Interesting articles thread

[Singu]

Epistemology being useful is an argument for philosophy being useful. Of course, most people mentally think of philosophy exclusively as ethics and then think it's for bad people who reject religion which is not even true of ethics, never mind epistemology, metaphysics, etc.

I don't think all of philosophy is useless, just most of it. Epistemology is immensely useful in both sciences and non-sciences. And anyway, I don't think using the criterion as "usefulness" is a good one, and that's just utilitarianism. Mathematicians come up with a lot of "useless" theorems with apparently no real-world application, but we don't ask them "What's the point if you can't use if?".

Anyway, people ask questions like, "How can we make Socionics scientific?" or "How do we know that Socionics is valid or not?".

How do we even know that its very approach is the right one? If the premise is wrong, then the entire conclusion is going to be wrong. If you want to answer those questions, then I think answering the questions of epistemology is going to be unavoidable.

[Metamorph]

I don't think all of philosophy is useless, just most of it. Epistemology is immensely useful in both sciences and non-sciences. And anyway, I don't think using the criterion as "usefulness" is a good one, and that's just utilitarianism. Mathematicians come up with a lot of "useless" theorems with apparently no real-world application, but we don't ask them "What's the point if you can't use if?".

Anyway, people ask questions like, "How can we make Socionics scientific?" or "How do we know that Socionics is valid or not?".

How do we even know that its very approach is the right one? If the premise is wrong, then the entire conclusion is going to be wrong. If you want to answer those questions, then I think answering the questions of epistemology is going to be unavoidable.

I think every idea should be used, but ironically it wouldn't be very productive if that were the primary concern of everyone making, researching, or pondering anything at all. All true mathematics ends up applied, for example, but if no one were fine playing in their heads for decades on end, much less would get discovered. Considering I love "impractical" things such as music and would rather not grovel in a hole like a mole, my idea of "use" is more about activity and being able to re-apply ideas in different contexts.

Thanks for making me consider the idea that people hate philosophy because it tells them hoarding money is a bad idea. No wonder Marx is scapegoated so much when, as much as I'm not into him, Stalin is not his fault. Hoarding money might be making you unhappy, a bad person, stupid, and you could even lose it all due to invisible forces! You mentioned none of that, but "practical" and "good" both seem to be very explicitly based on a pyramid of needs fraudulently and seemingly even maliciously attributed to Maslow, which I will now call The Needy Pharoah's Munchy Sleepy Pyramid Scheme. It's impossible to starve or be deprived even in America in the modern world unless you're schizophrenic or stuck in the middle of nowhere. You don't even need to sign up for resources for poor people because people just leave free rice, nuts, and apples everywhere, so people use the Needy Pyramid Scheme to tell people they can't pursue their more refined longings because food is more important and Maslow said (Maslow didn't say that or make the pyramid.)

[Singu]

Thanks for making me consider the idea that people hate philosophy because it tells them hoarding money is a bad idea.

It's more likely to do with the idea of scientism, that everything that there is to know can and should be answered by science.

So what good is philosophy? Well science can only answers matters of the physical world, so everything else must be answered by philosophy.

Apparently, Adam Strange is a "Te" type, and squark is an "ST" type. Which makes them the "practical" types. And if they say that philosophy is otherwise useless, or just matters of individual biases, then given their practicality and their strange & innate accessibility to what is "objective", or the "real world", it must be so.

So by definition, they are Logical Positivists, because they're essentially saying that anything that isn't answerable by science is useless or just playing with words.

So that is the alternative to philosophy, which is ironically even more useless than philosophy. Or at least, it's hell of a lot more limited.

Philosophy may terrify some people, because it opens the pandora's box to unlimited speculation. And philosophy did indeed create a lot of useless things and "dangerous thoughts". But limiting what we can think and can't think is going to limit our growth of knowledge, period, which will limit our progress.