| I agree with you within the 'academic' context, but that doesn't address my main issue of whether this same approach can or should be used in a 'broader' context. Could it be that on societal level creating a separate category like 'racist' is important and valuable, even if it's technically a 'fallacious' abstraction? We don't always have the time to properly get to the bottom of things, assuming all of us are even capable of doing so, so we're going to grasp for salient categories anyways. It vaguely reminds me of the discussions here about functional programming versus object-oriented programming. Alongside the heated debate for and against either approach (and the definitions of the 'true' version of each), there's always someone who points out something like 'closures are just a poor man's objects', and 'objects are just a poor man's closures'. Even if, for the sake of argument, the differences between FP and OP are not as fundamental or clear-cut as they seem, I'd argue that for me and many others these discussions are very useful. I'd never get out of my 'OOP box' to explore FP if it wasn't contrasted and put in a whole separate category and given a bunch of tantalizing pros that pull me to investigate. Isn't 'truth' really just another abstraction, but one we cannot (yet) dive into to find the underlying 'truth'? What I mean is, we stop at a certain point not only because it's where we end up at for the time being, but also because it's a useful abstraction. And to be clear, I'm arguing this primarily in the context of the already very murky and messy field of the social sciences / psychology, where definitions are a lot less definitive than in physics or mathematics, and where they have a much more immediate effect on society. (honestly, I'm not sure I'm disagreeing with you, and I'm sorry if I'm perhaps not making much sense. I'm not usually this openly... explorative in my comments here. Your comment(s) just tickled my brain in a good way.) |
Thanks for the reply. I just now saw this (haven't been nearly as active on here for the past week).
I enjoyed reading your reply. I had just one comment back:
> Isn't 'truth' really just another abstraction, but one we cannot (yet) dive into to find the underlying 'truth'?
It's not, because 'truth' is a logical construct, an a priori kind of concept, so whatever that 'truth' is that we find underneath what was once thought to be truth would just be a more fundamental truth (e.g., we discover that photons are actually an imbalance in another dimension or something).