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Hi Luis,
From some of your comments I gathered that you were getting annoyed by my comments. I hope that isn't the case.
>>>If I crawl far enough out onto the limb of semantic pliability I could say empiricism is generally an epistemological concern, epistemology is generally a metaphysical concern, metaphysics is generally a rationalist concern, and so therefore empiricism is generally rationalism. Your argument can be made of many doctrines, Harv, but it should beyond you to fall back upon such facile tautology! All philosophical endeavors are ‘generally epistemological concerns.’ Skepticism prefers empiricism; it does not examine the epistemology behind empiricism. If it did, it’d be epistemology.>H:”If ontology is entirely rejected as a legitimate exercise, then our theories of the world become anti-realist.” L: Not exactly (see reference below), but I haven’t ‘entirely rejected’ ontology. Straying into philosophy during scientific discussion is my concern here. If I question one’s use of ontological loops in a philosophy forum, then you’d be on track with this criticism.>>*You’re* the deontic one, not I (i.e., you misrepresent my stance). Any given set theory is dependent upon the math it defines, not ‘mathematics itself.’ Nevertheless, the point is that no known set theory can define a model of maths impervious to Godel’s Incompleteness theorem. That is, no set theory can exclude the GIT, which contradicts said set theory.>>Harv, my position is simply that *any* attempt to ‘find meaning’ is anthropomorphic.>“If what we regard as real depends on our theory, how can we make reality the basis of our philosophy? …I am a realist in the sense that I think there is a universe out there waiting to be investigated. I regard (solipsism) as a waste of time… We cannot distinguish what is real about the universe without a theory. A theory is a good theory if it is an elegant model, if it describes a wide class of observations, and if it predicts the results of new observations. Beyond that, it makes no sense to ask if it corresponds to reality.” |
