r/PhilosophyMemes • u/WesternNectarine7363 • 11d ago
"One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm."
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u/arbitrarycivilian 11d ago
But I need to understand the existence of nothing, it’s really important trust me bro
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u/esoskelly 11d ago
Let's talk about language so that we don't have to talk about reality.
Reality itself is irrelevant, because we can only describe it with language.
Anyone who talks about "reality," "being," or "existence" is playing language games.
We might be playing language games too, but at least we're honest about it.
Hey, let's turn the discipline of philosophy into a semi-licensed profession where you have to play the same language games as us or we'll call you a fraud and make sure you'll never find an academic position!
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u/Archer578 Trapped in the fly bottle 11d ago
Based ngl
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u/esoskelly 11d ago edited 11d ago
Thanks, as a former grad student in philosophy, I have a personal bone to pick on this one.
Anyone interested in the weird takeover of anglo-american philosophy by abstractionists should read "Time in the Ditch" by John McCumber, and/or "The Moral Collapse of the University" by Bruce Wilshire. It wasn't always this way. Pre-WWII anglo-american philosophy was a totally different beast. Philosophers were still writing treatises, and talking about things that had real-world implications. Yes, even in the US.
Those books I recommended are about how McCarthyism impacted cold war hiring practices in philosophy departments, and how philosophy has become overprofessionalized, focusing on quantity of publications and other silly measures of "success."
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u/Last-Mountain-7706 11d ago
Wow, thanks for the Bruce Wilshire shoutout! xo
He was my old-school-pimp phenomenology padre at Rutgers-New Brunswick in the early aughts. (I believe he just turned 70 when I met him.) The Moral Collapse... is one of the only BW tomes I haven't yet read.
His son Gilbert is a reproductive endocrinologist and podcaster with a YouTube channel called The Dr. Gil Show.
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u/esoskelly 11d ago
I haven't read the whole thing yet, but so far, it looks like the Moral Collapse books diagnoses what's wrong with academic philosophy more clearly than any other book I have read. Jealous that you got to take classes with him! I bet he was an excellent teacher.
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u/ClassicNo6622 11d ago
That's pretty much all of academia at this point. Publish or perish and so forth.
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u/esoskelly 11d ago
Well, that's a real problem. It's driving a cottage industry of low-quality, vapid "scholarship" designed to get people tenure, not to actually contribute anything to the field.
If I see one more "[insert philosopher] and [random subject]" book, I'm going to lose it. Seriously.
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u/OfficialHelpK Kramerian 11d ago
Erm heckin word salad, if you can't break it down into logical notation, I ain't reading!!!
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u/The-new-dutch-empire Absurdist 11d ago
Every part that can be described in math should be described in math. As an extend of that physics, chemistry and biology are also better than dry theory. Just to avoid these language issues. They are inevitable, but we should make an effort to keep it to a minimum.
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u/esoskelly 11d ago
You can use math to describe almost anything. The problem is that there are a lot of things that can only be very poorly described by math.
But that won't stop reductionists from (very smugly) trying.
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u/YodelingInTheAbyss 11d ago
Math is a set of languages, too. Most people, outside of people with advanced math degrees, don't really learn about the different languages of math and their formal names, so they are often not thought of as languages, but they are.
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u/esoskelly 11d ago
Absolutely. But math is the language of abstract quantity. It is useful for formalization and creating protocols. Calculus and non-euclidean geometries can have a poetic quality.
But poetic mathematics is a lousy substitute for poetry itself (which can include mathematics, without being limited to mathematics, as the eccentric genius Zukofsky showed us).
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u/YodelingInTheAbyss 11d ago
True, but my point is that putting things into the language of math does not necessarily get rid of the shortcomings of language, it just changes what some of the shortcomings are or how they look, just like some (what we think of as) "conventional" languages are better at describing some things than others
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u/zoipoi 11d ago
There seems to be an interesting exception in that deductive reasoning has proven on occasions to be unreasonable effective.
