Re: Pragmaticism and puritanism

Posted by Frank Wimberly-2 on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Pragmaticism-and-puritanism-tp7594748p7594766.html

Reminds me of a conversation I had with the Chair of the Philosophy Department at Carnegie Mellon.  I told him that Bertrand Russell fell off his bicycle when he realized that Anselm's proof of the existence of God is valid.  Wilfried Sieg (a German) looked concerned but after a few moments he said with relief,  "Ah, valid but not sound!"  Is that consistent with what you said?

On Wed, Mar 11, 2020, 11:44 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Scientific knowledge is more valid [†] because it travels across space and time better than other forms of knowledge.

I'd rank "artisanal knowledge" a close second. The apprentice, journey, master infrastructure worked pretty well, I think. But "financial knowledge" is a close competitor. I sometimes make the argument that the merchant class is primarily responsible for peace on earth because projection from the high-dimensional space of human relations down to a one-dimensional currency helps everyone get along ... just enough to do business with one another.

[†] Validity, in contrast with soundness. All types of knowledge are sound within their scope, where the scope is exogenous. But validity sets its own scope, like closure under an operator. Some may say validity is boolean, where a small system is valid or invalid and a large system is valid or invalid. But I'd argue that a smaller system is less valid than a larger system. A *universal* system will be the *most* valid. Or if that bugs you, it's easy to say, instead, that a valid but so small as to be useless system is *technically* valid, but nobody cares. What we want is a very large system that's valid.

On 3/11/20 10:00 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Why is one view more valid than the others?  Because science (actually with engineering) has made it possible to send probes to Neptune?  Depends on your goals.  

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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