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smacksim
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Deputy Chairman of the Council of Lords of Gaia
Feb 2004
time: 00:37
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O.k., I don't belong in this thread. I have no pretention of belonging in this thread, but I'm going to post anyways.
First off, this is the worst thread I've EVER read in any forum. Those of you who know what you are talking about should be ashamed. You ignore questions for the most part, and then prattle back and forth on various levels trying to determine who's read HUME, and who's not read very much. I'm embarrassed to be among you. Why doesn't someone present a cogent and new idea here?
Now granted, it's a dumb off topic forum anyways, and a lot of people come here just to relax and post their stresses. But some of you keep coming back to this thread. Now, it is spanking time for you. (cheers erupt over the skies of Apolyton 'The Spankings, the Spankings!' reminiscent of Monty Python's TQFTHG 'The oral sex' scenes.)
First up, Agathon:
I learned a lot from your posts. Well, some of them. I have a mild interest in studying philosophy again, although I had a housmate who developed schizophrenia after too much Kant...really. And that was a long time ago. Anyways, take this with a Gaian tonic, like I do:
quote:
Originally posted by Agathon
Donald Davidson proved that paradigms were a load of hooey in his paper On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.
Next question. |
And I thought I was pompouspompous . No, not me. Random Url. Anyways, here is a man in serious need of a spanking, or a drink. Which will it be?
Ok, got the bottle, but still drinking the poison from the apple:
quote:
Originally posted by Agathon
God you physicists talk a load of **** that doesn't even add up to a smidgum of knowledge.
Besides, you all smell and can't get any girls.  |
I'm no philosopher. Thank the gods. Or, as my Italian stonemason master used to say 'What are you some kind of philosopher, beer-drinker?' From a commercial I think. But let me tell you that the common person will be quite able to tell you what they know and don't know. And that includes things from physics, and they are right enough to be called knowledge. If ultimate knowledge proves them wrong, so be it, but practical knowledge accomplishes practical things, as anyone who's actually worked or built something could tell you. This is a spankable comment.
Oh no, a bad one:
quote:
Originally posted by Agathon
But it isn't knowledge. Warranted belief perhaps, but not knowledge. Besides, it will all be thought foolish nonsense in a couple of hundred years, if history is any guide. {...}
People in year one survey courses yes, but not the real thing. |
Look pal, I told you. No matter what you define knowledge to be, it has a working definition that makes this remark seem rather foolish. You could have come up with such a better retort. I know you could have. Only a very rarified and pasty physicist would say that something wasn't worth studying because it wouldn't provide (ring the God bells now) knowledge in the ultimate sense. Philosophy isn't even an exception to your argument, by the way. So this just sounds horrible from one who otherwise seems to have good taste (liked the desktop pic btw).
Oh no, a big no no: Actually I'm not even going to quote it. None of it is quotable. Basically you defend your position that paradigms don't exist and conceptual frameworks don't exist. While I do understand this concept, and even agree with it in theory, there is no reason not to go on discussing paradigms or conceptual frameworks because these things explain a visceral human sense of experience , in that coming to a new sense of reality feels new and different, and is defined by different rules. Sure, these are still the subset of all rules, but math like that isn't helpful to a discussion of paradigms internally. And if you are to make this argument, why don't you explain it? I think I can see the idea, but why not put it in context for the non-philosopher? Or are you hiding in your 'knowledge' yourself?
quote:
Originally posted by Agathon
Because it's a wheel that turns nothing. There is no a priori reason to assume an insuperable barrier between the mental and the physical that prevents physicalist explanations of conciousness.
{some stuff}
These reject the notion of hypothesized entities such as sense data or mental states in favour of reconciling our talk of intentional states (beliefs, desires, etc.) with the physical reality of the brain. Some philosophers, called eliminativsts, think we should go even further and reject intentional states as mere "folk psychology".
It's painfully obvious that you have little idea of what philosophers actually do these days. |
Now that was learning for me. And it's on topic. And you don't go off on some tangent because you read about it. It's your words, I think, your feelings. Except the last bit 
Oh my, I'm getting tired of this  . Must continue. This thread needs something.
Ah, you made some funny one-liners. More good news. Pass the Gaian Tonic, please.
quote:
Originally posted by Agathon
Rorty is.
Anyway, Plato PWNZ all modern philosophers. |
Oh, I see the Gaian tonic has had it's effect! Slow down old chap! 
