James doesn’t know what he is talking about. Well actually he does, he is just being deliberately misleading.
The philosophy that I engage in would be most associated to the continental tradition. That is where real philosophy resides. The problem is that much of continental philosophy also sucks, it just sucks for a different reason than the reason why analytic philosophy sucks.
Continental philosophy sucks because it is still quite nascent and hasn’t pushed far and honestly enough into its own method and conclusions. It “sucks” often enough because it actually has the potential to be great, and in rare cases reaches that potential.
Analytic philosophy sucks because it isn’t philosophy.
Well, you guys can invent your own personal definitions and idealized concepts of what “real philosophy” is if you like, but the “real world” of philosophers, seriously famous ones, say otherwise (e.g. Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein.).
You are each proposing that “real philosophy” is the bantering about subjects without even knowing what the subject is (common mindless thrashing … and accusing without examining). And your last few posts are in fact a reflection of such presumptuousness.
James is a believer in theoretical constructs. He thinks that forces are farces because they are clearly theoretical constructs that never were anything more than theoretical constructs, whereas affectance is a theoretical construct that is reality itself simply because it’s a part of an all-encompassing theory (which is a pretentious, practically useless, theory with a ridiculously high input/output ratio.) And QM is a fantasy even though it works because it doesn’t describe reality “as it is”. As if theories can ever be anything more than theories – procedures that can generate predictions based on given parameters.
You have absolutely no clue because you know nothing about it at all.
Yet here you are trying to derate it.
And why?
Certainly not because of your intellect.
RM:AO proves that theories can be “more than just theories”. But you wouldn’t know anything about that.
Theory is a description of a procedure that can be used to generate predictions using given parameters.
Theories can be created any way you want, but if they are to be of practical value, they must be grounded in prior observations – they must be able to predict past events. The greater the number of past events it can predict, the more grounded the theory.
The truth value of a theory is expressed as a set of its predictions that were tested (verified or falsified.)
You can simplify this expression by reducing it to a true/false ratio by dividing the number of verified predictions by the number of falsified predictions.
You can go further and reduce the expression to binary true/false using whatever method you want (one would be using “true” for >=0.5 t/f ratio and “false” for any other ratio.)
Because theories have a universal application, the number of predictions they can generate is infinite. This means that theories have no ultimate truth value. Instead, as its set of tested predictions changes, so does its truth value.
Theories are differentiated not only by their scope – by the range of predictions they can make – but also by the kind of input they take and by the speed with which output is generated.
All-encompassing theories are clumsy because they take too much input and because they take too much time to generate output. They are, for the most part, recreation.
Every instrument has advantages and disadvantages. There is no instrument without disadvantages. Whenever you switch from one instrument to another you are accepting certain trade-off. There is no ultimate instrument.
You can prove that theories are “more than just theories” lol. You totally solved Hume’s problem of induction, didn’t you?
As we have discussed before … try to get your words right and perhaps others won’t seem as moronic as you acuse. And perhaps you will appear less so to them as well.
You are paying way too much of your attention to superficial, irrelevant, distinctions. Wyld was correct. You do not see beyond words. You are a herd animal. Language is everything there is for you.
On the contrary, you do not pay enough attention to relevant distinctions and thus mislead yourself and others. And Wyld will disagree with anything that I say regardless (arrested adolescents are like that).
Nah… It’s just the part of thinking that you are missing most.