Posted by
Nick Thompson on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Analytic-philosophy-Wikipedia-the-free-encyclopedia-tp3235494p3240151.html
Glen,
What you have written below is beautifully said. I often feel that Owen's
contempt for philosophy arises from bulldozing everything he finds
contemptible into a pile and calling it philosophy. I know so many
mathematicians who dip back into philosophy from time to time to agree with
the proposition that nothing that not been formalized is worth talking
about.
But I do think that you and I and others may have contributed to his
contempt by failing to articulate where we have made progress and, in
particular, where the arguments of one of us has improved or corrected the
argument of the other. Or perhaps, even, to reveal problems that we have
uncovered that we now find insoluble. It would be interesting to make a
list of points of agreement between us on the subject of emergence.
Owen is correct that Wittgenstein would not necessarily be our ally in such
a project, since he seems to have come to regard philosophy as nothing more
than a tool for its own destruction. .
His aphorism, "That of which we cannot speak [clearly?] we should pass over
in silence" cuts so many ways.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (
[hidden email])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> [Original Message]
> From: glen e. p. ropella <
[hidden email]>
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
[hidden email]>
> Date: 7/10/2009 8:45:21 AM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Analytic philosophy - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
>
> Thus spake Owen Densmore circa 07/09/2009 07:17 PM:
> > So the question to the philosophic amongst us: what is the answer to the
> > above question? Is there a way in which philosophy can build on past
> > work in the same way mathematics does? Is there an epsilon/delta
> > breakthrough just waiting to happen in that domain? Will there be a
> > "Modern Algebra" unification within philosophy, finding the common
> > ground amongst widely different concepts like symmetry groups, fields,
> > rings, Hilbert spaces and the like?
>
> Personally, I believe that philosophy (by which I mostly mean analytic)
> is the larger system in which mathematics is grounded. I tend to view
> it as if philosophers are trail-blazing mathematicians. They foray out
> into the wild and whittle away at the fuzzy thoughts out there,
> preparing them for the more fastidious, civilized, mathematicians who
> follow. (Note that I believe programmers to be a form of
> mathematician... less fastidious than their more formal brethren,
> applied mathematicians who are still less fastidious than their
> brethren, pure mathematicians.)
>
> At each stage, the reliance on the semantic grounding of the formalisms
> is whittled away until you have, at the pure math stage, formalisms
> grounded solely in identifiable axioms like zero, reciprocal, axiom of
> choice, etc.
>
> So, in my (fantasy) world, philosophy will never be as rigorous as math
> because philosophy _is_ math and math is philosophy... they're just at
> different stages in the process. Philosophy is "upstream" and math is
> "downstream". This leads to the following direct answers to your
questions:
>
> > Why is it that philosophy does not build on prior work
> > in the same way mathematics does?
>
> Because philosophy is a frontier, wilderness activity, where prior work
> is less important than solving some case specific, imminent, problem.
>
> > Is there a way in which philosophy can build on past
> > work in the same way mathematics does?
>
> No, because the domains in which philosophy are useful are aswim in
> meaning and syntactically impoverished. Philosophy is an embedded,
> situated, open-ended, activity where everything constantly shifts
> around. Foundations are built on sand, not granite.
>
> > Is there an epsilon/delta
> > breakthrough just waiting to happen in that domain? Will there be a
> > "Modern Algebra" unification within philosophy, finding the common
> > ground amongst widely different concepts like symmetry groups, fields,
> > rings, Hilbert spaces and the like?
>
> Yes! But there is not just ONE breakthrough/unification coming. There
> are many, just like there have been many. And once those breakthroughs
> come, they congeal into a mathematics that is then adopted by an army
> consisting of a different, more fastidious, type of philosopher. The
> trail blazers move on to the next wild frontier while the "settlers"
> move in and bring mind-numbing order to the region surrounding the
> breakthrough.
>
> --
> glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095,
http://agent-based-modeling.com>
>
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