| > 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. |
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.