And look! You just defined it!
...using two rather undefined (or at least fuzzy) terms: "the
love of
wisdom"
Not sure you think why these words are “rather undefined,” but we could posit a certain fuzziness to then, and their meanings would change with context. However, that is true pretty much of … everything.
Steve seems to want an unambiguous definition of philosophy, yet such a definition cannot be found for science, either.
I guess it's a matter of degrees then. How does mathematics fit the scale?
Swartz expressed some of his views on maths as noted in the quote from him I cited. Let me go into that a bit more.
But first, note that Swartz has advanced degrees in physics and the history and philosophy of science and taught for many years in the prestigious philosophy department of Simon Fraser University. I mention this not by way of an invalid appeal to authority, but rather because it’s perfectly OK to cite a person’s credentials in evaluating the plausibility of what he says. You just can’t validly say what he says must be right BECAUSE OF those credentials.
I have also had personal correspondence with him, and once lured him into a philosophical discussion at another board. Maybe I’ll try to do that again here.
The quotes cited come from his book Beyond Experience: Metaphysical Theories and Philosophical Constraints. He wrote three books and all can be read online or downloaded for free,
here. All the books are great.
I have cited Swartz’s treatment of modal logic (one of his books is devoted to the topic) a number of times in defense of free will against hard determinism. Swartz himself has likened the allegation that determinism is incompatible with free will as a category error; on par with maintaining that noses are incompatibile with itches, and I agree with him. But note that this requires doing
philosophy and not, say, engineering.
While I am in a rambling and disquisitionary mood, I ca’t help but note how …
infantile .. Steve’s claim, made a couple of times, that I am “channeling peacegirl,” is. Peacegirl and I are as different as a chestnut horse is from a horse chestnut, to borrow from Lincoln. In fact, it is PHILOSOPHY (not engineering) that defeats, out of the box, peacegil’s claim that light from the sun can be at the eye instantly even though it takes 8.5 minutes to get to the eye. The violates the Law of Noncontradiction, which I, and not Steve, pointed out.
To return to Swartz, he is a proud and accomplished metaphysician, Steve’s scorn for the word notwithstanding.
In Chapter Five of the book cited above, entitled Underdetermination II, which you can
read here, Swartz speculates on the justification for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. After rightly dismissing Spielberg’s silly Close Encounters movie that aliens and us will communicate with music, he notably challenges the prevalent view that while technological aliens and us may have little in common, one thing we will have in common is maths. Swartz strongly doubts this. He writes:
The trouble is that there is no single way, or even just a few ways, to axiomatize either arithmetic or Newtonian physics. Any number of different ways exist to axiomatize arithmetic, some doubtless containing concepts we have never even imagined, {page 85} perhaps even concepts which we are incapable of having.7 Similarly for Newtonian physics. Must one have a concept of mass, for example, to do Newtonian mechanics? We might at first think so, since that is the way it was taught to most of us. We have been taught that there were, at its outset, three 'fundamental' concepts of Newtonian mechanics: mass, length, and time. (A fourth, electric charge, was added in the nineteenth century.) But it is far from clear that there is anything sacrosanct, privileged, necessary, or inevitable about this particular starting point. Some physicists in the nineteenth century 'revised' the conceptual basis of Newtonian mechanics and 'defined' mass itself in terms of length alone (the French system), and others in terms of length together with time (the astronomical system).8 The more important point is that it is by no means obvious that we would recognize an alien's version of 'Newtonian mechanics'. It is entirely conceivable that aliens should have hit upon a radically different manner of calculating the acceleration of falling bodies, of calculating the path of projectiles, of calculating the orbits of planets, etc., without using our concepts of mass, length, and time, indeed without using any, or very many, concepts we ourselves use.
He goes on:
Their mathematics, too, may be unrecognizable. In the 1920s, two versions of quantum mechanics appeared: Schrödinger's wave mechanics and Heisenberg's matrix mechanics. These theories were each possible only because mathematicians had in previous generations invented algebras for dealing with wave equations and with matrices. But it is entirely possible that advanced civilizations on different planets might not invent both algebras: one might invent only an {page 86} algebra for wave equations, the other only a matrix algebra. Were they to try to communicate their respective physics, one to the other, they would meet with incomprehension: the receiving civilization would not understand the mathematics, or even for that matter understand that it was mathematics which was being transmitted. (Remember, the plan in SETI is to send mathematical and physical information before the communicating parties attempt to establish conversation through natural language.) Among our own intellectual accomplishments, we happen to find an actual example of two different algebras. Their very existence, however, points up the possibility of radically different ways of doing mathematics, and suggests (although does not of course prove) that there may be other ways, even countless other ways, of doing mathematics, ways which we have not even begun to imagine, which are at least as different as are wave mechanics and matrix mechanics.
This is called the
philosophy of mathematics. Just so Steve knows such a thing exists.
Before I forget, I also wanted to mention Steve’s remark that political philosophy is now called political science. I took that as another silly dig at philosophy. Probably the academics changed to that out of a commitment to the (philosophical stance of) scientism, that claim that only scientific statements have any validity — a claim that seems curiously self-refuting, given that it is not notably a claim that can be tested, verified, or falsified. Maybe Steve can identify the “science” in political science. Is there a mathematical equation can tell you unerringly who the best candidate to for for is? Is there a theory of politics that supersedes all other theories, and tells you which political system to adopt? It was once thought, without any real evidence, that some form of democratic liberalism was the best system. The Chinese, who practice authoritarianism, are currently eating our lunch in many different important ways. Looks like they’ll even send humans to the moon before we’ll get back there, if we ever do. The U.S. and its political systems are in clear imperial decay. I expect that in 50 years the U.S. will no longer exist as a single country. Of course, I can’t prove that — there is no mathematical equation, or robust scientific theory, to justify this prediction. Not even engineering can justify it.
