"Claimed" he was allergic.

Cough(bullshit)cough.

And that had absolutely nothing to do with my comment, which was addressed toward the subject of the blog post, that being the misapplication of critical thinking.

>It's fine to live it out, but I think you've really misunderstood the point of philosophical discussion if you think that there's no value in discussing ideas from a purely hypothetical perspective.

I never said that. In my first comment I acknowledged that becoming a better thinker is through philosophical speculation is value speculation provides.

>Which is really ironic cause much of what Plato does is discuss ideas from a purely hypothetical perspective.

Hypothetical discussions and speculative discussions aren't the same thing. Allegories are perfectly capable of conveying verifiable truths.

>I think you misunderstand what it means to speculate an idea.

You're fixating on the word speculate unnecessarily. My question was about the alleged total lack of verifiability of philosophy.

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Which he only claimed without evidence after it was discovered he lied about being vaccinated. Regardless, not all the vaccines have the ingredient he is supposedly allergic to. But you already knew that, right?

It depends on what your criteria for ‘truth’ are, which I think is exactly what we’ve been debating here. What degree of uncertainty are you comfortable with? To call a statement ‘true’ does it have to be testable? Repeatable? Is a strong argument good enough?

I think a great deal of philosophy tends to allow for more leeway here than standard scientific practice, and you seem to have stricter criteria than the average philosopher. Personally I think propositions arrived at via the scientific method are probably the ideal form for truth but that for certain questions this isn’t always a possible method of investigation—or not possible at this moment in history. To me, that doesn’t make the ‘speculative’ answers any less interesting or valuable, at least as possibilities, but yeah they could be wrong

>I'm well aware of special relativity

I'm not the one calling differences caused by separate frames of reference "variations over time"

>Variations of location, time, and relative velocity are immaterial to objective reality.

If differences in frames of reference weren't material to objective reality they would be unnecessary to describe objective reality. As you are no doubt aware General Relativity is necessary to correctly describe reality.

>You think everything Plato said was purely speculation?

Yes, they're literally called Allegories.

>should be lived and applied

I think you misunderstand what it means to speculate an idea. A speculation is forming a theory. You cannot prove or falsify a theory with anecdotal experience because people see the world in such different ways.

It's fine to live it out, but I think you've really misunderstood the point of philosophical discussion if you think that there's no value in discussing ideas from a purely hypothetical perspective. Which is really ironic cause much of what Plato does is discuss ideas from a purely hypothetical perspective.

Even the hard sciences are the domains of inferred causality.

Hume remarks about billiard balls

>if I see one billiard ball rolling toward another, how do I know that the second ball will move when it is struck?

That is, experience is a necessary precursor to knowledge. And our observations are limited to only the confines of the single experiment from which they emerge. Repeated measurements add evidence of a causal outcome, but the state space of our observations is necessarily a subspace of the entire space of observable outcomes and we also assume the state space is time-invariant. We can therfore never be absolutely certain about anything because we can never be absolutely certain about the space we haven't sampled (which is admittedly a bit of a tautology)

Variations of location, time, and relative velocity are immaterial to objective reality. They're not "subjective truths", they're second-order measurements.

I'm well aware of special relativity Mr. 200 IQ.

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TLDR:

Some people mistake contrarianism for critical thinking. Aaron Rogers is one of them.

I read the article FYI mods.

Again. I’m sorry to all the philosophy students, grad students and others out there trying to ‘make it’ using their degree. I’d remind them first of all that Schlick and co of the logical positivist fame lived at the poverty level for years and taught in classrooms without heat for atleast a few years due to the economic situation after the Paris peace treaty. Thats dedication to knowledge or perhaps, dare I say it, love of wisdom?

Anyway, I digress, but this idea that every one who graustes is going to be getting traction and making a living doing pop philosophy in blogs and on YouTube is just awful to me. This article is so bad and so amateur I can’t tolerate it. It doesn’t understand logical positivism, it doesn’t explain it correctly. and it certainly doesn’t offer a new insight into it. Thsi of course woudlnt make it past screening for a journal. Yet here it is confusing people who perhaps aren’t familiar with logical positivism and the Vienna circle.

‘Engage with the article’ I have and I won’t bother typing up any more about its specifics than I have to. It’s fundamentally flawed. It’s written to keep fresh content on a Blog and i suppose that’s all we can say. The author didn’t respect the topic enough to give it the time it deserves and the result is nonsense (allusion intended).

I’m not a logical positivist apologist but I just want to say this is so poor I can’t even tolerate not saying saying to warn the rest of you to steer clear of this mess.

The fallacy fallacy doesn't apply to arguments that are indeed fallacies but rather that appear to be fallacies.

Principia Mathematica and subsequent set theories don't start from things you can count, they start from the empty set and the non-empty set. It's similar to basing a metaphysics on "I think therefore I am".

So you think the scientific method is the only way to verify truth?

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Sure there are philosophical sub fields—probably most notably analytic philosophies of cognition and perception—that are amenable to science, and often the philosophers working in these fields are in dialogue with scientists. But this is pretty far from being representative of the field as a whole.

As far as I’m concerned physicists are as welcome to the party as anyone else but you’re just not going to be settling via the scientific method whether Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment or Schopenhauer’s account of willing are accurate takes on the world anytime soon.

>Not every question can be settled with airtight logic or an experiment; sometimes all you have is a better or worse argument

From the most skeptical point of view, all we ever have is a better or worse argument. That's the basis of statistics, rooted in probability theory (and very Humean).

We can only sample from observable space across time. Our counterfactual probabilities may be vanishingly small, but they can never be zero.

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I'm not talking about "variations over time". I'm talking about getting two different measurements depending on your frame of reference.

>what even are you saying, my dude?

I'm saying you should probably learn the conceptual basics of special relativity.

Variations over time aren't "subjective truth", what even are you saying, my dude?

The fallacy fallacy is a dumb fallacy, because the purpose of the initial claim is to hold up an idea as true. If the claim is a fallacy, then there is no longer direct support for the idea, which directly leads to having no support to believe such a thing. The fallacy fallacy is just Gin Rummy in The Boondocks rambling: "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", yeah no shit, but you don't go believing there are invisible Russian elves in your oven heating things for you, because you don't have EVIDENCE they're there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVQB1TVcD2k

The physical universe itself changes length, position, casual order of events, and the rate of the passage of time depending on your frame of reference. Subjective truths are still true.

Except there is plenty of philosophy that can be applied and tested. It's incorrect to think speculation and unverifiability are inherent to philosophy. Philosophy originally included the investigation of the natural world.

It seems to me the only reason to separate speculative philosophy from the rest and gatekeep it as the only "true philosophy" is to retain the pretense of authority on things like metaphysics compared to physicists who are also capable of engaging in philosophy.

Truth in that framework is entirely meaningless.

Big oof.