(from reddit)
We must act to acquire. Actions exist. We require an epistemology for acting. We must cooperate. We require an epistemology for cooperation. If we cannot act or testify in some context then for us it does not exist for the purpose of our existence. If we can act or testify in some context then it exists for the purposes of acting and testifying and cooperating. I need, we need, make no claim about existence – we need make claims only about man acting in existence.
The more interesting question is why anyone would suggest some thing else – other than to force dominance upon the actions of others, whereas I merely demand cooperation (non imposition) from one another if we are to divide the labor of perception, cognition, memory, labor and advocacy.
My metaphysics is then the metaphysics of acting. And the criticism of that metaphysics predicated on how some other approach would be superior for the purpose of acting together in a vast division of labor to discover the first principles of the universe. It’s an evolutionary epistemology. I don’t set out to make claims of states, I set out to make claims of the results of processes.
Just as philosophy mired man in fallacy by confusing positive moral justification in matters of cooperation with negative scientific criticism for matters of epistemology, philosophy mired man in fallacy by conflating state for the purpose of deduction, with processes for the evolution of knowledge.
Again, that this error was for the purpose of persuading others and possibly a deception for doing so, is not that obvious. I don’t look for fixed principles with which to justify claims, I look for necessary constraints for the evolution of knowledge in the furtherance of action from which we can cooperate to produce prosperity in whatever universe we actually do exist in, regardless of how we perceive it.
We carry with us the baggage of prehistory, of the era of mysticism, and the era of pseudoscience. But knowing the mind of god, and knowing how to act within the universe are two very different questions: one about something increasingly questionable, and one about something staring us in the face every day.
The universe is not static for an acting being. It is constantly evolving. Because at any given moment he must act with the resources (including knowledge) at his disposal and cannot act with those that are not.
For all intents and purposes, those of us (westerners) who practice this form of exploration do demonstrably, in our reality, increasingly obtain domain over reality, and those who rely upon other (fallacies) of existence (mostly mysticism and platonism) fail to. That is because we discover through acting (testing).
I know of no material questions extant in metaphysics that cannot be addressed by the perception of change in state between a series of moments, and our consequent imaginings of consequences in each moment. (Vision works this way for example). The purpose of operationalism is to both guarantee that what we testify to actionably exists, and that we test the limits of our concepts (length for example) rather than assume our prior concepts hold.
So it is up to someone to defeat this argument. (Which is going to be very difficult.) I can’t. I have tried and I cannot.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine