Modern epistemology simply says that there must always exist a computable procedure to verify the justification of formal knowledge. Otherwise, it is not formal knowledge. — alcontali

What I take from modern philosophy is that most knowledge and the most important kinds of knowledge are not only not formal but not explicit at all. Formal knowledge is charming. It's a little star that twinkles in the darkness. 2 + 2 = 4.

When you're doing philosophy, you can focus on various subjects, various types of phenomena, etc. For example, there's philosophy of (or about) science, philosophy of (or about) art, philosophy of (or about) morality, etc. Some of those focuses have unique names, like aesthetics (philosophy of art) and ethics (philosophy of morality). Philosophy of science doesn't have a unique name, by the way. It's simply known as philosophy of science.

Well, epistemology is simply philosophy of knowledge. The focus is on questions like "What is knowledge," "What are the criteria for saying that we know something," etc. — Terrapin Station

Thanks, folks, we found a winner.

Thanks, TS.

I strongly believe that "the most intolerant wins".

You change the world, bit by bit, by being stubborn, intransigent, intolerant, and recalcitrant. — alcontali

Albert Einstein, Karl Guttenberg, Keppler, Galileo, the inventor of the Steam Engine, the sheep, the wheel, intromarital sex, the Information Superhighway, were all stubborn derrieres?

Then again, Ghenghis Khan was, as well as Lenin, Hitler, Moses, Jesus, and God.

I know philosophers have fantasized about perfect languages which would allow for god machines with which we could crank out truth after truth after truth... — jellyfish

That would not be possible anyway. Knowledge cannot be discovered by machines. It can be verified by machines, however. Furthermore, only empirical knowledge purports to somehow correspond to the truth.

What I take from modern philosophy is that most knowledge and the most important kinds of knowledge are not only not formal but not explicit at all. Formal knowledge is charming. — jellyfish

The problem with informal knowledge is that it has no objective justification. Therefore, its status as knowledge is necessarily uncertain.

That's not a view I agree with. So how would it be the case that you find that everywhere in the world?

I completely understand why you’ve made this point. However, “Everywhere” here doesn’t mean literally everywhere. This is the compartmentalised geographic everywhere, meaning in every country. What is trying to be said here, is that the majorities of most countries would agree with at the very least, not having unnecessary suffering inflicted upon themselves individually, as a community, as a country. The majority of people on the planet probably have at least one person in their life who will definitely not want them unnecessarily harmed, whether it is yourself, parents, family, friends, employers, colleagues and even random good natured strangers who try and apply that to everyone. Even the parents of murderers are still prone to not wishing anymore unnecessary harm to their child than they’ve already caused for themselves by committing murder.

@StreetlightX Might I ask that this debate about moral nihilism/relativism/whatever be split into its own thread? Would rather it not swamp this one. Thanks in advance.

So are you going to publish your book someday?

I mean technically it's self-published online right now. I don't have any particular plans to get like a professional publisher to put it in dead tree format or anything like that, though if somehow that happened that'd be cool I guess, but I'm not looking to make or spend any money on the project.

I am hoping to get some pseudo-peer-review from folks here on this forum once I'm done with it. (Over the course of this year I restarted the project from scratch, and have just recently finished my first pass of writing it all out in the new format, and now I'm spending the rest of the year going back through 300-something notes to myself I've accumulated over the past decade-plus to make sure I didn't miss writing about anything I thought was important, and then when I'm done with that I'll ask for proper feedback).

:up:

New thread here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6909/ethics

:clap: :pray:

The problem with informal knowledge is that it has no objective justification. Therefore, its status as knowledge is necessarily uncertain. — alcontali

You seem to imply that certainty requires justification. I don't think so. To even begin to justify is to assume that there is a community out there, a world out there. One has to already speak a language. Such certainties can't be justified, since we need them in order to justify.

Thing is, everyone knows something. Even if they don't know why that knowledge is justified.

Think about the classical division between coherence and correspondence theories of truth. Let's assume a debate between a strong coherence theorist and a strong correspondence theorist. Both can't be correct, yet both possess knowledge. The inability to codify or explicate the foundations of knowledge doesn't militate against the acquisition of knowledge.

