I’d be tempted to ask the lecturer to rephrase the whole paragraph tabooing ‘reality’ - I get the feeling they’re not actually saying anything controversial, they’re just choosing to use ‘reality’ in a non-standard way. Of course, maybe I just don’t spend enough time with the sort of people who genuinely believe this sort of stuff.
Even in physics we have ‘reality’ changing as you get closer to the speed of light, and the laws of physics don’t apply prior to the big bang.
This isn’t even close to being true. ‘Reality’ doesn’t care what equations we use to approximate it.
If I were trying to say something like that tabooing “reality” …
There is a tendency for those who believe that there is only one framework in which to integrate all observations to use the physical world as a basis for argument, while those who believe in using multiple frameworks use the social world. Even in physics we see the framework we use—our implicit and explicit assumptions—changing as you get closer to the speed of light, and the current frameworks of physics don’t apply prior to the big bang. These are fairly extreme situations. In this course we are dealing with social frameworks and the point is that different cultures operate in worlds that can be quite different. To see this purely as a perspective risks the dominant social grouping seeing their framework as the only one which can be used to evaluate observations, and others as having a different perspective but that their perspective should still be analyzed using the same framework. The assumption that cultures can have different frameworks places every [sic] on a level playing field with a dominant culture calling all the shots.
If the lecturer agrees with this rephrasing and agrees that the word “reality” can indeed be tabooed for this purpose, then there is hope, but I’d expect he won’t (you don’t phrase things in confused terminology if you understand how to phrase them in a much more reasonable manner). It’s probably a decades-old argument about definitions (that doesn’t realize that it’s an argument about definitions), which learned to protect itself from most patterns of rational argument, and most of the subject matter is about how to not notice the error at the center of it all.
I’d be tempted to ask the lecturer to rephrase the whole paragraph tabooing ‘reality’ - I get the feeling they’re not actually saying anything controversial, they’re just choosing to use ‘reality’ in a non-standard way. Of course, maybe I just don’t spend enough time with the sort of people who genuinely believe this sort of stuff.
This isn’t even close to being true. ‘Reality’ doesn’t care what equations we use to approximate it.
If I were trying to say something like that tabooing “reality” …
which makes a point like that of Can You Prove Two Particles Are Identical?.
Edit: Except that the last sentence doesn’t make sense—is there a typo?
If the lecturer agrees with this rephrasing and agrees that the word “reality” can indeed be tabooed for this purpose, then there is hope, but I’d expect he won’t (you don’t phrase things in confused terminology if you understand how to phrase them in a much more reasonable manner). It’s probably a decades-old argument about definitions (that doesn’t realize that it’s an argument about definitions), which learned to protect itself from most patterns of rational argument, and most of the subject matter is about how to not notice the error at the center of it all.
This was exactly what I was going to do but you’ve done it much more elegantly.