Philosophy Now Forum

http://xkcd.com/435/


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Logic is; everything else isn't.

And the poor old engineers get left out as usual.

Hi Arising,

http://xkcd.com/664/

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I sometimes fantasize about holding an entire phlosophical discussion using only xkcd comic strips.

http://xkcd.com/435/


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Logic is; everything else isn't.


Interesting strip. Quite specious, of course; like a politician's sound bite. I have been trying to think in what sense "sociology" could be defined as "applied psychology". It is not immediately obvious what the two fields are thought to have in common.

Mathematics? We often hear it said that mathematics is the queen of the sciences, because its conclusions alone possess certainty and finality, for all eternity. But of course, there is no free lunch. The price of this certainty is non-relevance, in the literal sense; mathematics can tell us nothing about the world in which we live. That is the role of the physicists, chemists, biologists et al, who take various mathematical models, and discard as rubbish those which cannot predict or explain the observed phenomena. Newton's theory of gravity is a beautiful piece of mathematics, but for many scientific purposes, it is toilet paper; it makes a poor approximation of how the universe really works. Ptolemy's geocentric theory, Newton's theory of gravity, and Einstein's theories of relativity, are all creditable efforts, intellectual tours-de-force; it's a pity that they are all untrue!

Philosophy = 1% Logic + 99% Psychology.

Hi VoT,

Was that an emotion just then?

Belief trumps Truth in the game of life.

QED

P.S. Would you like to edit some parentheses into your new equation?

alan1000 wrote:

Mathematics? We often hear it said that mathematics is the queen of the sciences, because its conclusions alone possess certainty and finality, for all eternity. But of course, there is no free lunch. The price of this certainty is non-relevance, in the literal sense; mathematics can tell us nothing about the world in which we live. That is the role of the physicists, chemists, biologists et al, who take various mathematical models, and discard as rubbish those which cannot predict or explain the observed phenomena. Newton's theory of gravity is a beautiful piece of mathematics, but for many scientific purposes, it is toilet paper; it makes a poor approximation of how the universe really works. Ptolemy's geocentric theory, Newton's theory of gravity, and Einstein's theories of relativity, are all creditable efforts, intellectual tours-de-force; it's a pity that they are all untrue!

Well-expressed, and, I think, true. Mathematics is a game of logic, using definitions and related axioms (assumptions), and finding the consequences (lemmas, theorems, corollaries, etc.) of those definitions and axioms. Some of mathematics supports theories of the workings of the universe, but the theories are temporary, and when new data don't conform to a theory, it is modified or thrown out and maybe supplanted by a new theory.