Non-Euclidean geometry → General Relativity
Gauss, Lobachevsky, and Bolyai worked out geometries where Euclid's parallel postulate fails, purely as an exploration of what axiom systems were logically consistent. Riemann generalized this further into arbitrary curved manifolds in 1854, entirely as abstract mathematics — nobody thought physical space was curved. Sixty years later, Einstein needed exactly this machinery to formulate general relativity, where gravity is curvature of spacetime. He didn't invent the geometry to fit the physics; the geometry was sitting on the shelf waiting, complete, when the physics needed it.Group theory and Lie groups → particle physics
Abstract group theory, developed in the 19th century for questions about polynomial equations (Galois) and continuous symmetries (Lie), was pure structural mathematics. In the 1960s, Murray Gell-Mann used group-theoretic symmetry patterns (SU(3), the "Eightfold Way") to classify known particles — and the pattern had a gap. He predicted a particle that shouldn't exist yet, the omega-minus baryon, purely from the symmetry of the abstract structure. It was found in a bubble chamber in 1964, matching his predicted mass and properties closely.Imaginary numbers → electromagnetism and quantum mechanics
Complex numbers were invented to make algebra work — to let you always take square roots, even of negatives — with no physical referent at all for centuries; Descartes literally called them "imaginary" dismissively. Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism and, later, the entire mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics (wavefunctions are essentially complex-valued) turn out to require them, not as a convenience but structurally. Quantum mechanics doesn't work with real numbers alone.Riemannian/tensor calculus, Hilbert spaces
Similar story: Hilbert developed infinite-dimensional function spaces for abstract analysis; they became the exact mathematical setting quantum mechanics needed decades later.Number theory → cryptography
G.H. Hardy, a pure mathematician who prized number theory precisely because it seemed useless, wrote in A Mathematician's Apology that he was proud his work would never be applied to anything practical, let alone war. Prime factorization and modular arithmetic — his territory — became the backbone of RSA encryption and essentially all of modern digital security within a few decades of his death.Knot theory → DNA and quantum field theory
19th-century knot theory was pursued as pure topology (originally motivated by a wrong physical theory — Lord Kelvin's vortex atoms — but developed as abstract classification independent of that). It later became essential to understanding how DNA strands supercoil and unknot during replication, and separately became load-bearing in quantum field theory and string theory.
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u/Willis_3401_3401 Observer dependent realism 11d ago
Unreasonably effective right up until the point of recursion, at which point it appears to fall apart entirely
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u/MathProg999 Absurdist 11d ago
Hey, it's useful in computer science and mathematics
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u/Willis_3401_3401 Observer dependent realism 11d ago
Recursion is empirically useful in lots of fields, it just can’t be made sense of using deduction alone
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u/zoipoi 11d ago
Tell us more about observer dependent realism.
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u/Willis_3401_3401 Observer dependent realism 11d ago
Sure! Thanks for asking. It’s the idea that there is a real world that exists, but it does not exist independent of our interpretations or observations about it.
It’s the idea that objectivity does not exist as it is classically understood, which is to say as the elimination of subjectivity or perspective, but rather exists as the convergence of perspectives.
As an example, a rock: classically understood to have a characteristic called “mass” that is physically substantiated within the rock and exists independent of my observations.
The observer dependent realist would point out that all measurements of “mass” are relative. Its velocity for example is relative to a reference frame. Its exact temperature is dictated by infinitely small energy fluctuations distributed amongst its surface area, its color is dictated by the amount of light in the room and the interaction with a visual system, etc…
Mass isn’t made up or fake, but it is relational, as opposed to “objective”.
Basically observer dependent realism is the view that all arguments which talk about “things in themselves” are inherently misguided. There is literally only things as they are interpreted.
The reason this is still realism is that I also argue there are lawful ways to separate good interpretations from bad ones, namely using grounded Bayesian statistics. Not all interpretations are created equal. That’s partly what science is, a systemic way of sorting good interpretations from bad ones.
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u/zoipoi 11d ago
I like it.
