PhilGoetz comments on The Power of Positivist Thinking - Less Wrong

68 Post author: Yvain 21 March 2009 08:55PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (48)
Tags: epistemology positivism verificationism

Comments (48)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 22 March 2009 01:09:29AM 9 points [-]

It remains one of the least lamented theories in the history of philosophy, because if there is one thing philosophers hate it's people telling them they can't argue about meaningless stuff.

Hah! I would have voted you up just for this. And also for:

But if we've learned anything from fantasy books, it is that any cabal of ancient wise men destroyed by their own hubris at the height of their glory must leave behind a single ridiculously powerful artifact, which in the right hands gains the power to dispel darkness and annihilate the forces of evil.

Ooh, this is good too:

But the entire point of caring about the "Islam is a religion of peace" issue is so you can misuse it as much as possible.

The "is a religion of peace" example shows one reason to avoid the word "is".

Comment author: hamnox 22 January 2011 12:56:13AM 2 points [-]

Speaking in E-prime does not help clear the brain of those cognitive errors, really. I tried it for a while, and it soon became clear that The Blind Idiot God engrained it far too deeply into our thinking patterns.

Even if they could not explicitly use the word "is", they would still use the same thinking patterns to equate things with their arbitrary definitions.

Comment author: ata 22 January 2011 01:15:55AM *  2 points [-]

Agreed on all counts (I also tried holding myself to writing and thinking in E-prime, several years ago). You can use E-prime without deeply understanding the motivation behind it, in which case you'll find other clever grammatical structures with which to make the same cognitive mistakes, or you can actually understand the nature of those mistakes and stop making them whether or not you avoid the word "is".

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit