| Look, I think philosophy is important and fundamental, and yes philosophy is a language game. What I don't like is how most philosophers don't actually contribute, in other words don't actually do philosophy. The most philosophical thing I have seen is formal verification software. Like metamath. Philosophers could easily gain a lot of my respect if they switched from natural language philosophy, to slowly formalizing physics, law, norms and values, natural language dictionaries into actual formal concepts, in a collaborative way, so that all philosophy can actually be integrated into a theory. Back to the clocks, what you claim is patently false. It is perfectly possible given 2 types of clock A and B to assess which type of clock is more precise: Let's model an imprecise clock as one that reports as time passed: the actual time passed plus an error term. The error term undergoes a random walk, or diffusion. This means all you have to do is make an ensemble of 2 (or more) clocks of type A: A1 and A2, and similarily 2 (or more) clocks of type B: B1 and B2, reset all clocks and then observe for which type of clock X we have a smaller difference between X1 and X2, as time passes. if the difference in reported time between A1 and A2 wanders away from 0 slower than the difference in reported time betwween B1 and B2 then you know clock type A is more precise. |