| > I do not understand what this is supposed to mean or demonstrate. Parent said 'Stating "there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy" while then going on to do the same seems incongruent'. I was just refuting this. It's essentially the same argument as "everything is philosophy" or "everything is politics", technically true but only in a vacuous sense. > That something is "overloaded" (amphiboly) I don't mean this. If I say "automorphism", I mean one thing and one thing only, because formal languages allow us to have precise definitions. Natural language doesn't have that. Words like 'truth', 'beauty', 'justice' are vague, imprecise meshes of meaning, so much that making precise statements about them is extremely problematic even conceptually. > Formalization isn't magic. To formalize something, you have to get to a place where you have a clear enough and correct enough understanding so that you can express it in that language. I completely agree. One of the major contributions of philosophy is that it attempts to untangle the mess. I have already said that I find this useful and productive. I'm not bashing philosophers, here. > And in any case, philosophers do employ formalization when they think it useful. It isn't always. Frankly, even mathematicians, practitioners of the most formal of sciences, don't use formal methods to express their _reasoning_ in most cases. I don't think these two cases are even remotely comparable. Mathematicians certainly do write informally when they write proofs, but that's only a way of communicating the result to another human. Any proof could be, given enough time, be rewritten completely formally, for example in a way that could be checked by a machine. If it can't, then it's wrong. Formalization employed by philosophers is essentially just a writing device they are using in order to prove a point. The subtext "we could break this down to a deduction tree, but it's too boring to actually do that" that underlies a mathematical proof is completely missing. Many authors have written literature using mathematical notation. It doesn't make their books math, for the same reason. |
I'm not convinced that we need to reach for the everything-is-philosophy hammer in order to make a reasonable case that we are doing philosophy when we argue that, for example:
> Words like 'truth', 'beauty', 'justice' are vague, imprecise meshes of meaning, so much that making precise statements about them is extremely problematic even conceptually.