Continuation of: Grasping Slippery Things
Followup to: Possibility and Could-ness, Three Fallacies of Teleology

When I try to hit a reduction problem, what usually happens is that I "bounce" - that's what I call it. There's an almost tangible feel to the failure, once you abstract and generalize and recognize it. Looking back, it seems that I managed to say most of what I had in mind for today's post, in "Grasping Slippery Things". The "bounce" is when you try to analyze a word like could, or a notion like possibility, and end up saying, "The set of realizable worlds [A'] that follows from an initial starting world A operated on by a set of physical laws f." Where realizable contains the full mystery of "possible" - but you've made it into a basic symbol, and added some other symbols: the illusion of formality.

There are a number of reasons why I feel that modern philosophy, even analytic philosophy, has gone astray - so far astray that I simply can't make use of their years and years of dedicated work, even when they would seem to be asking questions closely akin to mine.

The proliferation of modal logics in philosophy is a good illustration of one major reason: Modern philosophy doesn't enforce reductionism, or even strive for it.

Most philosophers, as one would expect from Sturgeon's Law, are not very good. Which means that they're not even close to the level of competence it takes to analyze mentalistic black boxes into cognitive algorithms. Reductionism is, in modern times, an unusual talent. Insights on the order of Pearl et. al.'s reduction of causality or Julian Barbour's reduction of time are rare.

So what these philosophers do instead, is "bounce" off the problem into a new modal logic: A logic with symbols that embody the mysterious, opaque, unopened black box. A logic with primitives like "possible" or "necessary", to mark the places where the philosopher's brain makes an internal function call to cognitive algorithms as yet unknown.

And then they publish it and say, "Look at how precisely I have defined my language!"

In the Wittgensteinian era, philosophy has been about language - about trying to give precise meaning to terms.

The kind of work that I try to do is not about language. It is ...

Micah_Glasser

Micah_Glasser