rubber, meet road
Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2020 3:38 pm
I've contended in various places, that tiny.cc/TheWholeStory if necessary and sufficient for answering all philosophical questions/problems directly or by logical extension. Ought problems are subject to contingencies and require specialized knowledge so i won't be addressing them here. In this thread i'll show how all IS questions are answered directly. That means entirely solving everything in epistemology and metaphysics (which are fundamentally inseparable for practical purposes).
To start, here are some typical problems/questions in those areas:
Justified True Belief - is not a possible definition of knowledge. The truth of a proposition is what knowledge is a pointer toward. You cannot include the destination in the pointer when the whole question is where the destination is. This is simple foolishness and "For over two millennia, this definition of knowledge has been reinforced and accepted by subsequent philosophers." <wikipedia> is a large part of why philosophy goes nowhere and is denegrated by many for navel-gazing. "Justified belief" is the maximum level of certainty knowledge can attain to. How certain? is an emperical question that depends on the specific evidence available. Justified belief is also sufficient for all questions about knowledge. The fact that infalliblism, roughly the understanding presented here, is rejected by most philosophers creates justifiable belief that most philosophers have no leg to stand on.
The problem of the criterion - refers to an infinite regress of proving how you know how you know, and so forth. This is no problem at all because knowledge is only ever sure Enough for a given purpose, at which point we stop adding justification. "It's always the last place you look." Any question that doesn't require inside knowledge can quickly and easily be answered well enough "for all intents and purposes" by an expert in the subject, such as these answers.
The question about why is there anything at all instead of nothing, is entirely incoherent. It assumes that "why" can be meaningful outside of a mind, which is an unsupportable proposition. It assumes that "nothing" is an existing thing in the same way as things. Nothing always means the lack of something specific in a specific context. There can be no such thing as a lack of everything in any sense. Even to be able to ask the question requires accepting the existence of a question-asker who can receive the answer in order to be relevant.
The problem of universals, Platonic forms, qualia, etc. There are no "things" in the Actuality beyond the perception of minds. In Actuality there is only undifferentiated stuff. Reality is the word we use to indicate our experience and it includes all the processing our subconscious does before we even notice, including no less than pattern recognition for the purpose of danger avoidance and interest potential. By the time we as conscious beings notice something, the attributes and boundary conditions that make useful things out of that stuff is settled "Reality" is our consensus experience and anyone who does not agree we say has a mental illness called delusion. All "things" are a pattern with a purpose and the resolution of the purpose determines the resolution of the pattern. There is no such thing as a pattern without a pre-existing purpose.
The heap "paradox" - is an entirely a semantic problem, not a paradox. A pile becomes a heap exactly when we decide to change the word we use because it suits our purpose better. This is how emergence works - when the attributes of a combination of things at scale requires a different metaphor (or definition) to distinguish how they're useful in a different way. Further, there is no such thing as paradox in Reality, only in language, and many philosophical problems would be more easily understood by removing this technical inaccuracy. The Ship of Theseus and most other metaphysical problems are also solved by understanding "pattern with a purpose".
Each of these problems is easily solved in a logically necessary and completely coherent way, as indicated above, both internally and externally consistent and expressible, as above, in ordinary language using ordinary definition in all cases except where the definition itself is the issue. Are there any gaps in these explanations that need filling in, or do you have additional IS questions that need resolution?
To start, here are some typical problems/questions in those areas:
Justified True Belief - is not a possible definition of knowledge. The truth of a proposition is what knowledge is a pointer toward. You cannot include the destination in the pointer when the whole question is where the destination is. This is simple foolishness and "For over two millennia, this definition of knowledge has been reinforced and accepted by subsequent philosophers." <wikipedia> is a large part of why philosophy goes nowhere and is denegrated by many for navel-gazing. "Justified belief" is the maximum level of certainty knowledge can attain to. How certain? is an emperical question that depends on the specific evidence available. Justified belief is also sufficient for all questions about knowledge. The fact that infalliblism, roughly the understanding presented here, is rejected by most philosophers creates justifiable belief that most philosophers have no leg to stand on.
The problem of the criterion - refers to an infinite regress of proving how you know how you know, and so forth. This is no problem at all because knowledge is only ever sure Enough for a given purpose, at which point we stop adding justification. "It's always the last place you look." Any question that doesn't require inside knowledge can quickly and easily be answered well enough "for all intents and purposes" by an expert in the subject, such as these answers.
The question about why is there anything at all instead of nothing, is entirely incoherent. It assumes that "why" can be meaningful outside of a mind, which is an unsupportable proposition. It assumes that "nothing" is an existing thing in the same way as things. Nothing always means the lack of something specific in a specific context. There can be no such thing as a lack of everything in any sense. Even to be able to ask the question requires accepting the existence of a question-asker who can receive the answer in order to be relevant.
The problem of universals, Platonic forms, qualia, etc. There are no "things" in the Actuality beyond the perception of minds. In Actuality there is only undifferentiated stuff. Reality is the word we use to indicate our experience and it includes all the processing our subconscious does before we even notice, including no less than pattern recognition for the purpose of danger avoidance and interest potential. By the time we as conscious beings notice something, the attributes and boundary conditions that make useful things out of that stuff is settled "Reality" is our consensus experience and anyone who does not agree we say has a mental illness called delusion. All "things" are a pattern with a purpose and the resolution of the purpose determines the resolution of the pattern. There is no such thing as a pattern without a pre-existing purpose.
The heap "paradox" - is an entirely a semantic problem, not a paradox. A pile becomes a heap exactly when we decide to change the word we use because it suits our purpose better. This is how emergence works - when the attributes of a combination of things at scale requires a different metaphor (or definition) to distinguish how they're useful in a different way. Further, there is no such thing as paradox in Reality, only in language, and many philosophical problems would be more easily understood by removing this technical inaccuracy. The Ship of Theseus and most other metaphysical problems are also solved by understanding "pattern with a purpose".
Each of these problems is easily solved in a logically necessary and completely coherent way, as indicated above, both internally and externally consistent and expressible, as above, in ordinary language using ordinary definition in all cases except where the definition itself is the issue. Are there any gaps in these explanations that need filling in, or do you have additional IS questions that need resolution?