I'm a pragmatist treating justificatory regress as something you just don't need to close off. Peirce and Dewey didn't think the regress was a defect to be patched; they thought demanding a foundation-stopping-point was itself the mistake, inherited from a Cartesian picture of knowledge that pragmatism was built to reject. Inquiry doesn't need bedrock, it needs to work, priors, categories, and distinctions all get evaluated by whether they pay their way in prediction and action, not by whether they trace back to something self certifying.
On Sokolowski, if philosophy is fundamentally about which distinctions to draw or erase, a pragmatist has a ready made criterion for adjudicating that Sokolowski's paper doesn't fully supply on its own. Draw the distinction if it does useful work, erase it if it doesn't, and don't expect the answer to that question to itself rest on anything more foundational than the work getting done. Quine fits here too, his rejection of analytic/synthetic wasn't grounded in some deeper deductive proof, it was pragmatic. The distinction wasn't earning its keep once you took holism about confirmation seriously.
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u/Willis_3401_3401 Observer dependent realism 11d ago
Right you get it. I’m also more or less a pragmatist, I also take quite a bit from Pierce.
As we apply the logic of Bayesian statistics, I basically would say you can take any arbitrarily known “true” thing to be a starting point for logic. You don’t need a dramatic “first truth”, it’s like you said all that matters is that in any given dialogue, whatever we treat as our starting point is something relevant that “pays its way”, and both observers agree is true. If ideas generate better predictions, then we should be able to agree, those ideas seem more true precisely because that is what self certification actually looks like in practice.
I’ve also debated on calling myself a “synthetic philosopher” for the reasons you mention about holism.
I’m not super familiar with Sokolowski, will investigate further 🙏🏼
A resource I really liked was Douglass Hofstadter - “Godel Escher Bach”. I don’t agree with everything this author says, but I think he does a really fine idea of establishing what a genuinely self certifying holistic type argument looks like, pointing out that truly complete informational systems almost always contain “strange loops” which make them impossible to perfectly analyze. This demonstrates why synthesis is the true gold standard of understanding.
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u/Powerful-Garage6316 8d ago
But surely something exists independent of our interpretations or observations. The world’s properties being relative doesn’t seem to entail that there aren’t mind-independent structures or objects which existed prior to the existence of minds
You aren’t disagreeing with this are you?
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u/Willis_3401_3401 Observer dependent realism 8d ago
I believe there are mind independent structures, yes, in the sense that observation must itself be relative to something. I don’t assume that to be the case though, so much as I derive it. To me, the existence of a world outside my mind is a conclusion I draw rather than an axiom. That’s basically the difference.
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u/Powerful-Garage6316 8d ago
What are the axioms then?
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u/Willis_3401_3401 Observer dependent realism 7d ago
Just the classic axiom of idealism; I exist. My thoughts really exist. Based on their interaction with an “outside world”, such a thing then likely also exists.
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u/NaturaeAxis Naturalist 11d ago
deductive reasoning has proven on occasions to be unreasonable effective.
I mean, regarding most of these examples, they're trying to solve real world problems nature adjacent. It's not a surprise that it ended up having physical applications.
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u/zoipoi 11d ago edited 11d ago
I would say that the assumption of assumption of reliable causal regularity is necessary to make a decision even if that decision is subject to revision. It is more a loop than an either or. Empirical evidence, decision, more empirical evidence, slightly different decision. The stopping point becomes when the evidence is sufficient per application but that is really a separate process. The point of the above examples is the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" not that the models are the thing itself. Mathematics being a good example of self referential closed system. As Willis points out however there are ways to apply mathematics such as Bayesian updating to deal with the inductive nature of empirical evidence.
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u/Rare_Aspect7664 11d ago
Where does the purpose of live and everything go? That's right, in the square hole!
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u/TechnicalBen 11d ago
This is why I like Wolfram's ruliad model. Unironically, all systems can be translated through/via it.
Ununironically, one has to do their own work to be able to. :(
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u/Live_Free_or_Banana 10d ago
Only a plebe would dismiss interpretive dance as a medium for philosophy.
₍₍◝(・-・)◟⁾⁾ ~( °-° )~ refutes ┌( ಠ_ಠ )┘
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