What constitutes being a philosopher?

@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Pull the other one !
Your diatribe merely serves to emphasise your pedantry. It is supercilious to assume that any respondent on a philosophy forum need be reminded about a sub-topic of an elementary logic course. And the fact is that your history of posting implies that YOU are fixated on binary logic in what you assume is "philosophising". It seems you haven't a clue about its limitations!

My goodness gracious, "fixated on binary logic"! You certainly know how to hurt a person! What a thing to say! I imagine you are opposed to all things binary, like male and female. You are so advanced!

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@kennethamy,

Tough! Anybody who accuses Kant of "the worst argument in the world" on the basis of logical analysis, is fair game for such criticism.

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The nebulousness of the nature of philosophy makes this something that must be distilled to one of two answers or both. Anyone who claims to be a philosopher, or anyone who is recognized as a philosopher.

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

And thus, in light of fresco's latest post, chumly's challenge made no sense at all

Perhaps philosophy is limited to a kind of "internal" organizing of the sensory input that reaches us. A kind of spirituality without any adherence to the dogmas that would push it over into the realm of religion.

I think you're on to something there.

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@Arjuna,

That "spirituality" is perhaps expressed as a resolution of dualities....of, for example, "inner" and "outer" being co-extensive and co-defined. I have always understood Niels Bohr's choice of the Yin-Yang symbol as his coat-of -arms (Swedish Knighthood) as an example of this.
How else is one to interpret ......

Quote:

The opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

....or for the logicians...

Quote:

No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.

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@fresco,

I see we're on the same page. Very Happy

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Tough! Anybody who accuses Kant of "the worst argument in the world" on the basis of logical analysis, is fair game for such criticism.

Who accused Kant of the worst argument in the world? I did not, and neither did David Stove. In fact, neither he nor I accused any particular philosopher of the worst argument in the world. But, certainly, "the worst argument in the world" , if it can be imputed to anyone, can be imputed to George Berkeley, so you seem to be confusing Kant with Berkeley. But certainly, the grandfather of "the worst argument in the world" is probably the one that Berkeley purveys. It is:

Since I cannot think about something existing unless I think about it existing, nothing can exist without my thinking about it.

Now, if that is not the worst argument in the world, it certainly is way up there. It is very hard to think of a worse argument. And, it may very well be true that all Idealists (or at least "subjective idealists") employ some variant of "the worst argument in the world" or it lies in the background as an assumption.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

That "spirituality" is perhaps expressed as a resolution of dualities....of, for example, "inner" and "outer" being co-extensive and co-defined. I have always understood Niels Bohr's choice of the Yin-Yang symbol as his coat-of -arms (Swedish Knighthood) as an example of this.
How else is one to interpret ......

Quote:
The opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

....or for the logicians...

Quote:
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.

You believe that the negation of a truth can be (let alone, is) a truth? Hmmm. I suppose that you give no heed to contradictions, in that case. In fact, you advocate them. Or maybe I should say that you both believe and do not believe in the truth of contradictions. If that is true it is nice to know exactly where you stand.

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@kennethamy,

Since I cannot think about something existing unless I think about it existing, nothing can exist without my thinking about it.

There are two ways, if not more, to process this claim. The first, if you are emotionally inclined to disagree, is to take it literally and disprove it with literal meanings of indvidual words in the sentence.
Another way to do it, if you are emotionally inclined to indulge in this statement, is to wonder whatever he could mean, and try to interpret it so that it makes sense. Doing so would open up alternative ways of thinking that you perhaps would not be able to find on your own.

The bottom line is this: It's just information, and truth is a matter of choice. You can find expressions of truth in whatever you look at, if you are so inclined. If you look for bullshit thats what you will see. We decide, and we do so based on how we feel about it. We all instinctively know what is true, and the explanation we accept as truth is generally the one that fits closest to our own instinctive, emotional feeling of existence. Truth = reality, and we do, after all, feel reality.

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@kennethamy,

Berkeley's was one path suggested by Kant's phenomenology. Berkeley's account of Kant's "inaccessible noumena" was that they existed in "the mind of God", making him something of a juicy target. Occam's razor in the hands of Husserl later dispensed with the need for "noumena" altogether. But the chief author of phenomenology was Kant whose "perceptual a priori's" are the foundation of post-modernism...a central target of Stove.

Your second post is merely a good example of your fixation. From a non-dualist perspective it is vacuous. Try considering the Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis for one simple approach to the dynamics of "reality", and consequently to a concept of "epistemological progress".

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

Since I cannot think about something existing unless I think about it existing, nothing can exist without my thinking about it.

There are two ways, if not more, to process this claim. The first, if you are emotionally inclined to disagree, is to take it literally and disprove it with literal meanings of indvidual words in the sentence.
Another way to do it, if you are emotionally inclined to indulge in this statement, is to wonder whatever he could mean, and try to interpret it so that it makes sense. Doing so would open up alternative ways of thinking that you perhaps would not be able to find on your own.

The bottom line is this: It's just information, and truth is a matter of choice. You can find expressions of truth in whatever you look at, if you are so inclined. If you look for bullshit thats what you will see. We decide, and we do so based on how we feel about it. We all instinctively know what is true, and the explanation we accept as truth is generally the one that fits closest to our own instinctive, emotional feeling of existence. Truth = reality, and we do, after all, feel reality.

No idea what you are saying. It isn't a statement, it is an argument. And since the conclusion obviously does not follow from the premise, it is a fallacious argument.

