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One way to understand the legitimacy and value of non-analytic philosophy is first to realize that the unmeasurable complexity of the world defies complete expo

One way to understand the legitimacy and value of non-analytic philosophy is first to realize that the unmeasurable complexity of the world defies complete exposition by rigorous analytical methods. We must then ask ourselves, are we to bury our heads in the sand and consider only what is provable and what yields to such methods? There is certainly a great deal of value in doing this, modern civilization is built upon brilliant scientists and technicians who have done just that. But to deny the very existence of things outside the scope of analytical methods is to deny fundamental truths about the world. Ok, if we want to pick our heads up and look around, what are we to make of what we see? How are we to navigate in this strange environment where grotesque and beautiful things undulate, merge, unmerge and dance almost tauntingly all around us at a frenetic pace? The first thing is to give up any hope of tracing this process by unambiguous cause and effect, which in turn means giving up on proof or replicability. Crucially however, one need not give up on truth, for there is a world out there and things are really happening, and it is possible to describe the action you observe, in spite of it not being reducible to neat and tidy chains of reason. The difficulty with this is that we cannot necessarily share our findings and observations with others and expect them to agree, or hope to build a stable consensus, because the sorts of truths we are concerned with are not trivially derived in the way that mathematical truth is, in its exposition, trivial. Thus in occupying ourselves with these things, we condemn ourselves in a way to perpetual conflict, both internal and external. But the important things to remember is, reality is still out there, it's still happening in a particular way at a particular time, whether we can agree on it or not.

