Sean's tonality ideas

[Cato]

Isn't this the prevailing academic jargon of the social sciences? I should have thought that after the mortal blow Alan Sokal administered, they would have at least the decency to shut the f^%$#k up for a loooong, loooong time. But I guess academic world nowadays is the last place where one must look for intellectual honesty.

Alan Sokal is one of my heroes!   0:)


One might charitably assume, or even hope most desperately,  that similar sentences from Mr. Sean, similar to the one quoted above, are satires on French post-modernist "philosophy."

But maybe not!   

[Cato]

Shards of Ideation, for piccolo and flexatone. I'll race you to it!

Tuned flower pots might be more appropriate, with an emphasis on the pot part!   

[karlhenning]

Tuned flower pots might be more appropriate, with an emphasis on the pot part!   

As PG Wodehouse wrote in (I believe) Leave It to Psmith: Say it with flowerpots!

[drogulus]

The absolute or Brahman underlies the relative such that the relative is only the absolute in relative form. Brahman is hidden from the intellect that wants to foreground, objectify and make transparent all things, ie when truth is necessary hidden behind the propositions and their infinite regressions of justification. Etc etc.

     

      You could use more familiar terms to make the same point. You could say that subjective models of the world don't "give" you the world itself, that they are partial, approximate and at best probable. Objective methods bring you more complete models, closer approximations and very high probabilities, but the map, no matter how good it is, is not the thing being mapped.

      I would conclude from this not that we don't know the world, but that knowing the world is this uncertain process and not any absolute holism. Truth, therefore, ought to be defined by what it's possible to know and not denigrated by comparison to an impossible ideal. The real world is a working hypothesis and absolutes are idealizations like straight lines and equilateral triangles, which are sometimes useful as tools of thought whether any real things conform to them or not.

      When I say there is a "real world" it seems there are 2 ways to take it, a world "out there" which is the object of our theories but not the sum of them (a "state of affairs") and the sum of our theories which we navigate with and use to conduct further investigations. So we always end up with a world and a world in our heads. This works pretty well most of the time.

[Sean]

      You could use more familiar terms to make the same point. You could say that subjective models of the world don't "give" you the world itself, that they are partial, approximate and at best probable. Objective methods bring you more complete models, closer approximations and very high probabilities, but the map, no matter how good it is, is not the thing being mapped.

      I would conclude from this not that we don't know the world, but that knowing the world is this uncertain process and not any absolute holism. Truth, therefore, ought to be defined by what it's possible to know and not denigrated by comparison to an impossible ideal. The real world is a working hypothesis and absolutes are idealizations like straight lines and equilateral triangles, which are sometimes useful as tools of thought whether any real things conform to them or not.

      When I say there is a "real world" it seems there are 2 ways to take it, a world "out there" which is the object of our theories but not the sum of them (a "state of affairs") and the sum of our theories which we navigate with and use to conduct further investigations. So we always end up with a world and a world in our heads. This works pretty well most of the time.

Well you're saying relativity is the absolute truth, which is a contradiction. But you understand the question, and I've also thought about the issue of epistemology and the critique of foundationism- which undermines Western thought generally, hence the resurgance of rationalism and empiricism under new absurd names like externalism and internalism. Best wishes.

[karlhenning]

Well you're saying relativity is the absolute truth, which is a contradiction.

Your strawman is a contradiction, yes.

What Ernie said was:

When I say there is a "real world" it seems there are 2 ways to take it, a world "out there" which is the object of our theories but not the sum of them (a "state of affairs") and the sum of our theories which we navigate with and use to conduct further investigations.

Not that you have any talent for reading.