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All academic fields have presuppositions that practitioners are required to start with. Your own example suggests historians would need to accept empirical evid

by keane 8y ago

All academic fields have presuppositions that practitioners are required to start with. Your own example suggests historians would need to accept empirical evidence (it gets more complicated from there: what evidence, gathered by or attested to by whom?) -- that's a starting point. Philosophy can't make much headway without first pulling in some dependencies like Western Logic. Your claim that Anthropology belongs due to "plenty of material evidence" comes down to a certain amount of evidence (ie, presented conditions) meeting your level of sufficiency; your claim that Theology does not belong likewise comes down to a certain amount of evidence (ie, presented conditions) NOT meeting your level of sufficiency. In other words, if one were to start from the presupposition that God didn't exist, your claim Theology does not belong would be true. Starting from the presupposition that God does exist, your claim would be ludicrous. Theology takes the second presupposition; in the light of the worldview of those who accept that presupposition, it belongs.

whatshisface 8y ago
Presumably, there are also presuppositions that put homeopathy in universities, along with pantheology, shamanism, and even things that nobody currently believes (but could, if they invented and then accepted new presuppositions). However, philosophers will at least claim to be able to arrive at logic instead of just using it (I'm not sure if this is true, but culturally they value not assuming anything implicitly.) Moreover, science definitely has features that require no preconditioning in order to see for yourself. Even your first chemistry class will involve experiments that you don't need to put yourself in a trance in order to observe the results of. So, while I'm sure that Soplism has convinced many that there's no telling what's really true (and by extension, that any time a group agrees on something they've arrived at it through purely social means), there's definitely a bunch of things out there that you can check for yourself. Is it a presuppositon to say something like, "there is a world?" Some could argue that it is, but it's definitely different from saying something like, "there is a second world that nobody can observe or interact with."

by keane 8y ago

whatshisface 8y ago

Presumably, there are also presuppositions that put homeopathy in universities, along with pantheology, shamanism, and even things that nobody currently believes (but could, if they invented and then accepted new presuppositions). However, philosophers will at least claim to be able to arrive at logic instead of just using it (I'm not sure if this is true, but culturally they value not assuming anything implicitly.) Moreover, science definitely has features that require no preconditioning in order to see for yourself. Even your first chemistry class will involve experiments that you don't need to put yourself in a trance in order to observe the results of. So, while I'm sure that Soplism has convinced many that there's no telling what's really true (and by extension, that any time a group agrees on something they've arrived at it through purely social means), there's definitely a bunch of things out there that you can check for yourself. Is it a presuppositon to say something like, "there is a world?" Some could argue that it is, but it's definitely different from saying something like, "there is a second world that nobody can observe or interact with."