thrance 2y ago
I don't get that, if there is no unambiguous link of cause and effect, what is there left to describe, or even observe ? I think that if someone is completely unable to justify an observed truth to others, then it might not be a truth at all.
- equanimitivity 2y ago
  I used to think similarly, but learning about the proven incompleteness of sufficiently rigorous analytic systems has moved me towards appreciating less rigorous ways of interfacing with reality. Veritasium has a nice video on Godel’s incompleteness theorem. It’s quite ironic that it was mathematically provable that analytic systems can never be complete, and can’t be provably coherent. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo&pp=ygUUdmVyaXRhc2l1bSBob2xlIG1hdGg%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo&pp=ygUUdmVyaXRhc2l...
  - thrance 2y ago
    Oh I studied this, I'm well aware of those theorems, and I don't think they are the death bell of logic some make them to be. If you somehow find an unprovable theorem (quite rare), you can always try with a different set of axioms. Mathematics are not about proving absolute truths of the universe but rather of pushing reasoning over a set of axioms the furthest possible. Also as a nitpick, analytic systems that don't contain arithmetic can be complete and proven coherent. As for the real world, facts that can neither be proven true nor false (existence of an immaterial soul for example), I think should be left at that. It is useless speculating about things we can't ever know of. I leave that to religion/spirituality.
    - Ecoste 2y ago
      "It is useless speculating about things we can't ever know of." And how do you know which things we can know of and which we cannot? Trusting your gut instinct on that isn't scientific. And why is speculating about immaterial things useless? I'm sure many great mathematicians heard some form of "what you're doing is useless and has no use or relation in the real world" especially in the realm of pure mathematics. You bring up the soul which is a convenient example, but let's instead use a concept which YOU know exists for yourself which is consciousness. Can we ever know anything more about the mystery of consciousness or life or why any of this world and universe exists? Are those unknowable? Should we not talk about them? Should we only try to apply the lens of science here and for some reason not try to advance our understanding using philosophy even though it might not be as formal and unambiguous as math?
      - pixl97 2y ago
        Yea, the previous posters take is just outright crazy to me.... Imagine reality as the problem space of all things that could exist within the constraints of physics. The problem with observational evidence that it is only providing a tiny window into what is possible, really only the most probable are going to be what you see for the most part. Philosophy gives a means of meta views of systems and simplified system views that allow us to find otherwise unreachable islands of what can exist in our reality.
- Ecoste 2y ago
  > I think that if someone is completely unable to justify an observed truth to others, then it might not be a truth at all. What if the observed truth that someone is trying to communicate is paradoxical and hard to communicate in and of itself? What if the truth is ambiguous? What constitutes ambiguous or unambiguous? At the end of the day ambiguity is a real concept, so is a paradox, therefore there will exist things that are ambiguous and paradoxical and pointing that out does have value.
  - Kranar 2y ago
    There is no reason that ambiguities or paradoxes can't be expressed analytically and formally. Math and computer science are full of such things and they are celebrated. Being hard to communicate is precisely why it's important to communicate rigorously and formally.
    - Ecoste 2y ago
      We have a ton of examples of great mathematicians who also happened to be great philosophers and vice-versa. Some philosophers also tried to incorporate mathematical symbols and such into their work. We value both their philosophical works and mathematical works. They were smart people and chose different mediums to express different concepts. How can you try to explore the ego, consciousness, unconsciousness, dreams, suffering, life's purpose, subjective beauty, symbolism, truth, religion, god, ethics and whatever else that is not easily formalized? We might very well arrive at a formal and unambiguous description of these sometime in the far future, so are we not supposed to at least try to talk about these concepts now? You use different tools for different concepts, and science and philosophy is just 2 of those tools. At the end of the day philosophy undeniably changed the world, so there is at least some value to it. Philosophy is not anti-logic, it is very much for logic.
    - Nevermark 2y ago
      What is a person? It is a practical question. Sometimes we need to have or choose a hard answer to make a decision. It inevitably isn't going to be solved formally. Any more than what is the dividing line between a chair and not-chair. Many patterns we encounter have fuzzy non-formal edges. Perfect consensus is impossible, but any consensus is valuable. So we invent and argue about the "best" way to "understand" these things. These arguments are partly objective, partly subjective, partly emergent, and partly just farmed out to favorite "authorities" or social pressure. But important and unavoidable. -- At the highest level, even how we percieve reality is important. It impacts our values, our motivations, our ethics, how we cope with events, etc. Trickling down to every day choices. "What is real?" ends up being an important question, no matter how lacking in formal rigor the answers we each have are.
allemagne 2y ago
>the unmeasurable complexity of the world defies complete exposition by rigorous analytical methods. Do you mean that it would be impossible to explain the world in such a way even if we had an unlimited amount of time and ability, or just that we would never have access to what would even be theoretically necessary to rigorously explain the world? The latter seems undeniable, the former I don't think we can claim to know for sure but I want to say the opposite is true. >Crucially however, one need not give up on truth, for there is a world out there and things are really happening, and it is possible to describe the action you observe, in spite of it not being reducible to neat and tidy chains of reason. It seems like you're saying that we have mathematical truths, and "tricky truths" that can't be derived but should still be sought out. This totally makes sense to me. However, it seems like you're trying to imply a kind of equivalence between these kinds of truths and de-emphasizing the importance of mathematical reasoning when it seems like instead there should be a preference for mathematical truths that don't as easily lead to the kinds of conflict or disagreements that you're describing. I.e. it seems like beliefs about these "tricky truths" should be held less strongly than beliefs about mathematical truths, should be grounded in something like Bayesian reasoning that we can derive mathematical truths about, and we should be constantly searching for ways to tie our beliefs about these "tricky truths" together in ways that follow something like rigorous analytical methods.
- sameoldtune 2y ago
  I think you’re exactly right. In philosophy this Bayesian thinking is called “verisimilitude”, or to quote Stephen Colbert, “truthiness”. Hume and Wittgenstein did a good job in their own ways of elucidating why judgements cannot stem only from facts. The “is ought problem” and “picture theory of language” are approachable places to google on the matter. But we make judgements all day and it does seem like there are better judgements than others. We don’t have easy answers for what is right, wrong, beautiful, ugly, redeemable, or important. But these unscientific concerns are the most important aspects of anyone’s life, and philosophers can provide a lot of insight.
resource_waste 2y ago
We have science. No need to think that pretty words are equiviliant or have a similar merit as things closer to the laws of physics. We know about neurotransmitters, we have philosophy about pain and pleasure. That seems significantly more solid than religious/non-analytic philosophy. Cool religion to believe those words. Write them down and sell a book.
msla 2y ago
If the world is immeasurably complex, then we will only see the part of that we can measure, meaning our world is measurably complex. We don't have any ability to measure or otherwise interact with the immeasurable part, such as the Universe beyond the observable Universe.
Jevon23 2y ago
>One way to understand the legitimacy and value of non-analytic philosophy I don’t think HN is even sold on the value and legitimacy of analytic philosophy. It’s best to get people on board with that first, before moving on to the weird stuff.
jfengel 2y ago
I don't believe that analytic philosophy covers everything that the world has to offer. But I have yet to find anything of value to me in "continental philosophy". I realize that the distinction is arbitrary and tendentious, and the "continental philosophers" would not use that term for themselves. Still... if we're not going to place the values of analytic philosophers at the fore, then we have to use our own. The only tool I have at my disposal is "I don't like it". Other people find meaning in it, and that's fine for them, but we don't seem to have any meeting ground and no good way to find one. Which is fine. Neither of us is wrong. I just have to avoid resenting the ways that (in my estimation) continental philosophers act as if they were possessed of arcane secrets and it's my fault that I fail to understand them.
- taneq 2y ago
  I think it’s entirely reasonable to resent this behaviour. By portraying their musings as weighty and learned discourse rather than unfalsifiable speculation, they’re wasting our time.
  - jfengel 2y ago
    Falsifiability isn't the be-all and end-all. It's an important way of looking at the world, but it's also limiting. The limits are great at helping us identify absolute bullshit. And all of that bullshit is aggravating because it makes it seem impossible that there could be anything else. But it's still important to avoid the intellectual laziness of dismissing it automatically out of hand and potentially missing something else that matters to us.

