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I had always heard that Sartre was a great philosopher. I had read his fiction and about existentialism so I thought let me read what everyone says is his great work, Being and Nothingness.
After a few chapters, I wanted to punch Sartre just like the comic. It was nothing but non stop unverified suppositions about the nature of thought.
My approach is that you can learn something from everyone, even if their views on everything may not make sense. For example, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould is spot on about his works on evolution, but starts to lose the plot with his “non overlapping magisterium” stuff. So I get what you’re saying
The odd thing is Being and Nothingness is held up as Sartre's great work when it's actually utter trash. Like if Linus Pauling was acclaimed for his crackpot idea that Vitamin C cures all cancer and as a footnote it's noted that he discovered DNA.
I mean . . . yeah
Carnap's statement is false, humans find all sorts of non-verifiable beliefs and experiences cognitively meaningful. Dreams, religions, ancestor worship, coincidences, hypothesises, potentials, the future, stories....
Carnap is falling into the fallacy of scientism, in neglect of anthropology, sociology, fiction writing, and any number of other humanities subjects and activities.
Humanity being interested in unknowns and unverifiable understandings and forms of belief is vital to having a broad human experience which is vital to having a good life, and a good understanding of humanity.
We are not a solely rational species.
Carnap’s statement is false, humans find all sorts of non-verifiable beliefs and experiences cognitively meaningful.
I think Carnap's conception of "meaningful" differs from the "cognitively meaningful" term you use here. Which from context, I gather means something like "personally fulfilling" or "socially important". Carnap along with the other logical positivists were trying to develop a philosophy of science that didn't depend on metaphysical claims and was ultimately grounded in empiricism. Carnap's use of the term "meaningful" is more akin to saying that a concept can be connected to the empirical world. Meaningless claims, then are the opposite, they cannot be connected to the empirical world.
Imagine for example that you and a friend were the victims of an attempted mugging turned violent, but to you and the mugger's surprise you discovered that you were impervious to attacks with lead pipes and laser guns. As you are searching for an explanation for these newfound powers your friend suggests that the reason you have these powers is that you both, without your knowledge, are wearing magical rings that give you super powers, but the rings are invisible and cannot be felt by the wearers. Carnap would say that is meaningless because the ring explanation cannot be connected to the empirical world. The explanation requires an imperceptible entity.
Trying to draw a bright line between empiricism and metaphysics is not scientism, in the pejorative sense that you mean here. I think to qualify as such Carnap would need to dismiss all meaningless (in Carnap's sense of the term) propositions as totally lacking in personal value. I don't know his writing well enough to say whether or not he holds that view, ( a brief reading of his entry in the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy suggests, no he did not hold those views) but I don't think that conclusion is a particularly charitable reading of Carnap's criticisms of metaphysics.
I didn't introduce the term "cognitively meaningful" - it's in the comic we're all replying to.
This pretense that myself and others don't understand what's trying to be said is faulty. The comic would have worked had it said "substantively meaningful" instead...
...but my point (fuck Carnap, he's not here, and people need to think for themselves and present their own opinions from time to time) is that in human collective societies, truth claims themselves are as meaningful as they are broadly believed - or at least discussed.
That is dealing in some sense of human social meaning (and is also a statement on how hard it is to avoid each other these days). Where as logical positivists are trying to approximate some statement about the validity of perceptions of the universe, perceptions which which themselves can't escape our human contexts for understanding them.
So the logical positivists are discussing tools for gathering meanings the universe immediately cooperates with, where as I'm discussing what humans will co-operate with (and hence what is cognitively meaningful to our social brains). Which I find more interesting... As logical positivism is a boring, old, basic, and unavoidable premise for any reasonable person.
I'm superior, because I found an errant word in the comic and made a bunch of commenters online actually have an interesting discussion. :P j/k
Either that or I'm a kind of troll.
YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?
- Death, Hogfather
Eh just because an individual or a group finds something “meaningful” doesn’t mean, well, anything
Personal beliefs expressed en masse seem to have shaped huge chunks of history and our planet, so…
Agree to disagree.
Did you run this by Clippy? Or at least, by the history of nation states and religious wars?
