(March 20, 2018 at 7:42 am)Mathilda Wrote: My question is more along the lines of, what's the point of having a load of nicely polished stones laying around everywhere cluttering up the place looking elegant and ornamental?I promise to drop the analogy after this final use..but..put simply, because those stones are the things that validate the conclusions of the research we see as integral to knowledge.
Quote:I see the need for blue sky research for example, but at least blue sky research in science, maths and logic means that there is the possibility of making a better kind of door stop with your polished stone. Pure philosophy seems to be done for its own end.It;s and end with many products...so it;s..at least potentially, an eefficient avenue of improvement. If we improve..for example..the rules of material implication - all material implications are improved.
Quote:My husband and I always laugh when we see a pure Mathematician interviewed on TV because of a break-through they spent their entire careers working on. The interviewer will ask them what use it is and the mathematician will mumble something along the lines of "uses in stacking, queueing theory and encryption ...". It's like a secret code understood to mean, well yeah, it's been a really difficult puzzle that I really wanted to solve it and get paid at the same time.LOL, sure. I'd say that the "pure philosopher" (apologists don't even approach that) is trying to solve a puzzle about how we know what we know..and it may be that they have no specific practical application in mind..but if they can solve the puzzle then it sits as a completed piece that others can leverage to effect in blue sky research or practical application.
We all have our favorite examples..I've probably bored you with this one before. If I haven't bored you with it before..then you'll appreciate it for swirling around a subject you're discussing and being frustrated with in another thread.
Just a quick summary for lurkers- allegedly, any mp can be an mt and vv with a single transposition to the premise of material implication. If p, then q..if not q then not p. These are both valid and equivalent forms and as such we think that if the variables..defined, are granted..then they lead to knowledge, to truth.
If we apply that to a ship in the night sinking and a subsequent report in the local paper the next morning, though..the transition implies something intuitively wrong. If (p)a ship sinks in the night, then (q)there will be a report in the morning. If (not q)there will not be a report in the morning, (not p) a ship did not sink in the night. So what gives? There's the puzzle. Can a future event be the cause of a past event? Or maybe theres some problem with conditionals. Or aybe it isn;t the case that every mt can be an mp or vv. Or maybe it's a problem of language.
No matter what the answer is to that puzzle..it will inform all products of all conditional statements because it's a comment on conditional statements in general.
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