Philosophia Polymathematica

I have a tendency to comprehend most philosophical topics in straightforward and practical ways. This is no different in the case of discerning subjective from objective matters, an issue that philosophers routinely concern themselves with. My basic stance on the subjective-objective divide is that if something is a matter of personal taste, opinion, or preference then it is subjective. As an example, consider the following subjective statement: “Pistachio ice cream tastes better than vanilla ice cream.” The above statement is representative of my personal opinion, based on my taste, and other people are free to, with equal legitimacy, adopt different positions regarding these two popular ice cream flavors. On the other hand, if something is a matter of fact (or dare I use an often-reviled term in informal philosophy circles, truth ) then it is objective (see the example of an objective statement, infra ). This is not to say that I necessarily have a simplistic way of comprehendi...

I don’t think it’s debatable that while most people can accurately identify complexity, they can’t necessarily accurately describe either the phenomenon or the conditions of complexity. In the real world complexity can, of course, manifest in an infinite number of things. As such, there exist in the real world infinite varieties of complexities, the specific elucidation of which requires intimate knowledge of the thing with respect to which the specific sort and stripe of complexity at-hand is an emergent property. For purposes of this blog, we will examine the objective conception of complexity in a most general manner. As it is, a thorough understanding of complexity in general is a prerequisite for understanding a particular or specific form of complexity. My personal definition of complexity is that it is the entropy that accompanies an increasing degree of elaboration. The condition of numerous parts, pieces, elements, variables etc. constituting something is a sine qua non for ...

Questions such as what is complexity and what contributes to the complexity of something are of interest to philosophers in general and to epistemologists in particular. I came across a fascinating array of answers to questions about the nature and function of complexity at a recent meeting of my philosophy discussion group. The subject was approached from several different angles and many of the propositions shared during the collaborative inquiry can be reconciled and synthesized. Also shared were a number of fascinating propositions that despite being germane and, to a lesser or greater degree, meritorious cannot be reconciled with those that were the most relevant to the topic because they were based on sufficiently different premises. Specifically, the irreconcilable propositions concerned themselves primarily with either the relativity, or the subjective perceptions, of complexity.   Again, though I’m not particularly amendable to this position for reasons I will touch upon...

I recently re-watched a fascinating interview of a fascinating lawyer, James Sexton, on Soft White Underbelly’s YouTube channel. Sexton’s knack for telling a story wrapped around a legal matter immediately struck me upon my first viewing some months back. The entire interview is a tour de force and I highly recommend viewing it if something like that tickles your fancy (accessible via this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5z8-9Op2nM&list=LL&t=1155 ). The portion of the interview, the philosophical richness of which I only realized upon a subsequent viewing, where Sexton described judicial procedure to the interviewer made me actively ponder something I intuitively practice but did not hitherto that moment dedicated conscious thought to: the management of costs incurred in shortening one’s inductive leap. In Sexton’s words: “What makes being a… lawyer interesting is that… a lot of what a court has to do is disregard what happened… because the truth is at the bottom of ...

In common parlance the terms hypothesis and theory are used interchangeably. There is nothing improper about this in everyday usage. However if one is to become philosophically pedantic about such matters, then these terms and their derivatives signify concepts and activities with vastly different epistemic values. Cursory attempts to disambiguate and epistemologically rank these distinct constructs will invariably result in further confusion. The avoidance of such confusion necessitates a thoughtful consideration of the nature of these abstractions and the purpose of their underpinning functions. Consistent with my preferred analytic approach, a semantic inquiry will precede a philosophical one. The Webster’s All-In-One Dictionary & Thesaurus (Second Edition) provides the following definitions for these abstractions: Hypothesis : An assumption made especially in order to test its logical or empirical consequences. Theory : A plausible or scientifically acceptable general p...

In the previous blog, by taking a comparative approach, we discussed how reasoning differs from rationalizing. When examining the structural components of reasoning, we, of course, considered cogent reasoning that would likely yield conclusions different from those yielded by rationalizing. Cogent reasoning is reasoning that is based on good reasons; it is based on objective measures such as facts, data, statistics, and evidence. Cogent reasoning is not based on arbitrary, capricious, or whimsical notions such as wishful thinking or rash appeals to emotion. During our immediately preceding comparative study, a natural question that suggested itself was whether rationalizing is the same thing as erroneous, as opposed to cogent, reasoning or, better yet, whether all erroneous reasoning is necessarily rationalizing. As we will explore in this blog, rationalizing and erroneous reasoning are also two altogether different modes of thought, albeit with a distinction much finer than the one ...

Though in common parlance the words reasoning and rationalization are often used interchangeably, there exist subtle but nonetheless highly important distinctions between them. Merely understanding the distinguishing criteria can enable one to become a better thinker, debater, advocate, and arbiter. To my mind, this is due to at least the following reasons: the correct usage of a word backed by an accurate understanding of its etymological denotation and semantic connotation allows for a level of precision of thought that would not be possible otherwise; he who can delineate the contours of these two separate entities is better equipped to parse one’s interlocutor’s rationalizations from reasoning and then proceed to discredit the rationalizations; and most importantly (and probably a most difficult thing to do), one can identify instances of one’s own rationalizing and attempt to resist the temptation to base one’s beliefs upon rationalizations. The importance of having a technica...