thrance 2y ago

I don't get that, if there is no unambiguous link of cause and effect, what is there left to describe, or even observe ? I think that if someone is completely unable to justify an observed truth to others, then it might not be a truth at all.

equanimitivity 2y ago
I used to think similarly, but learning about the proven incompleteness of sufficiently rigorous analytic systems has moved me towards appreciating less rigorous ways of interfacing with reality. Veritasium has a nice video on Godel’s incompleteness theorem. It’s quite ironic that it was mathematically provable that analytic systems can never be complete, and can’t be provably coherent. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo&pp=ygUUdmVyaXRhc2l1bSBob2xlIG1hdGg%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo&pp=ygUUdmVyaXRhc2l...
- thrance 2y ago
  Oh I studied this, I'm well aware of those theorems, and I don't think they are the death bell of logic some make them to be. If you somehow find an unprovable theorem (quite rare), you can always try with a different set of axioms. Mathematics are not about proving absolute truths of the universe but rather of pushing reasoning over a set of axioms the furthest possible. Also as a nitpick, analytic systems that don't contain arithmetic can be complete and proven coherent. As for the real world, facts that can neither be proven true nor false (existence of an immaterial soul for example), I think should be left at that. It is useless speculating about things we can't ever know of. I leave that to religion/spirituality.
  - Ecoste 2y ago
    "It is useless speculating about things we can't ever know of." And how do you know which things we can know of and which we cannot? Trusting your gut instinct on that isn't scientific. And why is speculating about immaterial things useless? I'm sure many great mathematicians heard some form of "what you're doing is useless and has no use or relation in the real world" especially in the realm of pure mathematics. You bring up the soul which is a convenient example, but let's instead use a concept which YOU know exists for yourself which is consciousness. Can we ever know anything more about the mystery of consciousness or life or why any of this world and universe exists? Are those unknowable? Should we not talk about them? Should we only try to apply the lens of science here and for some reason not try to advance our understanding using philosophy even though it might not be as formal and unambiguous as math?
    - pixl97 2y ago
      Yea, the previous posters take is just outright crazy to me.... Imagine reality as the problem space of all things that could exist within the constraints of physics. The problem with observational evidence that it is only providing a tiny window into what is possible, really only the most probable are going to be what you see for the most part. Philosophy gives a means of meta views of systems and simplified system views that allow us to find otherwise unreachable islands of what can exist in our reality.
Ecoste 2y ago
> I think that if someone is completely unable to justify an observed truth to others, then it might not be a truth at all. What if the observed truth that someone is trying to communicate is paradoxical and hard to communicate in and of itself? What if the truth is ambiguous? What constitutes ambiguous or unambiguous? At the end of the day ambiguity is a real concept, so is a paradox, therefore there will exist things that are ambiguous and paradoxical and pointing that out does have value.
- Kranar 2y ago
  There is no reason that ambiguities or paradoxes can't be expressed analytically and formally. Math and computer science are full of such things and they are celebrated. Being hard to communicate is precisely why it's important to communicate rigorously and formally.
  - Ecoste 2y ago
    We have a ton of examples of great mathematicians who also happened to be great philosophers and vice-versa. Some philosophers also tried to incorporate mathematical symbols and such into their work. We value both their philosophical works and mathematical works. They were smart people and chose different mediums to express different concepts. How can you try to explore the ego, consciousness, unconsciousness, dreams, suffering, life's purpose, subjective beauty, symbolism, truth, religion, god, ethics and whatever else that is not easily formalized? We might very well arrive at a formal and unambiguous description of these sometime in the far future, so are we not supposed to at least try to talk about these concepts now? You use different tools for different concepts, and science and philosophy is just 2 of those tools. At the end of the day philosophy undeniably changed the world, so there is at least some value to it. Philosophy is not anti-logic, it is very much for logic.
  - Nevermark 2y ago
    What is a person? It is a practical question. Sometimes we need to have or choose a hard answer to make a decision. It inevitably isn't going to be solved formally. Any more than what is the dividing line between a chair and not-chair. Many patterns we encounter have fuzzy non-formal edges. Perfect consensus is impossible, but any consensus is valuable. So we invent and argue about the "best" way to "understand" these things. These arguments are partly objective, partly subjective, partly emergent, and partly just farmed out to favorite "authorities" or social pressure. But important and unavoidable. -- At the highest level, even how we percieve reality is important. It impacts our values, our motivations, our ethics, how we cope with events, etc. Trickling down to every day choices. "What is real?" ends up being an important question, no matter how lacking in formal rigor the answers we each have are.

