Theme: Grammar

MANY PEOPLE INTUIT THIS PROBLEM IN EXTANT THOUGHT… LET ME DEFINE AND SOLVE IT FOR YOU

—“Hi Curt Doolittle. Can you tell me which types of philosophy I have used in my post? Thank you”— Angela Michelle Joy Stahlfest-Moller

Hmm…. This may seem critical at first but hopefully it will provide you with insight into the intuition you feel – that you are not alone, but that the problem cannot be solved the way you suggest. And that the solution is in progress already.

So here we go:

You make use of reason.

(Not rationalism, not empiricism, not operationalism.)

You make inappropriate use of the verb to-be (“is, are, was, were).

Your method of decidability is called ‘intuitionism’.

Your terminology and grammar and method of decidability are ‘imprecise’, which prohibits rational, empirical, and operational testing.

Because you rely upon intuitionism and untestable language,

your conclusions do not follow from your premises with the degree of certainty you intuit.

But this is all consistent in furtherance of your objective.

You are doing what many people attempt to do, which is to create consistency by reconciling the difference between the objective and subjective experiences.

The most extreme example of this technique is Heidegger who attempted to conflate experience with existence. Some people find his attempt interesting, and others somewhere between nonsense and dishonesty.

There are a number of current ‘pseudoscientific’ arguments that have attempted to solve the problem of velocity and ratio.

You make use of scientific terminology and argument and criticize its terminology without drawing the conclusion that the scientific method, concepts, and terms evolved for the sole purpose of overcoming the ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, and deception endemic to our intuitions.

But your method of doing so is to attempt to suggest there may exist some form of verbal legitimacy to intuitionistic reasoning rather than appreciating the extraordinary difficulty the western world has born in order to create a methods, concepts, language and grammar that compensate for the failings of our intuitions, whether biological limitations, cognitive biases, normative biases, and institutional biases.

While it is possible to speak in subjective language that we can intuitively test, doing so is extremely burdensome. For example, almost all mathematical terms refer to numbers, but other than the natural numbers, actually functions. But to change all of mathematics is burdensome. In every field we make use of ‘convenient’ language.

The advocates of the extreme application of your idea, are the creators of postmodern, politically correct, feminist, philosophies that use the social construction of reality. This form of language is a rebellion against 19th century science of Darwin, Spencer, Menger, and Nietzsche, and it’s ‘dehumanizing’ statements about man in relation to nature, just as Rousseau, Kant, and Medelssohn were rebellions against the British (and Italian) scientific enlightenment.

The solution to the problem you wish to solve, is FIRST to preserve the objective scientific language, but SECOND to require operational and objectively testable definitions. This is what the physical sciences have attempted to do but they are burdened by technical language; which, THIRD, constructs a competition between the objective and the subjective frameworks that both provides intuitionistic sensibility and subjective testing, but limits the errors, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion and deceit – problems that our intuitions, and therefore all humans, so frequently demonstrate.

My belief is that this transition is happening in our language and that sometime in the next century or so that transition will be complete.

Western civilization is built on competition between deflationary specializations, and this is another example of it – even in our language.

Cheers.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine