Graphical Philosophy 4 Jul 20114 Jul 2011 Wittgenstein wrote: Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. [On Certainty §611] Or, in a GIF: From Patton’s Argument Clinic. I think there’s a need for the entire corpus of modern philosophy to be done using GIF animations, don’t you? On which topic, see this post by Siris, on the Brain-Heart-Trolley-War-Kidney-[Evil Demon] Problem… Humor Logic and philosophy
Evolution Is Physicalism coherent? 11 Oct 201411 Oct 2014 In my last post I argued that physicalism cannot be rejected simply because people assert there are nonphysical objects which are beyond specification. Some are, however, specifiable, and one commentator has identified the obvious ones: abstract objects like the rules of chess or numbers. I have dealt with these before… Read More
Education Yeah, I’m teaching too 14 Feb 2013 As always, click through, and press the red button… Read More
Outside of mathematics and a few other highly formalized subjects, it’s pretty hard to be sure that Mr. A says P and Mr. B says not P. Certainly a great many of the debates that occur on the Internet are dueling monologues, not that establishing that a real disagreement is under way keeps us from calling each other idiots and heretics since, or so it seems to me, the most heated conflicts are not about the truth or falsity of propositions but about whose preoccupations matter.
I call this, not originally, the phenomenon of talking past each other. It is a crucial aspect of what used to be called, before it was redefined by Hegelians and Marxists, dialectics. These days it is best called something like contrastivism or erotetics. Note that Ludwig asserted these principles “cannot be reconciled” – that presumes they compete in the same semantic space.