News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Concerning Stephen Hawking’s Claim That Philosophy Is Dead (2012) [pdf]. Parent comment

Re:Concerning Stephen Hawking’s Claim That Philosophy Is De... by jmcmichael on Friday December 16, 2016 @11:15AM (#13194225)
Anytime one attempts to abstract entities and features from reality in order to work with them - whether you're practicing philosophy, physics, medicine, writing laws, coding animal behavior, or describing a database schema, one must base one's work on an ontology whether it be implicit or explicit. Many ontologies exist - arguably at least as many ontologies exist as conscious entities capable of conceptualization.

Your second statement assumes the affirmative to the question I asked; that the ontology of science does indeed serve as the only valid foundation for all other ontologies, unless I'm missing something. Philosophers call this the theory of 'causal closure'[1] It has many implications that you may or may not agree with in the areas of consciousness, free will, ethics, etc.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_closure

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Concerning Stephen Hawking’s Claim That Philosophy Is De... by fish55 on Friday December 16, 2016 @11:54AM (#13194627)
Very interesting, thanks. I was thinking of logic as the foundation, but now I realize that I was actually thinking of a combination of logic and science.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Concerning Stephen Hawking’s Claim That Philosophy Is De... by jmcmichael on Friday December 16, 2016 @10:53PM (#13199086)
Yes, and logic + various epistemological disciplines besides science give us valid knowledge in other domains.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Concerning Stephen Hawking’s Claim That Philosophy Is De... by fish55 on Tuesday December 20, 2016 @01:57PM (#13222776)
I'm not sure about that. I was very persuaded by this essay, which makes exactly this distinction: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-I...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Concerning Stephen Hawking’s Claim That Philosophy Is De... by jmcmichael on Tuesday December 20, 2016 @02:42PM (#13223237)
I don't think Latour's criticism of social theory applies to the causal closure of physics, or science's claimed exclusivity to describe fundamental ontologies; it criticizes the approaches of 20th century post-modernist critique.

Are you familiar with his follow-up, 'Reassembling the Social'? I'm not, but in reading a summary it seems to propose better methods for comparing ontologies and systems.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Concerning Stephen Hawking’s Claim That Philosophy Is De... by fish55 on Tuesday December 20, 2016 @04:18PM (#13224117)
It's been a long time since I read that. After posting the link, I reread it, and it seems I misinterpreted it somewhere along the way. I thought that it develops an opposition between "matters of fact" and "matters of concern", and that it breaks along the same lines of the discussion here, but it doesn't.
[ Parent | on HN ]