the writings of Peirce and Vygotsky. The manuscripts were lost in the back of a Harvard library, or were untranslated Soviet era books that had already fallen foul of Stalinist politics.

Samizdat like Vygotsky's attack on Piaget that had to be dragged out of the bowels of the British Library, arriving on the clanking trolley three days later.

Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds. — Richard Feynman

:lol:

And what is meaning itself supposed to mean if I'm alone? — jas0n

Yep. Everyone wants to be an influencer. TikTok is truly the crucible for the development of your "more ideal community of tomorrow". :rofl:

The age of rationality is ending, the age of irrationality and emotional incontinence is at hand.

And PoMo always played that same influencer card in French society after all. Rebels without a clue ... but looking Parisian cool in a craggy old geezer way as they baffled a nation's TV audience on late night black and white.

Nothing changes, even as everything changes.

Yep. Everyone wants to be an influencer. TikTok is truly the crucible for the development of your "more ideal community of tomorrow". — apokrisis

Exhibitionism. It seems like one of the ingredients even in the scientist/philosopher. TikTok has a mystical subculture, conspiracy theory subculture, and so on.They understand themselves to be truth-seeking and truth-sharing. What do we make of that? A universal urge to weave myth/science ?

The age of rationality is ending, the age of irrationality and emotional incontinence is at hand. — apokrisis

Maybe. But I remember that folks were even afraid of pragmatism once. McLuhan's World city is new. The algorithms keeping us in bubbles is new. As far as Pomo goes, it has to be simplified to the usual vague rebellion in order to affect anyone outside a tiny bubble. Nietzsche is as radical as any of them and readable (which does not mean easy to understand, any more than the later Witt is.)

It's probably the stupidities in political extremes that are the most threatening.

Is there some meta-level or vantage from which to characterize how the site ‘as a whole’ changes along with each participant’s changing experience of it , one that wouldn't simply be one more subjective perspective? — Joshs

The 'self-knowledge' of the 'distributed operating system' is also distributed. The 'subject' with 'experience' is a body plugged into a 'dance' with other bodies using language and technology. The 'minds' of these subject/bodies are themselves bundles of memes and habits (another level of distributed operating systems?). 'Perspective' is parasitic on the singularity of the body. It's only contingently true that each body 'plays' just one handle here. It'd maybe be better to have at least two, and to methodically exercise differing approaches with each. As 'a' philosopher, I feel like a team of explorers. But folks are confused if you switch gears/masks to quickly. Folks are maybe too attached also when forced to play a single mask.

The website echoes the culture at large in assigning one name, one locus of address and responsibility, to some projected ghost that lives in each body. Is the notion of perspective not dependent on the everyday experience of eyes aimed at the world from different positions in space?

Sometimes I think you are willing to dissolve the subject. Other times you seem to want to make it foundational.

The age of rationality is ending, the age of irrationality and emotional incontinence is at hand. — apokrisis

Do you think that's a good thing? You know, evolutionarily...?

They understand themselves to be truth-seeking and truth-sharing. What do we make of that? A universal urge to weave myth/science ? — jas0n

Isn’t it a case of the science answer becoming too complex and sounding much more like nonsense than the “facts” one can make up to justify one’s own theories. Plus the clear understanding that knowledge is power and so conspiracy theories are the only way for society’s powerless to reclaim power? To delegitimise the technocratic elite is to legitimate Trumpian rule by meme.

Do you think that's a good thing? You know, evolutionarily...? — Agent Smith

Hell no. It’s game over for a species that depends on toilets that flush, energy, food and lighting at the click of a button or app.

Isn’t it a case of the science answer becoming too complex and sounding much more like nonsense than the “facts” one can make up to justify one’s own theories. — apokrisis

:up:
Folks hate math and love interpersonal drama. As you know, some people like the weird stuff about QM woven into their new religion of virtuous aliens and channeling and so on.

One of my big interests in philosophy/psychology has always been the stories individuals tell themselves to navigate the lifeworld. I think of a practical base (don't play in traffic, pay your rent) on which an elaborate often-unpractical (relatively optional) self myth is built (which includes the self heroically in a world myth, naturally.) The dominant constraints on this self-myth are social. Obsessing over fashion or the faddish moral vocab of the day, at the cost of understanding even basic physics, might be optimal for a young person trying to climb up the social ladder, get money, mate, and feed babies. This works as long as a specialized class invents and runs the machines...and suffers/articulates/navigates the ever-present constraints of nature (like the second law, working away, mostly ignored.)

My own line would be Anaximander => Aristotle => Peirce. And I wouldn’t feel as if I was missing much just sticking to those three. — apokrisis

Yeah, your well-reasoned positions, apok, seem very consistent with this "line" (genealogy). :cool:

Likewise, I'm confident with these tres hombres Epicurus => Sextus Empiricus => Spinoza.