Because some very unverifiable and in that sense "unreal" beliefs have had some very meaningful and pivotal roles in history and civilization.
Thought-acts and speech acts can make the metaphysical meaningful, and have done so throughout human history.
..... remember how I said our species wasn't soley rational?
Sometimes you just get into a bitchslappin' kind of groove.
Kant is right. We only have empirical evidence of the sensory world, which we know is created by the brain. Ideas that the sensory world represents some objective real world are unfounded metaphysical speculation with no sensory world application.
Not really, no. Our sensory experiences are the brain reacting to objectively real things rather than creating them. We know that they are objectively real because too many people experience them, usually in similar if not identical ways that the chance of it being coincidental or a shared delusion is astronomically remote.
The scientific method + Occam's Razor says the world objectively and verifiably exists outside of our brains, beeyotch! drops mic
The scientific method is a consequence of believing the world around you to be emprically provably real, not the other way around.
Absolute nonsense. That's like saying that you lose your voice in order to fill out a health insurance card as you wait for treatment. Don't put des hoarse before des carte.
Well, drole response I suppose, but there's no way of applying the scientific method without first believing in the non-phenomenal world, so the scientific method can't act as the horse there.
Yeah, someone arguing that there's no objective reality WOULD claim that the best method to objectively prove reality depends on already believing in objective reality.
I've seen coins less circular than your logic.
It never goes anywhere with them. They keep presenting useless skepticism until finally you admit that in theory you could be brain in a jar. Then they "win" and get to claim God.
I assume you are like me. I take the evidence and see where it goes. What they do is they throw away the evidence so they can get the result that they want.
These things break my theory
Me: my theory must be wrong.
Them: you can't really know anything.
My understanding of Kant isn't that the world exists outside of our brain, but that what we perceive as the world can never be determined because we perceive things differently. I mean, many of us don't even see the exact same colors for example. And this can be extended to quantum physics even when you consider that certain things are based on when they are observed.
what we perceive as the world can never be determined because we perceive things differently.
I'd actually argue that that is proof that the world CAN be determined: if several people with different perception and perspectives agree on how something looks, feels, tastes etc, that commonality in spite of differences is proof that the shared experience of something is objectively real.
many of us don't even see the exact same colors for example
But most of us do, which can't be a coincidence.
And this can be extended to quantum physics even when you consider that certain things are based on when they are observed.
Hey! No fair bringing physics to a philosophy discussion! How would you like it if I used football to prove that golf is boring? 😉
commonality
That's a bit of a weak point. It's proven that with propaganda enough people can be made to be convinced of something that can even be very untrue.
Definitely 5 lights there.
Ok? You don't need consensus to determine truth. It is about model making and evidence building.
Is it hot?
Touch it, have someone else touch it, use an IR gun on it, smell it, feel the warmth air around it, put a thermometer on it, get a witness account of how it got warm....
Each piece of data builds confidence. Eventually you get a wonder theory about how it got warm and a model from how it returns back to normal.
Kant: you can't know anything
Also Kant: I know the Christian religion is true
Add Verification Man punching a scientist holding a stack of peer-reviewed studies and that'd describe my weekend trying to get some actual facts onto the Reiki wikipedia page.
Check it out, it's embarrassingly poorly written and there's 16 pages of people getting insulted for trying to propose changes
Oh man nothing better than a good old wiki talk page fight.
All you people are so sure that you can't know anything except your dream logic you call metaphysics.
Nietzsche was right. You can't stand how temporary everything is so you imagine some world where things are rock solid and unchanging. It's like math but for the weak children
How about a kind of Pascal's wager for science?
Either the axioms of science are correct, or reality isn't empirically testable. In the latter case, believing in the the truth won't get you any farther than a false belief in science.
What are the "axioms of science"? List them
I'm not the person you're replying to, nor an expert but wouldn't they be things like:
There is a reality which behaves according to certain principles within time.
Humans experience reality through flawed faculties, but experiences can be aggregated in ways which reduce or eliminate the impact of those flaws.
The more thoroughly those flaws are eliminated from the aggregate, the more reliably predictions can be made about the principles that govern reality.
Those are really just conclusions we have reached not parts we started with.
I guess we need to just adopt the axiom of verification for science to work.
Why not lol
