[FRIAM] Pragmaticism and puritanism

[Frank Wimberly]

Reminds me of a conversation I had with the Chair of the Philosophy
Department at Carnegie Mellon.  I told him that Bertrand Russell fell off
his bicycle when he realized that Anselm's proof of the existence of God is
valid.  Wilfried Sieg (a German) looked concerned but after a few moments
he said with relief,  "Ah, valid but not sound!"  Is that consistent with
what you said?

---
Frank C. Wimberly
505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Wed, Mar 11, 2020, 11:44 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Scientific knowledge is more valid [†] because it travels across space and
> time better than other forms of knowledge.
>
> I'd rank "artisanal knowledge" a close second. The apprentice, journey,
> master infrastructure worked pretty well, I think. But "financial
> knowledge" is a close competitor. I sometimes make the argument that the
> merchant class is primarily responsible for peace on earth because
> projection from the high-dimensional space of human relations down to a
> one-dimensional currency helps everyone get along ... just enough to do
> business with one another.
>
> [†] Validity, in contrast with soundness. All types of knowledge are sound
> within their scope, where the scope is exogenous. But validity sets its own
> scope, like closure under an operator. Some may say validity is boolean,
> where a small system is valid or invalid and a large system is valid or
> invalid. But I'd argue that a smaller system is less valid than a larger
> system. A *universal* system will be the *most* valid. Or if that bugs you,
> it's easy to say, instead, that a valid but so small as to be useless
> system is *technically* valid, but nobody cares. What we want is a very
> large system that's valid.
>
> On 3/11/20 10:00 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> > Why is one view more valid than the others?  Because science (actually
> with engineering) has made it possible to send probes to Neptune?  Depends
> on your goals.
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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