Not everything can be made explicit. — Srap Tasmaner
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.
If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding.
The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm nor the voice that echoes it.
And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither.
For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.
And even as each one of you stands alone in God's knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.
Kahlil Gibran — wonderer1
But I've had a lot of time to think about this sort of stuff on my own. — wonderer1
I wanted to provide a social explanation for reason, but leaving it more or less intact -- and this is the aporia that Lewis ran into, that he couldn't directly link up the convention account of language to the model-theoretic account he was also committed to. — Srap Tasmaner
I don't know what you had in mind regarding a social explanation for reason — wonderer1
I speculate that logic becomes a matter of undeniable intuition as we are grasping the relationships between language about reality and reality itself. — wonderer1
It does seem to be an acquired taste, and some psychologies make acquisition much less likely. Still, there are those times when you can lead someone to a more accurate understanding of their own nature and change the rest of their lives for the better. — wonderer1
I'm really enjoying participating on TPF, and I've already received a warning for bringing up a psychological topic, so perhaps later in a different context. — wonderer1
Being in the habit of telling each other what we know, I tell you something I think I know -- about the mind or reality or some philosophical thing -- but instead of thanking me, you disagree. This is shocking and bewildering behavior on your part. (Surprise.) — Srap Tasmaner
If I do not understand your position at all, that's the worst case for me, because what kind of action (i.e., talking) can I engage in in response? Anything is better than this, so my first step will be to substitute for your position a position I believe I understand and can respond to. (There's a cart before the horse here. Have to fix later.) — Srap Tasmaner
I want to bring your views into alignment with mine, and that's why I make arguments in favor of my belief. But I probably don't really know why I believe what I believe, so I'll have to come up with reasons, and I'll convince myself that if I heard these reasons I would be convinced. But really I have no idea, since I already believe what I'm trying to convince you of; it's almost impossible for me to judge how much support these reasons give my claim. Finding reasons for what I already believe presents almost no challenge at all. — Srap Tasmaner
Denying the premises is really the least of my worries, because we're talking roughly about intuitions -- making this the fourth recent thread I've been in to use this word -- which I'm going to gloss here as beliefs I don't experience as needing justification. If you share my intuitions, we still have to fight about the support relation; if you don't, I can just keep daisy-chaining along until we find something we agree on. This is routine stuff, have to have common ground even to disagree let alone resolve such a disagreement. — Srap Tasmaner
If you start from the idea that some people will just "get it", we're still talking intuitions; as you spell out more and more steps between what your audience accepts and what they don't, this is what logic looks like. The usual view, of course, is that "being logical" makes a connection a candidate for a step in the argument; the thing is, I think we spell things out only to the point where the audience agrees, which means something they accept without reasons -- and here we're talking precisely about the support relation that holds between one belief and another, and the sorts of things I come up with are just things that sound convincing to me as someone who already believes, which means my process for producing reasons is a kind of pretend. — Srap Tasmaner
the support relation really shouldn't be presented as another belief itself, but as a rule or habit for passing from one idea to the other. (I think empiricists and pragmatists would agree on that.) So the issue at each step I have to spell out is not whether you accept a proposed connection, but your behavior -- do you pass from antecedent to consequent as I predict or desire? — Srap Tasmaner
Not only easing the discomfort, but this is also the most profitable policy for reducing surprise. If actual agreement (top priority) doesn't reduce surprise, then we can at least fall back on predictable narratives about conflict. — Isaac
I'm selling the whole package of support relations as a whole — Isaac
That's actually not bad, and less hand-wavy than I thought. — Srap Tasmaner
Yellowstone — wonderer1
"Okay, everyone, you all need to move back now, that's it, move on back now, DON'T GO IN THE WOODS!" Just ever so slightly lost his cool as this grizzly ambled toward us, it was awesome. — Srap Tasmaner
variation in the constellations of cognitive strengths and weaknesses people have — wonderer1
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
thread where I'm pissing on the law of non-contradiction: — Srap Tasmaner
There's still something a little off though. — Srap Tasmaner
now my trust in the modeling department has weakened, so by showing you their report, I'm also checking up on them, testing them. "Look, you seem to know something about this P business. Here's what my boys are telling me. Is this any good? Did they miss the boat here?" — Srap Tasmaner
Through these first few exchanges, there's been no sign of the need to bring your views into alignment with mine, only a brief flirtation with bringing mine into alignment with yours. — Srap Tasmaner
There might be something else going on here though. When I recognize that you had a genuinely different view of what I assume is the same body of evidence, that piques the curiosity of the modeling team. "How did he come up with that?" There might be a bad algorithm there worth knowing about and avoiding, or there might be an interesting inference technique there we didn't know about, and even if it doesn't change our view in this case we're always on the lookout for new inference tech. So there's going to be a strong need to know why you had a thought that I didn't. Oh, and of course this plays directly into my need to model you better! My model of you was inaccurate; I need to update it with a model of the crappy inference algorithm you're using, in case I talk to you again. — Srap Tasmaner
some hand-wavy thing about cooperation in the general project of all of us staying alive. — Srap Tasmaner
Have a great trip! We'll be here when you get back. — Srap Tasmaner
Absolutely. The thing about psychological theories is that everyone has them, you have to have, otherwise your strategies when interacting with others are random. We don't just throw darts blindfold when deciding how to respond, we have a theory about what our actions/speech is going to do, how it's going to work. That's a psychological theory. — Isaac
If psychology fails, it is its methodology that's at fault, not it's objectives. — Isaac
it seems worth pointing out that everyone has one, but some are based on looking into the evidence and some aren't. — wonderer1
We are fantastically complex creatures though, so of course progress takes time. — wonderer1
Speculative philosophy of history, then, stems from the impulse to make sense of history, to find meaning in it, or at least some intelligible pattern. And it should not surprise us that at the heart of this impulse is a desire to predict the future (and in many cases to shape it). By any standards, then, this branch of philosophy of history is audacious, and there is a sense in which the term ‘speculative’ is not only appropriate but also carries derogatory implications for those historians and others who insist on a solely empirical approach to the past, i.e., on ‘sticking to the facts’...
