E writes: “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.”
The usual justification for skepticism about reductionism as a methodology had to do with the status of the bridge laws: those analytic devices which reduced A to B, whether A was a set of sentences, observations, etc. Like climbing the ladders in the Tractatus, they seemed to have no purpose, once used.
They weren’t part of the reductive language, yet the they were necessary for the reductive project.
Carnap was probably the last philosopher to try for a systemic reduction, and his attempts floundered on well known problems, circa 1940.
E writes: “Consider the popular philosophical notion of “possible worlds”. Have you ever seen a possible world? Is an electron either “possible” or “necessary”?”
Kripke’s essay on possible worlds makes it clear that there is nothing mysterious about possible worlds, they are simply states of information. Nothing hard.
E writes: ” If there was a repository of philosophical work along those lines—not concerned with defending basic ideas like anti-zombieism, but with accepting those basic ideas and moving on to challenge more difficult quests of naturalism and cognitive reductionism—then that, I might well be interested in reading.”
Professional philosophers are not scientists, but rather keep alive unfashionable arguments that scientists and technicians wrongly believe have been “solved”, as opposed to ignored.
You are not suited for philosophical abstraction because you primarily want to build something. Get on with it, then and stop talking about foundations -which may not exist. Just do it.
Alright, I am going to bite on this.
E writes: “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.”
The usual justification for skepticism about reductionism as a methodology had to do with the status of the bridge laws: those analytic devices which reduced A to B, whether A was a set of sentences, observations, etc. Like climbing the ladders in the Tractatus, they seemed to have no purpose, once used.
They weren’t part of the reductive language, yet the they were necessary for the reductive project.
Carnap was probably the last philosopher to try for a systemic reduction, and his attempts floundered on well known problems, circa 1940.
E writes: “Consider the popular philosophical notion of “possible worlds”. Have you ever seen a possible world? Is an electron either “possible” or “necessary”?”
Kripke’s essay on possible worlds makes it clear that there is nothing mysterious about possible worlds, they are simply states of information. Nothing hard.
E writes: ” If there was a repository of philosophical work along those lines—not concerned with defending basic ideas like anti-zombieism, but with accepting those basic ideas and moving on to challenge more difficult quests of naturalism and cognitive reductionism—then that, I might well be interested in reading.”
Professional philosophers are not scientists, but rather keep alive unfashionable arguments that scientists and technicians wrongly believe have been “solved”, as opposed to ignored.
You are not suited for philosophical abstraction because you primarily want to build something. Get on with it, then and stop talking about foundations -which may not exist. Just do it.