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_philophile_ t1_irb5h6e wrote

Reply to comment by mirh in Heidegger v Carnap: how logic took issue with metaphysics by ADefiniteDescription

>But when anything can mean everything (and why not, also its opposite while we are at it) then you aren't on a quest for knowledge.

I don't understand your point here. Are you denying the Hegelian dialectic as a process for uncovering truth and reaching understanding? That seems to he implicit in your framing, but I grant I may well be misunderstanding.

>To the point that I have read the worst scoundrels wiggling away from any responsibility towards their work, by claiming that the very damn language that they were using to convey such information is just too limited to actually know the world.

I think understanding with langugage is possible, to a point -- the impossibility of totalizing signification and recognition -- being that point. Is there something to be gained by denying the limitation of symbolic thought (aside from grasping for symbolic authority)? Again, may be misreading.

>And btw it's quite disingenuous to affirm that Carnap and other logical positivists failed. They set the basis for Popper's theory of truth, in what could be considered the biggest example of "progress" that there probably ever was in philosophy.

Definitely understand your point here... Disagree. 'Progess' is ideological in the most unproductive sense. Historicism is for fools and capitalists. Positivism is only useful toward those same ends.

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mirh t1_irbftkh wrote

> Are you denying the Hegelian dialectic as a process for uncovering truth and reaching understanding?

I mean, even throwing everything in your basket at the wall hoping that it sticks could be "a way" for discovery, so.. I'm denying nothing in such an all-around fashion. Was it Feyerabend to say anything goes?

> the impossibility of totalizing signification and recognition

That has also a name, and thanks to actually well-defined terms I believe there is at least some rough boundary of what the limits could be or not.

> Is there something to be gained by denying the limitation of symbolic thought (aside from grasping for symbolic authority)?

I'm not denying the limits (some of which I'm sure somebody way smarter than me already demonstrated).

I'm criticizing hypocrites that just handwaves that ex post and call it a day, as if something this fundamental (and definitively unorthodox) shouldn't be in the first pages of their work, and especially as if "pointing out there's a problem" was the same of how proving it from first principles.

A failure that it's even more stark considering that a certain man a century ago spent 360 pages just to explain how 1+1=2 in the most dead cold way possible, and another nuked the provability and consistency of mathematics itself in a tenth of that.

I'll grant though that I was taking more of an issue with users of this sub here, more than specific philosophers.

> 'Progess' is ideological in the most unproductive sense.

As in "scientific progress" it does not seem particularly bad. Even though yeah, I can see how there may be a waaay better word to make my point.

> Historicism is for fools and capitalists.

Nothing to add there.

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