I believe I have mentioned this before, but if you can find yourself a copy of Tallis' The Knowing Animal, I think you will very much enjoy it.
I think it is his best work, by far, and I have read quite a bit of him. — Manuel
I wrote to Tallis after getting one of his books, and he replied very positively. I will look out for that title! (Looking at the Amazon page, one of the reviews comes from James le Fanu, another UK writer from a medical background, who's book Why Us? also really impressed me, about 10 years ago, which is of a similar genre. ) — Wayfarer
I was reminded of Roger when I read Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (henceforth S&B). Like Roger, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze have the habit of using terms of which they have not the faintest understanding, in order to impress the impressionable. Unlike Roger, they did not grow out of it and, also unlike Roger, they were rewarded not with obscurity but with international fame and the adulation of seemingly intelligent academics the world over.
For many years, Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva et al got away with murder, confident that their readers would have only the slightest acquaintance with the areas of knowledge they expropriated to prop up their ideas and their reputation for scholarship, indeed for omniscience. Few if any real historians took note of Michel Foucault's eccentric periodisations; with a single exception, analytical philosophers did not think of Derrida as someone to engage in a debate about the contemporary significance of J.L. Austin and speech act theory; and for every ten thousand students who learned about Rousseau's ideas from popularisations of Derrida, there was hardly one who had read, and reflected upon, Rousseau's writings for herself.
Eventually the postmodern Theorists started to attract the attention of experts in the disciplines into which they had strayed. Linguists looked at their linguistics and found it littered with elementary errors. Derrida, for example, repeatedly confused the sign as a whole with the signifier and so have his many hundreds of thousands of obedient disciples. This error is one of the cornerstones of his work. Other linguists were amused by the Derrideans' ignorance of linguistics outside of Saussure -- this ignorance perhaps strengthening their confidence in their ability to pronounce on the whole of language. Historians have examined Foucault's egregious versions of the history of thought and have discovered that even the miniscule and eccentric empirical base upon which his broad sweep theories are poised is grossly at variance with the documentary evidence. His periodisation -- crucial to his vision of Western history and of man as `a recent invention' -- would, to take one small example, require Descartes to have lived sometime after he had died, in order to fit into the right episteme. Indeed, one does not have to be much of a scholar to demonstrate that Foucault's epistemes and the so-called ruptures epistemologiques separating them -- the central notions of the book (The Order of Things) that brought him his international fame -- correspond in no way to any historical reality
And finally, I personally think there's an alternative term for what the paper calls 'lived experience', which helps to orientate the discussion more clearly in the context of the philosophical tradition. I wonder if there are any guesses as to what this word might be? — Wayfarer
↪Joshs Yes, I can see you two wouldn't get along. Talis is a reactionary from the post-modernist pov, but then that probably applies to me also :yikes: — Wayfarer
This wouldn't be an isolated case, as there is a whole school of Buddhist thought whose basic approach is reductio ad absurdum:Still, what are your thoughts on using idealism as a rhetorical ploy, along the lines of Stephen Law's "Going Nuclear"? — wonderer1
The Prāsaṅgika view holds reductio ad absurdum of essentialist viewpoints to be the most valid method of demonstrating emptiness of inherent existence, and that conventional things do not have a naturally occurring conventional identity.[1] Further, the Prāsaṅgika argue that when initially attempting to find the correct object of understanding - which is a mere absence or mere negation of impossible modes of existence - one should not use positivist statements about the nature of reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prasa%E1%B9%85gika_according_to_Tsongkhapa
Why do you think that is?Your view reminds me of Madhyamaka Buddhism, but I doubt many scientists would take up a Buddhist philosophy to such a strong extent. — Leontiskos
When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which the authors show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system
some studies have indicated that women tend to be more represented in certain areas of mathematics compared to others. For example, fields such as mathematical biology, mathematical education, statistics, and applied mathematics have seen relatively higher levels of female participation compared to more traditionally male-dominated areas like pure mathematics or theoretical physics.
And finally, I personally think there's an alternative term for what the paper calls 'lived experience', which helps to orientate the discussion more clearly in the context of the philosophical tradition. I wonder if there are any guesses as to what this word might be? — Wayfarer
well, how can a subjective experience be compared to another without being in accordance to a standard of some kind? I think every subjective experience has something to do with objective knowledge...does the knowledge itself become or is/can be subjective when used from/obtained from a single subjective experiences alone?Can one's own subjective experience have anything to do with the objective knowledge? — Corvus
You think whatever I say that you think.
You feel whatever I say that you feel.
You did whatever I say that you did.
Your intentions are whatever I say that your intentions are.
Listen to pretty much any scientist, and this is what they are telling you, directly, or at best less directly. — baker
Possibly because you think like they do already. So you don't feel imposed upon. When scientists say "we", you feel included in that "we". Not everyone does, though. — baker
Where do you get that from??When scientists say "we think X", why are you interpreting that into "You think X, because you think what we tell you you think"? — flannel jesus
Disagreeing with scientists potentially comes with a cost. Like the cost of disagreeing with a doctor, teacher, psychotherapist, boss, anyone who uses science in an argument against you in any way.Surely you can just accept that scientists think X, and you disagree - scientists in general don't imagine nobody disagrees with them.
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