DOOLITTLE’S CHAINSAW: WHY WE USE OPERATIONAL LANGUAGE by @Propertarian Frank (be

DOOLITTLE’S CHAINSAW: WHY WE USE OPERATIONAL LANGUAGE

by @Propertarian Frank

(better than I can say it)(this man is an artist)

We use consistent naming with consistent and unique delineation.

And we start constructing our language by naming actions and transformations, rather than using names for ‘ideals’ or ‘essences’ or ‘ontological’ primitives, which are characterized by their inaccessibility to observation (discerning through measurement).

You can tell if a language employs idealist concepts by subjecting them to Curt Doolittle’s Chainsaw (lol) : “what is the particular decision problem this concept solves, and what are the particular actions and transformations we use to achieve decidability?”

For instance, the concept ‘mass’, provides commensurability among physical objects of similar scale, and is used to decide a wide variety of questions from mechanics to pricing groceries.

The specific way in which we construct and use instruments to measure ‘mass’ constitute the particular actions and transformations that are named by the symbol ‘mass’ and its unit of measurement. (Just as standard library functions in programming languages compile to specific machine instructions, so do operational names compile to specific actions and transformations )

Thus, there’s no single concept ‘mass’, but rather a spectrum of it, determined, and limited by tools of measurement at different scales.

You can idealize ‘mass’ by treating it as if it isn’t limited and determined by measurement (action), but that doesn’t mean ‘mass’ in formal operational grammar deploys that idealism.

Doolittle’s Chainsaw lets you know if an idealism is completely devoid of operationalizable content or not. For instance, while ideal ‘mass’ can be salvaged (operationally defined), things like infinity, continuum are not.

This idealist approach to language (also called Platonism), as opposed to operational language, is the single largest source of error in all domains of human knowledge. From mathematics (infinity, uncomputable numbers), to physics, to economics, to law (e.g. property rights as unconstructed ideal attributes, equality), to philosophy (lol almost all of it), across all levels of intellect, thinkers evidently fall for it.

This is why Curt says widespread adoption of operationalism will be at least as large a leap as empiricism over rationalism, and rationalism over mysticism were.