And then I learned of some Plato I'd not read and sounds interesting. Well done. Nice hook. Good swing. Clever form:
quote:
Originally posted by Agathon
Yeah, but Plato introduces it only to point out why it has to fail, and nobody bothered to listen to him. If more people read the Theaetetus we could finally dump a lot of worthless stuff. |
quote:
Originally posted by Agathon
Not what I said. Apparently, physicists can't read too well. Some philosophers claim that knowledge just is justified true belief whereas some like me don't. That's a separate question from whether anyone actually has either. |
Ah, now I see, FOUR PAGES into the thread. If you are going to argue knowledge in a way clearly differing from what a physicist, in a casual way would argue, it is your job as a philosopher to make the distinction early and clearly. I picked it up, but he didn't, and probably most didn't. Why torment people with these things when you could bring them new ways of thinking? We need a new smiley for 'Explain Yourself!'.
quote:
Otherwise, most of what you've said in this thread is the same old prattle. |
 That doesn't apply to you, quite the converse: New prattle, but it does apply to many other people lining up for spankings. What the heck is the matter with this thread. It's like a 90's conversation about post-modernism or something. People, paradigm doesn't bite. It's just an annoying word for 'Crap, I have to think about things in a totally new way. Weird, better write it down.'
quote:
Who are we supposed to turn to when we want to get a better idea of what justice is, or when we want to think about the nature of concepts (which everyone uses after all), or when we want to clarify what we mean by "objective" and subjective". Scientists are ill equipped to deal with any of these questions.
There isn't any place to go other than to philosophy and no other tools to use other than those of philosophy. |
Can we use something that has no framework? (concepts) 
I'm so done with this post. I can't believe I finished round 1. Next up: Molly Bloom, though I probably won't even come back to this thread. My radioactivity meter is off the scales.
-Smack
Edit: fixing mis-stacked quotes
Last edited by smacksim on 06-07-2004 at 13:18
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Agathon
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Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002
time: 00:37
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quote:
Originally posted by smacksim
O.k., I don't belong in this thread. I have no pretention of belonging in this thread, but I'm going to post anyways.
First off, this is the worst thread I've EVER read in any forum. Those of you who know what you are talking about should be ashamed. You ignore questions for the most part, and then prattle back and forth on various levels trying to determine who's read HUME, and who's not read very much. I'm embarrassed to be among you. Why doesn't someone present a cogent and new idea here? |
Because I learned a long time ago, that if you present a cogent new idea, you have to spend upwards of 400 posts explaining it over and over again to people who make facile and inappropriate objections.
quote:
I learned a lot from your posts. Well, some of them. I have a mild interest in studying philosophy again, although I had housmate who developed schizophrenia after too much Kant...really. And that was a long time ago. Anyways, take this with a Gaian tonic, like I do: |
Kant? Thank God I never have to read Kant again.
quote:
And I thought I was pompouspompous . No, not me. Random Url. Anyways, here is a man in serious need of a spanking, or a drink. Which will it be? |
OK - so that was a troll post. I really can't be bothered spending x100 posts explaining Davidson's argument. However, it is a pretty good one in my view, and you can read it yourself in the paper I referenced. The gist of it is that conceptual schemes require the notion of a (theoretically) untranslatable language, and that we cannot make sense of this without falling into absurdity given the interdependence of belief and meaning. It's essentially a pretty boring topic for anyone who is a non-philosopher to bother with - but then again the same thing goes for most of physics, biology, lit crit, etc.
quote:
I'm no philosopher. Thank the gods. Or, as my Italian stonemason master used to say 'What are you some kind of philosopher, beer-drinker?' From a commercial I think. But let me tell you that the common person will be quite able to tell you what they know and don't know. And that includes things from physics, and they are right enough to be called knowledge. If ultimate knowledge proves them wrong, so be it, but practical knowledge accomplishes practical things, as anyone who's actually worked or built something could tell you. This is a spankable comment. |
It's a troll comment, and a commentary on the manifest failure of traditional accounts of knowledge as infallible cognition of reality. If you use "knowledge" in that sense, then nobody has it. On the other hand, the "philosophical" use of the term has so infected contemporary discourse as to engender an almost universal scepticism.
Oh no, a bad one:
quote:
Look pal, I told you. No matter what you define knowledge to be, it has a working definition that makes this remark seem rather foolish. |
That's true, but too many scientists put on airs and presume themselves to be furnishing us with knowledge conceived as in accord with the Platonic tradition (infallible cognition of reality).
quote:
You could have come up with such a better retort. I know you could have. Only a very rarified and pasty physicist would say that something wasn't worth studying because it wouldn't provide (ring the God bells now) knowledge in the ultimate sense. Philosophy isn't even an exception to your argument, by the way. So this just sounds horrible from one who otherwise seems to have good taste (liked the desktop pic btw). |
Again, this is a troll comment. Plato would argue just this and I was hoping someone would take the bait, but no-one really did.
