When your scientific theory runs into trouble, either it's unable to explain certain things that were observed, or it just gave false predictions with regards to what you were supposed to observe, you generally have two options. You can 1) modify/expand your theory - so that it accomodates to the newly gathered data; or you 2) reject it and adopt a new one.
Introduction: The Discovery of Neptune
It's never completely obvious which option one ought to choose. For example, in 1821 French astronomer Alexis Bouvard published tables of the orbit of Uranus, making predictions of future positions of the planet based on Newton's laws of motion and gravitation (Bouvard 1821). However, subsequent observations revealed his predictions to be wrong - his tables were substantially off from what was actually observed.
In 1954, Aldous Huxley wrote an essay, in which he elaborated on his psychadelic experience under the influence of mescaline. Now, the work has gathered strong reactions for its evaluation of psychadelic drugs as facilitators of mystical insight with great potential benefits for science and philosophy.
For a general summary, Wisecrack has a great short take on the work:
We won't stress over any of that here. Rather, I want to take a closer look at the analogy itself, perception as a kind of door - what kind of door and where does it lead to? Why a door in the first place? What's up with the wall?
Not sure. I was always interested in questions about reality, I mean, what is reality? What is the world? Is that world mediated through our senses? Does our cognition actively process sensory data into a completely different whole? Is my world, the human world, the modern-millenial-world, the stupid-philosopher-jerking-off-to-arguments-world, is it completely detached from the world as it is?
Then I gradually realized that those questions are too big for me. For anyone, maybe. - ♫But together we stand a chance!♫- We need to communicate. Develop ideas together. Poke into each other's arguments. Get rid of bad ones. Heap up good ones, and build up a cathedral of knowledge.
Would be cool if we could just hook up to a cloud and directly transmit those ideas from one brain to another. But we can't, I think. So, we have to mediate those ideas. Through language. Sigh.
Philosophy of language! My passion. My curse. My excuse, so I can pretend like I'm doing something useful with life.
That's what I'm doing, I guess. In life. And I try to be useful, so I transmit those ideas via Youtube. But certainly, I could be more effective at transmiting those ideas? I guess I try to have fun with the channel. Do a bunch of stupid shit. Can't help myself, really.
Anyways, that's my long-term goal. Get some neat ideas out there, minimize the spread of fallacies that relate to language and stuff. Maybe provide some useful tools for viewers, who'll know to use them better.
For now, I just want to finish processing Wittgenstein's ideas (still reading Philosophical investigations) and find some sort of synthesis with another author that completely gripped me, Merleau-Ponty. They have a lot in common and their ideas do provide a different, a more dynamic, a more fruitful world-view than the rigid, static ontologies of modern science.
Language as a organic system of localized rules of useage? Consciousness as an embodied self, whose dynamics are shifting in relation to situational context? Dynamic semantics? A dynamic world?
After I finish that study, I'll familiarize myself with recent scientific developments and start presenting them through the lens of the acquired philosophical perspective on things. Oh, and meanwhile, I'll be posting a bunch of stupid shit, because that makes me happy:
I goofed around with some recent videos, but now it's time to get down to business and cover some real philosophical topics. Before shooting I'll be sharing my thoughts and findings here, so that I'll give myself some time ot process and get some feedback from you, guys.
The philosophy of language lectures opened up the path to philosophy of mind, I'll start with an inspection of behaviorism, gestalt psychology and phenomenology.
An easy way to approach those topics, I think, is through certain case-studies of mental phenomena, such as aphantasia, the blindness of the mind's eye.
He's sharp. He's cute. He's Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important philosophers of modern philosophy!
In this video we look at his Tractatus, his first major work and only one to be published in his lifetime. Basically we could say that he wanted - just like Bertrand Russell - to find out how our thoughts relate to reality. In an attempt to answer this question he put forth the "Picture Theory of Language".
I try to give an easily approachable lecture that serves as an introduction to Tractatus. In the second part of the video I examine the task of his logical analysis and portray how exactly he imagined science to construct true sentences of the world by deriving at the so-called "simple objects", the elementary particles of reality. A true sentence, in this view, would be the stated relation between signs for those particles, that would reflect their relation in reality.
The logical empiricists, also known as the "Vienna circle", took the ideas of Tractatus and constructed a very interesting variation of Wittgenstein's ideas, that I will present in the next lecture - on the dispute between Rudolf Carnap and Martin Heidegger.
What do these words mean – and – who gets to decide?
This posts serves as an introduction to semantics, the linguistic and philosophical study of meaning in language. It also serves as an introduction to the fresher and more interesting problems in modern philosophy of language.
It’s common for people to sometimes just assume that meanings are these fixed things that never change and hence words are always to be understood in just a certain fixed sense that is dictated by definitions or the origin of a word. We’ll see how that holds up.
This post is a short introduction to two influential arguments in the scientific realism debate (basically this is a transcription of the attached video):
When you think about the world, at some point you have to ask yourself – what to make of science and the supposed body of knowledge it has acquired?
Is science merely a very successful tool for controlling nature, but says nothing about the underlying structure of the world? Or do certain scientific theories at least to some degree capture the actual truth?
The answer to this question determines how you are going to view the mind, think about language and talk about the metaphysics of space and time. Where you’re going to position scientific beliefs in your philosophical system, will have a significant effect on it.
The most commonly held view (at least by people in general) is that yes, scientific theories do tell us the truth, even if it’s just an approximation of what the world is actually like. We call this view scientific realism, which normally consists of the claim that:
“Our best scientific theories about the world are approximately true – an approximation of what the world is actually like."
