I do think that discovering that virtually all human concepts don’t have cartesian definitions is a valuable step. I also can’t think of a good way of discovering it other than what was actually done—lots of people try and try, and fail.
Along the way there were some successes too—maths turned out to work OK, and ideas like gravity and so on. The ones that did have cartesian definitions were so useful that we don’t regard them as philosophy any more, which is a bit unfair. Philosophy gets to be the diseased bit—the bit that got left behind because nobody could figure it out.
The whole point of the search for cartesian concepts is that you can reason with such definitions. They are the useful ones. The rest—well, it’s a swamp, logically speaking. It’s worth trying to discover which ideas fit in which category.
The whole point of the search for cartesian concepts is that you can reason with such definitions. They are the useful ones. The rest—well, it’s a swamp, logically speaking.
You’re mostly limited to such definitions when it comes to deductive reasoning; inductive and heuristic reasoning can work well with concepts that have sharp edges or lots of fuzziness.
I do think that discovering that virtually all human concepts don’t have cartesian definitions is a valuable step. I also can’t think of a good way of discovering it other than what was actually done—lots of people try and try, and fail.
Along the way there were some successes too—maths turned out to work OK, and ideas like gravity and so on. The ones that did have cartesian definitions were so useful that we don’t regard them as philosophy any more, which is a bit unfair. Philosophy gets to be the diseased bit—the bit that got left behind because nobody could figure it out.
The whole point of the search for cartesian concepts is that you can reason with such definitions. They are the useful ones. The rest—well, it’s a swamp, logically speaking. It’s worth trying to discover which ideas fit in which category.
You’re mostly limited to such definitions when it comes to deductive reasoning; inductive and heuristic reasoning can work well with concepts that have sharp edges or lots of fuzziness.