[quote[Oh no, a big no no: Actually I'm not even going to quote it. None of it is quotable. Basically you defend your position that paradigms don't exist and conceptual frameworks don't exist. While I do understand this concept, and even agree with it in theory, there is no reason not to go on discussing paradigms or conceptual frameworks because these things explain a visceral human sense of experience , in that coming to a new sense of reality feels new and different, and is defined by different rules. Sure, these are still the subset of all rules, but math like that isn't helpful to a discussion of paradigms internally. And if you are to make this argument, why don't you explain it? I think I can see the idea, but why not put it in context for the non-philosopher? Or are you hiding in your 'knowledge' yourself?[/quote]
But those sort of paradigms aren't really that interesting. I don't care about them at all.
quote:
And then I learned of some Plato I'd not read and sounds interesting. Well done. Nice hook. Good swing. Clever form: |
If you care about defining knowledge at all, you have to read the Theaetetus. It's a brilliant book that screws with you in multiple ways.
quote:
Ah, now I see, FOUR PAGES into the thread. If you are going to argue knowledge in a way clearly differing from what a physicist, in a casual way would argue, it is your job as a philosopher to make the distinction early and clearly. I picked it up, but he didn't, and probably most didn't. Why torment people with these things when you could bring them new ways of thinking? We need a new smiley for 'Explain Yourself!'. |
But if I bothered to explain it all, I would be the tormented party based on past experience. Having to repeat essentially the same post 10 times in different words gets boring after a while. Besides, philosophy is too much like work.
quote:
Can we use something that has no framework? (concepts) |
Not if you are a semantic holist, but that doesn't mean you have to be a conceptual relativist.
Philosophy threads here usually devolve into "Does God exist?" or some other boring and hoary old topic. It's not surprising that people have a bad feeling about philosophy if they think that this is what we spend all our time doing. But then again, what normal person would want to sit around arguing about meaning and reference, which is closer to what contemporary philosophers actually do.
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smacksim
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Deputy Chairman of the Council of Lords of Gaia
Feb 2004
time: 00:37
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Well, I think you are being a snob, by recognizing the snootiness of the proposition.
I'll take the bait, and thanks for the reply. I didn't expect anything as it didn't seem anyone actually read this, only wrote to it.
As to your question, and comments, it is a thread about paradigms, right? If no paradigm interests you that has internals, guts, substance that makes the word worthwhile to some people, then why are you here? I don't really like the word, but I understand the concept. It just gets used too much and has a low resolution. People say 'I had to make a paradigm shift' for any level of shift in thinking because they lack a convenient set of words like mathematics to describe it, not 'cause they are dumb or clever, just because it's inconvenient. That's my position on that matter. Now, about the bait..
I would propose that on the whole, 'No' would be the right answer to your question. There should exist propositions whose truth value cannot be added to or subtracted from by discrete and sortable contributions. But this is probably a small set, don't you think?
Edit: Took out a smilyface, which was buggin' me.
-S
Last edited by smacksim on 06-07-2004 at 13:14
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Agathon
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Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002
time: 00:37
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People can use the term "paradigm" in that way and I have no problem with it. Paradigms as radical and universal conceptual schemes seem to me to be a non-starter. I'm not sure that Kuhn himself originally thought of it this way; although I don't have a copy of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to check.
Re: the second question. What I mean is this.
Take an empirical proposition such as "the cat is on the mat" and suppose that it is true.
What makes it true?
In traditional philosophy there are two things required for it to be true, one is that the cat actually has to be on the mat, the other is that the statement "the cat is on the mat" has to have a meaning: so necessary conditions for truth are meaning + fact.
But are these discretely sortable? Traditional philosophy says yes, because it believes in a strong distinction between empirical and analytic propositions. Analytic statements are those which are true purely by virtue of the meanings of their constituent terms - e.g. "All cats are felines". If analytic propositions are possible, we can make a distinction between truths according to our conceptual scheme (true by virtue of meaning) and truths according to the way the world is (empirical truths). Analytic truths are the confirming case to show that meaning can be discretely sorted from fact.
So far, so good...
But in the seminal paper Two Dogmas of Empiricism Quine argued forcefully that one cannot provide an account of analyticity that doesn't rely on a suspect notion of meaning which cannot itself be supported (I'll save you the details) and he also pointed out that the model of confirmation the traditional picture suggests is at variance with actual practice.
What he means is this. Take "the cat is on the mat" or any other empirical proposition. This is true or false depending on the obtaining or non-obtaining of that fact and has a discrete set of non-negotiable verification conditions (i.e. a discrete meaning - "the cat is on the mat" claims that the world is a particular way and no other).
But then consider the plain fact that theory is underdetermined by evidence: there is always more than one theory which fits the facts (which is why conspiracy theories retain their popularity). If this is true, then we aren't forced to make particular alterations in our belief set when faced with disconfirming evidence. If this is the case, then no individual proposition has a discrete set of verification conditions, although our theory does as a whole.
