Form: Definition

Q&A: WHAT IS PLATONISM AND WHY IS IT AN ERROR?

(advanced philosophy made meaningful)

Platonism can refer to AT LEAST the following:

… 1) the philosophy of Plato in toto.

… 2) that imperceptible reality is intelligible by appeal to abstract analogy.

… 3) the use of fantasy and imaginary as substitution for ignorance or to obscure deception.

… 4) the prior existence of abstract objects – or at least their determinism as an appeal to authority for the use of imaginary entities.

… 5) the existence of a third reality beyond that of the physical, and the thinking – the supernatural – in which these entities exist.

(ed: re-orderd for clarity)

All of which are means of avoiding the COSTLY actions necessary to observe the unobservable through the development of instrumentation.

I tend to think of it as the set of metaphysical, cultural, normative, habitual, and genetic information that users either cannot imagine exist competitors or alternatives.

But people use it basically as a means of saving costs in order to justify their priors.

I suspect that is because we all have a greater genetic interest in moral priors, and knowledge priors, such that we seek to preserve our investment or make use of the wayfinding that current investment allows us. So we all need bridges from whatever wayfinding we use, to some alternative.

In other words, we have a habit of using informational substitution of the unknown as if it is of equal empirical content to the known, as a means of preserving our ability to make judgments, whether those judgments be avoidance of cost, the preservation of investments(priors), perpetuation of existing frauds, or production of new frauds.

THIS IS PLATONISM:

the substitution of fantasy for information as either a means of cost avoidance, of obscuring comforting and advantageous deceptions, or of preserving comforting falsehoods.

Platonism is to philosophy(truth) what suggestion is to deceit.

CONFLATIONISM

I suspect that the majority of conflationsm in thinking that affects the non-European world’s thought, is the consequence of their failure to isolate the observable and actionable, from the analogistic and the narratives we use to form consensus.

The importance of western non-conflation is something that is obvious in our institutions. We separate religion and law and science. But it is not so obvious that our martial epistemology and our sovereignty is the cause of it. (Or even if we are more mentally predisposed to it for some reason).

Platonism is something we struggle to be rid of by operationalism, and thereby separate the deterministic (numbers from identical categories) from an imaginary reality (a mathematical reality).

So I view operationalism as an extension of western non-conflation, and a necessary test of existential possibility, and likewise a necessary test of appeals to truth that are in fact, appeals to imagined unknowns wherein we lack knowledge of causality due to (a) cost, (b) convenient preservation of investments, (c) conveneint preservation of frauds.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine