coberst wrote:Eris is mistaken, however, it is the same mistake that most people make and we can easily comprehend why that mistake is made.
That made me laugh. I only wish it were for better reasons.
Western traditional philosophy has since Newton made such a splash concentrated on factual knowledge.
Dude, do you realise that western philosophy since Newton has undergone a massive and fundamental split into two disciplines that are so wildly different that members of each branch regard the others as not only misguided but completely wasting their time? I keep specifying whether I'm talking about continental or analytic philosophy, and there's a reason for that. It's not the names that vary: it's the first principles of enquiry.
No, of course you don't realise that. History of philosophy isn't something you'd find in bookjackets and abstracts.
This concentration has left us ill prepared to intellectual deal with human affairs. The world of nature, i.e. fact knowledge is engulfed in simplicities and regular order. This concentration on objective facts leaves us with a lack of comprehension required in dealing with chaos and multilogical complexities of human affairs, i.e. the human sciences.
Take even first semester general chemistry and see if you can associate science with "simplicities and regular order" without breaking into a smile. Science is rigourous and rational, true, but simple? It is to laugh.
If studying the natural sciences leaves us with a lack of comprehension of the "human sciences" it's only because we haven't applied ourselves sufficiently. We're profoundly uncomfortable as a species with the idea we might be able to describe ourselves scientifically, but that just means we haven't, not that we can't.
The telos of objective knowledge is truth. The telos of subjective comprehension is meaning. Empirical facts seek truth, meaning seeks significance and value. To comprehend men and women one must discover how they create meaning in their life. Meaning happens at multiple levels; it goes all the way from the meaning of life, to the meaning of wealth, to the meaning of social status. The quest for meaning is a search for a form of life that is worth living.
Define "meaning." Normally I wouldn't semantically nitpick, but a few decades ago this fellow names Willard Van Orman Quine demonstrated that meaning is an illicit concept that makes use of a viciously circular definition, and made multiple proposals for how to build up something more reasonable, leading to things like the modern theories of truth and empirical semantics. Of course if you had studied any modern philosophy, you would have known that.
In the human sciences we do not focus upon causality and existence in the same manner as for objective knowledge. In the human sciences all is symbolic and artificial. We create our meaning and often it is very subjective and not amenable to the methods of objective knowledge. We locate meaning within a context. The context is historical and complex and time related. When we try to comprehend the human reality we are trying to access our position within a context and the bigger our scope of knowledge the large will be the historic context in which we place our self to create meaning.
I'm too tired to deal with that right now. Suffice to say your ramblings are making about as much sense as ever. You seem to be trying to generalise the context principle, or maybe are getting Hegelian again. It seems fairly vacuous though: your words are real ones, and your sentences for the most part grammatical, but you're failing to cohere.
So you have no degree whatsoever then? Weren't you claiming to be some sort of retired engineer in another thread? I thought people typically required many years of professional training and experience to be qualified to define what constituted science. Oh, and learn how to use the quote function so you don't mistype your post when you quote me next time. 