“Q: ARE YOU DOING PHILOSOPHY? NO. NOT REALLY.” Argh. Technically what I do is no

“Q: ARE YOU DOING PHILOSOPHY? NO. NOT REALLY.”

Argh. Technically what I do is not philosophy but formal science. Formal science is one of the four sciences: formal(logic), physical(before), behavioral(during), and evolutionary(after).

I consider myself an anti-philosophy scientist. However, not only does no one understand the definition of science, but no one understands the distinction between science and philosophy. So for the sake of simplicity, I say I’m a philosopher and social scientist specializing in epistemology(knowledge), decidability(truth), law(conflict), and economics(cooperation).

So, I work in the logic of decidability. The Formal logic of decidability. It’s a Formal operational logic. That means it’s different from formal set logic. Formal set logic uses symbols for categories. Operational logic uses names of operations instead of symbols. Both are formal in that they require unambiguous grammars of continuous recursive disambiguation. It’s the difference between abstract mathematics independent of context and scale and concrete and discrete computation dependent upon context and scale: a vast difference.

The simple version is that I (we at NLI) write what looks like English, reads like programming, describes a supply-demand curve, and is just a different category of mathematics (ordinal or semantic, or ‘dictionary’) – terms that require explaining:
cardinal(quantitative order) >
… ordinal(qualitative order) >
… … semantic (domain, dictionary, list order).

I realize that I am, we are, trying to cause a rather grand leap in human thought, as large as the leap from theology to philosophy, or philosophy to science.

So it’s quite an adaptation of ‘frame’ we’re asking of people – even if the benefits of doing so are as great as every other leap.

The problem has been finding a means of simplifying it such that we can teach it effectively to larger numbers of people – which we think we’re able to do now.

But like any formal discipline (STEM Knowledge) it’s more work than you’d expect. Partly because learning something you don’t know is easier than re-learning something you already think you know.