Hence we move from semantic atomism to semantic holism - propositions only have meaning in large groups and not individually. But this destroys the analytic/empirical distinction because there are no longer any discrete meanings to provide the contents of analytic statements. So we move from a picture in which some statements (analytic) are always true whatever the evidence, and those which are true based on the evidence (empirical) to the idea of propositions which are all empirical (although without discrete verification conditions) among which some are more likely to be revised than others for pragmatic reasons (mathematical and logical truths are the least subject to revision).
Since all statements are revisable (including bizarrely, that one) and there is no one unique theory which fits the evidence, there is no sortable distinction between meaning and fact as contributors to truth values. Hence there are no special "analytic" propositions which are the unique object of philosophica investigation - conceptual clarification will always be a pragmatic affair.
It gets more complicated after that, but that is a stripped down version of the argument. I can push it to get rid of the idea of conceptual schemes too, as the scheme/content distinction is really based on the same idea.
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Flinx
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Toronto, ON CANADA
Nov 2001
time: 00:37
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quote:
Originally posted by notyoueither
No, he didn't, I don't think.
More like he thinks that they are the sum of assumptions and prejudices that any person takes with them into any thing in life, including scientific inquiry.
A paradigm then is simply the crystal through which we all observe the world. You might say the prism has a structure which is reinforced by the viewing through it. Some people have been free thinking enough, been smart enough, and have had enough data at hand that they were able to radically remake the assumptions about important parts of human knowledge. In other words, they shifted the structure of how they and others looked at the world. |
This is what I wanted this thread to be about! People here in Off-Topic (more so than in other forums) spout off some amazing stuff. PosterA will make an argument like ‘rain is wet, Kool-Aid is wet, therefore rain is made of Kool-Aid’ to which PosterB points out that ‘rain is not red’ and PosterA replies ‘I never said it was red Kool-Aid and thanks for proving me right.’ If PosterN said ‘if you assume A, B and C then given X you conclude I’ and PosterM replied ‘you cannot assume A and C but you can assume B, D, and E which given X implies J’ then we would have a real discussion. What we do have is PosterN saying ‘I’, PosterM says ‘J’ PosterN says ‘you are and idiot it’s I’ and PosterM says ‘you are an a**hole it’s J’. In the remote cases when A through E comes up they are talked about as ultimate truth when in reality they (A through E) too are subjective interpretations.
If you have a point of view that is internally consistent then I can respect that and agree or disagree but when you argue ‘J’ is true because ‘J’ is true I say you are an idiot blinded by your paradigm
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nostromo
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Montréal, Québec
Mar 2002
time: 00:37
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quote:
Originally posted by notyoueither
No, he didn't, I don't think.
More like he thinks that they are the sum of assumptions and prejudices that any person takes with them into any thing in life, including scientific inquiry.
A paradigm then is simply the crystal through which we all observe the world. You might say the prism has a structure which is reinforced by the viewing through it. Some people have been free thinking enough, been smart enough, and have had enough data at hand that they were able to radically remake the assumptions about important parts of human knowledge. In other words, they shifted the structure of how they and others looked at the world. |
This is one of the most common use of the word "paradigm". According to the Wikipedia:
quote:
Probably the most common use of the word paradigm is in the sense of world view. For example, in social science, the term is used to describe the set of experiences, beliefs and values that affect the way an individual perceives reality and responds to that perception. |
However, this is not exactly what Kuhn meant by "paradigm". Kuhn uses the word to describe the shared commitments of scientific communities. And these communities can be very small. Paradigms are very hard to define precisely. For instance, it is very hard to say precisely what is the newtonian paradigm. Nevertheless, it is possible to describe some of their typical components:
(A) Fundamental laws and theoretical assumptions (Newton's laws of motion form a part of the Newtonian paradigm.)
(B) Metaphysical assumptions. They say what type of entity exists and how they interact. Stuff like: "heat is the kinetic energy of the constituant parts of bodies" or "all perceptible phenomena are due to the interaction of atoms in the void."
(C) Values like: predictions should be accurate; quantitative predictions are preferable to qualitative ones; theories should be simple, consistant...
(D) Exemplars. Kuhn attached a lot of importance to these. What are they? According to Kuhn, they are
quote:
the concrete problem-solutions that students encounter from the start of their scientific education, whether in laboratories, on examinations, or at the ends of chapters in science texts. To these shared examples should, however, be added at least some of the technical problem-solutions found in the periodical literature that scientists encounter during their post-educational research careers and that also show them by example how their job is to be done. |
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06-07-2004 10:01
ACK!
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