Philosophy Now Forum

I'd like to discuss two principles for achieving and solidifying scientific certainty of the causal nature of objects: 'diversification' and 'depth'.

Diversification is to take an object and try it out in similar circumstances where the point of factuality still holds domain but is not the same as any earlier circumstances. By diversifying the number of circumstances, you prove that it's true about the point of factuality, what you say is the cause behind the effect of an object.

Depth, on the other hand, is for when diversification just isn't enough. Depth is about those situations where there is a lack of trust, either between people, between organizations, or within either a person or an organization. Depth seeks to unpackage the structure of conditions that underlies the object in question and how it produces its effect. As conditions form "levels" of depth, where each level have conditions conditioning parts of the conditions above themselves until you reach the object in question, those same levels are finitely known. There is at any time a practical limit to our knowledge of the structure of conditions, and 'depth' is a matter of unpacking further and further levels until the object is deemed so solidly certain, it is unquestionably true, or, at some point breaks down in incoherency, and has to be discarded for untruth.

Now... what do you think of this, in critique?

The Voice of Time wrote:Diversification is to take an object and try it out in similar circumstances where the point of factuality still holds domain but is not the same as any earlier circumstances. By diversifying the number of circumstances, you prove that it's true about the point of factuality, what you say is the cause behind the effect of an object.

Is there a simpler way of putting this? Could you give an example?

Sorry, I used the term "point of factuality" as a neologism. I presume that's what caused the lack of understanding?

So, what I mean by "point of factuality" is the question of whether something is true or not about another thing.

What I'm saying in the quote is that given you have only 2 different situations in which it's true that... I don't know... corn seeds will turn into popcorn. Now if your statement is that "corn seeds will pop after some time when first poured into a pot", this may have proven to be true because you've seen it twice happen in two different situations when you've been making food, and the only thing you noticed about the situation is the pot. So you hypothesise that it's the pot that makes the difference, it is "the cause".

However, by diversifying the situations, making new situations that are more and more different from the original situation, you are gonna land on a situation which there is no heat source, and so you can wait for what seems an eternity but nothing happens. Now reason and logic solves out why this happens eventually, but the point I'm making is not the reasoning behind "why", but the way in which we must accumulate raw experience resources to use in order to process, through reason and logic, what is eventually the truth of the matter... the full truth.

Eventually, either by example, or by deciding a new hypothesis, we are gonna land on the assumption it's the heat and not the pot that allows the corn seed to pop. The lesson being, the more diversification, the greater the chance we uncover a dependable assumption on cause, the "source of causal power", as I would say (though ordinary people would likely just call it "cause" for short). The more we diversify, the more dependable we prove the source: the hypothesis for "the cause".

It is not merely by re-doing a situation, for instance, like some people might come to think, but by diversification, that we find the merits of our assumptions.

uwot wrote:

The Voice of Time wrote:Diversification is to take an object and try it out in similar circumstances where the point of factuality still holds domain but is not the same as any earlier circumstances. By diversifying the number of circumstances, you prove that it's true about the point of factuality, what you say is the cause behind the effect of an object.

Is there a simpler way of putting this? Could you give an example?

I'll give you an example.
Is it factual that if a person sees he is angry and some times, under certain conditions he is not. Is it still the truth that the person is angry or not?