[Erlich_Bachman]

You seem to assume that any process reasoning or thinking has to be scientific to be useful. A very dubious proposition.

Given your example, thinking about who is beautiful and who isn't (not "Scientific Study", just thinking) would be pointless is well, and in reality, in practical objective reality of a lot of people, isn't.

> quickly leading to reductions to the absurd such as here.

That is the whole point of the original thought experiment, it shows exactly that.

But it leads there by showing not that the question itself is wrong. But by showing that if you try to apply scientific thinking to everything, you end up with absurdity. That there are many areas of life where intuition is a much more suited, practical, and result-rich method of thinking.

[Blikkentrekker]

> You seem to assume that any process reasoning or thinking has to be scientific to be useful. A very dubious proposition.

No, in fact, I clearly said that they were useful but not scientific.

My problem with The Ship of Theseus, is that it prætends to be scientific, whereas it is merely a futile quibble of semantics.

> Giving your example, thinking about who is beautiful and who isn't (not "Scientific Study", just thinking) would be pointless is well, and in reality, in practical objective reality of a lot of people, isn't.

Indeed it isn't. Now imagine the existence of some thought experiment by a philosopher who tries to use deductive logic to decide what is and isn't beautiful absent any rigorous definition of beauty and thus indeed ends up stuck.

I would indeed call that a very futile exercise, so I called The Ship of Theseus.

[dragonwriter]

> My problem with The Ship of Theseus, is that it prætends to be scientific, whereas it is merely a futile quibble of semantics.

It doesn't pretend to be scientific (it does not purport to offer or relate to testable empirical hypotheses), it is a philosophical thought exercise illustrating that the concept of identity of a composite of mutable composition (pretty much every concrete thing in the real world) is arbitrary.

[guyomes]

The Ship of Theseus is a quite old thought exercise. At that time, science and philosophy were not as separated as today. Actually, after reading the nice comic book Logicomix [0], I learned that the philosophical thought exercise of Wittgenstein, Russel and others, on trying to rationalize the world at the beginning of the 20th century, is actually what lead to a fundamental axiomatic redefinition of mathematics themselves. So it seems far stretch to call philosophical thought experiment not scientific.

I agree that it is not scientific in the modern sense, after Karl Popper introduced the concept of falsifiability in 1935 [1], shortly after Hilbert advocated for rigorous proofs in mathematics in 1917 [2]. Although at that point, it is mostly a matter of vocabulary, thought experiments seem necessary for the advance of science.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bold_hypothesis

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_program

[Erlich_Bachman]

> The Ship of Theseus, is that it prætends to be scientific

How? Doesn't seem to me that most people think of it that way, but maybe I am not aware of some things. How can it even pretend be scientific when even the basic category in which it's placed is "a thought experiment"?

[Igelau]

> it pr(e)tends to be scientific, whereas it is merely a futile quibble of semantics.

It doesn't pretend to be scientific. The question predates science.

> I... My... I... I...

Identity, identity, identity, identity!