It may have been interesting to have done the same poll on the old forum.

Here, less than half of correspondents have done any serious study.

Probably the same demographic attends. We just remember the exemplary and contrast it to the usual.

Indeed.

Here, less than half of correspondents have done any serious study. — Banno

True, but I count about 20 or so people involved in this discussion and 31 polled, so most who polled also contributed some comments about it. Few of these are the contributors I would suspect have done some serious study, so I'm not so sure the poll is reflective of the community, but you may be right.

Of equal interest to me is the very premise behind such a question. This being an anonymous site, no one has any constraint to give an honest answer, so respondents, I think, will divide into three camps.

Those who see their best interests served by claiming some qualifications (whether real or not is irrelevant here).

Those who feel that they cannot sustain such an impression (again whether real but forgotten or not real makes no difference) and so had better go with a robust defence of auto didactia.

Those who feel that either claim (again no matter how truthful) automatically makes them seem like someone in either of the first two camps and so refrains from saying anything.

I suspect that serious students are here may well disproportionately fall into the last category and so be less well represented in the poll (presuming most who vote also comment, or course).

Interesting. I would assume that anyone professing any interest in philosophy would already have come to terms with the non-negotiability of truth.

Those who feel that they cannot sustain such an impression (again whether real but forgotten or not real makes no difference) and so had better go with a robust defence of auto didactia — Isaac

Or they are the types, who for whatever reason reject the idea that formal training is important/beneficial for doing philosophy. (Fear of brainwashing seems to be a phobia possible of explaining that for some.)

True, but I count about 20 or so people involved in this discussion and 31 polled, so most who polled also contributed some comments about it. Few of these are the contributors I would suspect have done some serious study, so I'm not so sure the poll is reflective of the community, but you may be right.

Of equal interest to me is the very premise behind such a question. This being an anonymous site, no one has any constraint to give an honest answer, so respondents, I think, will divide into three camps.

Those who see their best interests served by claiming some qualifications (whether real or not is irrelevant here).

Those who feel that they cannot sustain such an impression (again whether real but forgotten or not real makes no difference) and so had better go with a robust defence of auto didactia.

Those who feel that either claim (again no matter how truthful) automatically makes them seem like someone in either of the first two camps and so refrains from saying anything.

I suspect that serious students are here may well disproportionately fall into the last category and so be less well represented in the poll (presuming most who vote also comment, or course). — Isaac

People have a tendency online, especially in anonymous contexts, to be skeptical of any claims of achievement or status. There are a number of reasons for this, but I suspect that one of the primary reasons is that people tend to assume that the anonymous people they're interacting with must be more or less in the same boat as they are.

It's rather pointless to claim any particular achievements or status online. The vast majority of the time people either just ignore it or they get pissy about it.

1.) The evidence is out there for anyone to see, that of all the trades available for human endeavor, philosophers tend to pick on each other moreso than others.

2.) The more one exposes himself to the thoughts of philosophers, the more he tends to think himself worthy of being the copy of one. And the more one adopts the philosophy of an established author, the more he relinquishes the philosophy of others, at the real risk of becoming the proverbial one-trick pony in the world’s metaphysical rodeo.

3.) I’m never going to tell anybody how much philosophy I’ve studied, because I’m self-antiquated by 2.) and thereby I am deathly afraid of 1.)

This being an anonymous site, no one has any constraint to give an honest answer, — Isaac

Thing is, unless I'm reading the site interface wrong, there's no way to tell who voted for what, only how many people voted for each option, so unless a voter also comments to say how they voted, voting is just throwing an anonymous token in a bucket.

I will say that the results so far surprise me some. I was expecting mostly autodidacts, then students, then decreasing numbers of the increasingly higher degrees, and while there are mostly autodidacts and degrees in descending order as expected, I'm surprised that there are no students or associate's degrees.

I'm surprised that there are no students or associate's degrees. — Pfhorrest

I dunno about the associate's degrees (maybe those are just in general less common?) but I assume students of philosophy share at least one reason with professors of philosophy for not being here: they're already philosophizing all day long, plus homework and/or grading, and the last thing you want to do is get into another conversation about free will.

I assume that's similar in most professions.