To others, however, it is a worthwhile undertaking because it is so natural to a reflective being. Just as at times one gets the urge to ‘make sense’ of one’s own life, either out of simple curiosity about its ‘meaning’, or through suffering a particularly turbulent phase, or because weighty decisions about one’s future are looming, so some are drawn to reflect, not on themselves, but on the history of their species – mankind.
Whether speculative philosophy of history is worthwhile or, instead, a fundamentally flawed exercise, it is surely an understandable venture.Firstly, attempts to discover a theory or ‘philosophy’ of history are intrinsically interesting because they try to make sense of the overall flow of history – even in some cases to give it meaning.And there is a sense in which to do particularly the latter is to offer answers to the question, ‘what is the point of life?’ (not yours or mine, but human life in general.)
The importance of such a question is either self-explanatory or nil, depending on an individual’s assumptions.Some see it as the ultimate question to be answered, whereas others see it as symptomatic of an arrogant anthropomorphism which demands that ‘life, the universe, and all that’ be reduced to the petty model of merely human dimensions, where intention and reason are seen as the governing principles.But that individuals differ in this way is exactly the point, in the sense that speculative philosophy of history raises the issue directly into the light of argument, allowing us to examine our initial assumptions regarding the value or futility of such ‘ultimate’ questions.
For example, one might ask sceptics whether they at least accept the notion that, on the whole, ‘history has delivered’ progress in the arts, sciences, economics, government, and quality of life. If the answer is "yes," how do they account for it? Is it chance (thus offering no guarantees for the future)? Or if there is a reason for it, what is this ‘reason’ which is ‘going on in history’?
Similarly, if the sceptics answer ‘no’, then why not? Again, is the answer chance? Or is there some ‘mechanism’ underlying the course of history which prevents overall continuous progress? If so, what is it, and can it be defeated?
There is an argument to be made that focusing on arguments in isolation is akin to putting all your effort into finding out the best way to walk and making the most accurate maps, while completely ignoring the question of where you are walking from or to and why. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Saying these turns are "necessary," might be a bridge too far, but they also aren't wholly contingent as in the natural selection type theory of how knowledge progresses. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Great point! Unfortunately in the school and even in the university science and especially math isn’t taught like this: how not only the mathematician/scientist came to the conclusion, but how the scientific community accepted the result. There simply isn’t the time. Hence you are taught the theory, the proof, the conclusions. And that’s it, then forward. Not much if anything on how it was done, what were the objections, possible earlier errors etc.I've often wished math and science were taught with more of an eye to history. — Srap Tasmaner
Yes. And ever changing. If psychology is affected by culture (and I'm certain it is) then what was true yesterday in psychology might not be true today. We're playing catch up. — Isaac
-- but for some reason even you hedge here and don't advocate it --
(2) Some people hear "the Enlightenment" and think, "Greatest wrong turn in history, still sorting out the mess it made," and some people think "Finally! That's when we got on the right path, the only trouble is staying on it."
@Isaac's suggestion is, I believe, that there is no 'objective' context to recover to understand the Enlightenment; however you describe that context, before and after, is going to be shaped and colored by the story you're telling about it.
But the calculus changes here if you recognize that all you have the option of doing is comparing stories (and what they present as evidence for themselves) to each other; it's obvious with history, but true everywhere, that you don't have the option of judging a story by comparing it to what it's about, 'reality' or 'what really happened'. Comparing stories to each other might give some hope of 'triangulating' the truth, until you remember that this triangulating process is also going to be shaped and colored by narrative commitments, just like the material we're trying to judge.
That said, I don't think this leaves us unable to analyze intellectual history at all. We can observe that Renaissance thinkers "rediscovered," classical culture in an important way. We can spot major swings in US culture when comparing the 1950s and 1960s and be quite confident in describing real differences in trends. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I also think people like historical narratives of how science, math, etc. develop because we are innately geared towards remembering people, conflicts between people, social interactions, etc. as a social species. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.