allemagne 2y ago

>the unmeasurable complexity of the world defies complete exposition by rigorous analytical methods. Do you mean that it would be impossible to explain the world in such a way even if we had an unlimited amount of time and ability, or just that we would never have access to what would even be theoretically necessary to rigorously explain the world? The latter seems undeniable, the former I don't think we can claim to know for sure but I want to say the opposite is true. >Crucially however, one need not give up on truth, for there is a world out there and things are really happening, and it is possible to describe the action you observe, in spite of it not being reducible to neat and tidy chains of reason. It seems like you're saying that we have mathematical truths, and "tricky truths" that can't be derived but should still be sought out. This totally makes sense to me. However, it seems like you're trying to imply a kind of equivalence between these kinds of truths and de-emphasizing the importance of mathematical reasoning when it seems like instead there should be a preference for mathematical truths that don't as easily lead to the kinds of conflict or disagreements that you're describing. I.e. it seems like beliefs about these "tricky truths" should be held less strongly than beliefs about mathematical truths, should be grounded in something like Bayesian reasoning that we can derive mathematical truths about, and we should be constantly searching for ways to tie our beliefs about these "tricky truths" together in ways that follow something like rigorous analytical methods.

sameoldtune 2y ago
I think you’re exactly right. In philosophy this Bayesian thinking is called “verisimilitude”, or to quote Stephen Colbert, “truthiness”. Hume and Wittgenstein did a good job in their own ways of elucidating why judgements cannot stem only from facts. The “is ought problem” and “picture theory of language” are approachable places to google on the matter. But we make judgements all day and it does seem like there are better judgements than others. We don’t have easy answers for what is right, wrong, beautiful, ugly, redeemable, or important. But these unscientific concerns are the most important aspects of anyone’s life, and philosophers can provide a lot of insight.

resource_waste 2y ago

We have science. No need to think that pretty words are equiviliant or have a similar merit as things closer to the laws of physics. We know about neurotransmitters, we have philosophy about pain and pleasure. That seems significantly more solid than religious/non-analytic philosophy. Cool religion to believe those words. Write them down and sell a book.

msla 2y ago

If the world is immeasurably complex, then we will only see the part of that we can measure, meaning our world is measurably complex. We don't have any ability to measure or otherwise interact with the immeasurable part, such as the Universe beyond the observable Universe.

Jevon23 2y ago

>One way to understand the legitimacy and value of non-analytic philosophy I don’t think HN is even sold on the value and legitimacy of analytic philosophy. It’s best to get people on board with that first, before moving on to the weird stuff.

jfengel 2y ago

I don't believe that analytic philosophy covers everything that the world has to offer. But I have yet to find anything of value to me in "continental philosophy". I realize that the distinction is arbitrary and tendentious, and the "continental philosophers" would not use that term for themselves. Still... if we're not going to place the values of analytic philosophers at the fore, then we have to use our own. The only tool I have at my disposal is "I don't like it". Other people find meaning in it, and that's fine for them, but we don't seem to have any meeting ground and no good way to find one. Which is fine. Neither of us is wrong. I just have to avoid resenting the ways that (in my estimation) continental philosophers act as if they were possessed of arcane secrets and it's my fault that I fail to understand them.

taneq 2y ago
I think it’s entirely reasonable to resent this behaviour. By portraying their musings as weighty and learned discourse rather than unfalsifiable speculation, they’re wasting our time.
- jfengel 2y ago
  Falsifiability isn't the be-all and end-all. It's an important way of looking at the world, but it's also limiting. The limits are great at helping us identify absolute bullshit. And all of that bullshit is aggravating because it makes it seem impossible that there could be anything else. But it's still important to avoid the intellectual laziness of dismissing it automatically out of hand and potentially missing something else that matters to us.