I will say that the results so far surprise me some. I was expecting mostly autodidacts, then students, then decreasing numbers of the increasingly higher degrees, and while there are mostly autodidacts and degrees in descending order as expected, I'm surprised that there are no students or associate's degrees. — Pfhorrest

Hm, I don't post much, but I might have voted, as voting as a low-effort activity. But I couldn't because what formal education I have doesn't easily fit into the poll.

First, the subdivision of school/university isn't easily translatable. I'm Austrian, have an elementary school, some sort of middle school, and then some sort of commercial college. After that I went to University where I earned a "Magister" (which is probably somewhat comparable to a Master but in reality might be somewhere between a Bachelor and Master, not at all sure).

Next problem I have is how to map "philosophy" onto my education. Philosophy wasn't part of the elementary school education. "Philosophy" was part of the syllabus in Middle school only in the sense that it was integrated in "German" as part of German/Austrian literary history. It could have been part of my education had I stayed on the school for 4 more years (roughly a highschool equivalent - and I would have had to choose either a humanities or a nat-sci branch) , but I changed to a commercial college, where philosophy wasn't part of the syllabus much (you don't get through a commercial college without hearing about "the invisible Hand" and stuff like that).

However, philosophy was a huge part of may sociology studies at University. Social philosophy (utopias, anarchy, etc.), philosophy of science (even if you didn't take the specifically targeted courses, which I did, you'd hear about Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, etc.), and depending on the theories you end up interested in you'll need to familiarise yourself with certain philosophers, though secondary literature usually suffices. (Marx, Husserl, Derrida...)

I'd say "some incidental university classes" would maybe fit what I went through? I definitely don't have a degree in philisophy, though my univerity degree has included the most philosophy, formally. But it's not easily comparable to either a Bachelor or a Master (though it's definitely not a doctorate). And some of my philosophical knowledge is audtodidact (e.g. whatever little I know about Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Sartre...).

As it is, I finished my degree over 20 years ago and have never done anything with it - I'm both out of the loop and unpractised, and I'm not confident at all. I can read logical notation but sometimes need a table to remind myself what some of the less frequent signs mean, and it's slooooowwwwww going in any case. An autodidact with the adequate passion will know more than I do.

So what should I vote? Autodidact? Some incidental college classes? I chose not to vote at all.

I did worry that differences in educational systems would make this poll difficult to answer for some. In my American English dialect "college" and "university" are roughly synonyms. (There are two-year colleges, which give Associate's degrees, that are not universities, but they are equivalent to the lower division of a Bachelor's degree, and many people do two years there, then finish up the last two years of their Bachelor's degree at a proper four-year university; I did that myself).

In any case, since it sounds like you didn't major in philosophy, but studied some of it as coursework in another degree, I would put "some incidental college classes", which is meant to include that kind of scenario. (I would likewise answer "some incidental college classes" if the same kind of poll were asked about sociology or cultural anthropology or religious studies, for example, since I did a bunch of those as electives alongside my philosophy major).

How much philosophical education do you have? — Pfhorrest

I've been reading (and more importantly living) philosophy for about 25 years. My formal education is in something more objective and less fun.

"Some incidental college classes" would have been my first choice, even though it didn't occur to me that "university" and "college" could be synonyms. Thanks for the clarification. I voted now.

I would assume that anyone professing any interest in philosophy would already have come to terms with the non-negotiability of truth. — Pantagruel

What about the entire pragmatism movement?

Or they are the types, who for whatever reason reject the idea that formal training is important/beneficial for doing philosophy. — Artemis

Yeah, I think a lot of people confuse philosophy (small p) with Philosophy (capital P). You can train in both, but you can only really claim authority in the latter. Philosophy (as the imfamous badinage goes) really is the history of who said what when, and people who haven't learnt it aren't going to have a clue no matter what their native skill. Contrarily, philosophy with a small p is more like a skill, one could be trained in it (and so good), but equally one might simply be natively good at it, or train themselves. And yes, those who choose to get trained in it formally will inevitably pick up a bit of 'brainwashing' along with the methodology. It's not hard to break out of, but I think it's naive to image some kind of culturally neutral 'how to think' instruction could ever happen.

:cool: