[Ian said:] Krimel, Platt, Ham, The thread I saw, went ..
[Ham] You are an objectivist who speaks the language of Science. Metaphysics is not now, nor was it ever, "testable". It is precisely this "modern usage" of objective data that has blinded us to philosophical enlightenment. [Krimel] I know you are but what am I? Metaphysics that are not testable are irrelevant. It is just snake oil. Philosophical enlightenment? OMG is that a joke or something? Is that what you actually think you are selling? Honey, please... [Platt] > Spoken like a true believer in scientism. > Not sure exactly what the label "Scientism" means Krimel, but I find myself agreeing with Ham and Platt. I'm not defending Ham's essentialism, but a metaphysics is not "testable" in the falsifiable "scientific method" sense but is indirectly testable by its fit with everything else observable, and all manner of related inductive and deductive reasoning. Precious little is "testable" in the real world, the world is not a science lab, so it's a non issue. To recognise that, is "enlightened" in the sense Ham used the phrase you dubbed "snake oil". Platt, and Ham I'm sure, fall on pseudo scientific logic when it suits their rhetoric, everyone does - it's our "addiction" to the objective argument. It's very hard to avoid, if you want to sound serious and credible - a problem I don't suffer from in DMB's eyes ;-) Now what was the actual argument ? [Krimel] What is pragmatism but the notion that ideas have consequence and should be judged accordingly? We do not need to set up double blind experiments to know whether the world is composed of things that wiggle and things that hold still. Frankly I am hard pressed to think of any set of ideas that is not testable in some sense. We judge good ideas from bad ideas based on whether they work or not. Ham, asserts that metaphysics is in some sense a literary exercise. You just set up a bunch of ideas and they do not need to have any contact with the world of experience. They require no criteria for assessing them. They do not even require any known spoken language for explaining them. This might have worked even 200 years ago but it simply doesn't any more. I never said what criteria would be needed to evaluate a metaphysics. In fact I have asked Ham many times to suggest any criteria whatsoever to evaluate his assertions. Mostly he seems to claim it is a matter of esthetics. But this is the point at which he typically ends the discussion, as though this were an unreasonable request. Are you are chiming in here to support the adoption of baseless claims, Ian? Scientism, is a word Platt throws out when he can't think of anything else to say. moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