If you fail to distinguish between statements and arguments you are just going to confuse yourself. It certainly is not a "matter of choice" whether the argument is fallacious or not. It is clearly fallacious. I suppose it is a matter of choice whether it is the worst argument in the world. I think it is pretty bad, and since it seems to have influenced Idealists to repeat it, and even to base what they claim on it, it may be the argument with the worst influence in the world. It may even be that Kant let it seep into his own views.

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@Cyracuz,

Quote:

Since I cannot think about something existing unless I think about it existing, nothing can exist without my thinking about it.

Perhaps the best way to demolish the "worst argument" purveyors, is by interpreting this quote with respect to "the tree in the forest" scenario.

i.e. "The unseen tree in the forest" is an oxymoron because it is being visualized already in the speaker's mind. "Un-visualized existence" is meaningless. Equating "thinking" with "visualization" makes Berkeley's argument completely intelligible. ( esse est percipi)

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@kennethamy,

It certainly is a matter of choice if the argument is fallacious or not.
Have you not chosen the premises on which you make the judgment?

Perhaps he means that "nothing" is an actual thing.
Or maybe he means that if it's real he can think about it... who knows. The argument may or may not be fallacious, but only in relation to a specific theory that you have chosen to believe in.

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

It certainly is a matter of choice if the argument is fallacious or not.
Have you not chosen the premises on which you make the judgment?

Perhaps he means that "nothing" is an actual thing.
Or maybe he means that if it's real he can think about it... who knows. The argument may or may not be fallacious, but only in relation to a specific theory that you have chosen to believe in.

Have you not chosen the premises on which you make the judgment?

But it is fallacious to argue that because I have chosen the premises of the argument, that I choose whether the argument is fallacious. For example, suppose the argument is:
1. A chooses the premises of the argument.

Therefore, 2. A chooses whether the argument is fallacious.

Clearly, 1. therefore 2. is fallacious. For even if I do choose the premises of an argument, whether the conclusion follows from those premises is not up to me. For example, suppose I choose the premise, that if 4 is an even number, then 4 is divisible by 2, and my conclusion is that 10 is not divisible by 2. Clearly, it is not up to me whether the conclusion does or does not follow from the premise. It simply does not. But how is that up to me?

Of course (although this is irrelevant) it is not even true that in the above argument, since the premise is chosen by me, whether the conclusion follows from the premise is chosen by me, since I did not chose that premise, you did.

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@kennethamy,

I meant that you have chosen the premises on which to judge the soundness of another argument.
Fresco offered an example of another choice of premises.

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

I meant that you have chosen the premises on which to judge the soundness of another argument.
Fresco offered an example of another choice of premises.

I don't understand what you mean. Let's take as an example the famous argument,

1. All men are mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.

Therefore, 3. Socrates is mortal.

This argument is sound. It is sound because it is valid and both 1. and 2. are true. What premises have I chosen?

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@kennethamy,

Answer:

The syllogism requires naive realism to be axiomatic. That means that interpretation of the word "is" presupposes that existence can be independent of observers in the sense that set membership properties are deemed to be "objective" and static. Consider replacing Socrates with Jesus in the syllogism from the point of view of "a believer" and you will get an idea of observer dependent properties. If you then extend the exploration of "properties" from different human observers to different species with different physiologies you should realize that "properties" MUST be a dynamic combination of "internal" and "external" states which are two sides of the coin we call an observation or interaction "event". What words like " man" or "mortal" do is re-present our expectancies of those events. (RE-present not "represent" because the word triggers an internal state/visualization). The abstract persistence of the word lulls into the assumption of the independent persistence of "properties".

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@fresco,

...I should have added that because Berkeley rejects the axiom of naive realism, attempts to apply syllogistic logic to his thinking are as inappropriate as attempting to apply the rules of physics to biological functionalism. And in case "religion" is deemed to be the exception which proves the rule, we need only consider the "wave-particle " issue in physics as a "scientific" example of the problems of applying set theoretic logic, even at the level of physics.

None of this matters for most of everyday experience where common language, culture and physiology determine relative agreement as to "events", but philosophy aspires to transcend the "everyday".

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@kennethamy,

I feel that a response from me is a bit superfluous after fresco's reply.

But I'll give one anyway.
This argument uses the premise "all men are mortal", for one, which is in itself a conclusion which is true only according to certain beliefs, and in certain contexts, but which you have chosen to believe in if you claim this argument is sound.
I think this argument would be very ineffective in a discussion about reincarnation and the immortality of the soul.
If someone had a gun and there was doubt wether or not he could kill Socrates with it, the argument could perhaps be of some use. Bad examples perhaps, but my point is that I think the soundness of any argument is related to it's usefulness more than it's truth value.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Answer:

The syllogism requires naive realism to be axiomatic. That means that interpretation of the word "is" presupposes that existence can be independent of observers in the sense that set membership properties are deemed to be "objective" and static. Consider replacing Socrates with Jesus in the syllogism from the point of view of "a believer" and you will get an idea of observer dependent properties. If you then extend the exploration of "properties" from different human observers to different species with different physiologies you should realize that "properties" MUST be a dynamic combination of "internal" and "external" states which are two sides of the coin we call an observation or interaction "event". What words like " man" or "mortal" do is re-present our expectancies of those events. (RE-present not "represent" because the word triggers an internal state/visualization). The abstract persistence of the word lulls into the assumption of the independent persistence of "properties".

What premises did you say I was choosing in judging the argument sound? Could you just state them?

1 Reply

What constitutes being a philosopher?

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