/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11025244]

why is logical positivism (and by extension, naturalism and materialism) still around?

[Anonymous No.11025248]

Because people are too stupid to understand quantum mechanics.

[Anonymous No.11025266]

>>11025248
Yeah, sure, but too stupid to understand the book Godel's Proof too? Really?

[Anonymous No.11025285]

>>11025266
Dude, people are just so put off by math. Too, mathematicians—granted they are attempting to give the simplest explanation for a theorem(a proof)—are writing proofs are that very difficult to follow, because the conjectures are just very difficult to prove. I find it hard that laity and philosophers could or would understand higher maths without being a mathematician or knowledgable in math.

[Anonymous No.11025286]

>>11025244

>logical positivism, naturalism, (philosophical) materialism

I hear people bitch about these things on this board all the time and I've never once, not even one time on this particular board which I've been browsing for about five years, seen a thorough or even half-baked, good-faith effort to explain why these hated categories are supposed to be so false, so misguided, so childish. I instead suspect, unless I can be shown wrong, that when /lit/ posters dismiss these philosophical categories, they do so above all not because they want to be right, but because they want to be in some sense fashionable and because the above concepts are by now "boring" (analytic/anglo) to some degree, having been replaced by "sexier" (continental) concepts. Full disclosure: I have a good grasp on what is meant by philosophical materialism, but I actually sorta forgot what positivism actually is so I just skimmed it again just now.

Consider this your opportunity to BTFO the categories, hand me my ass, however you want to put it. Why are positivism and materialism so obviously wrong? (Do not say: "I can't read the books for you", "just google it", or things of this nature. You opened the door by starting the thread, and you have a wonderful chance to summarize in one post just why these things are so wrong, and thereby to demonstrate your superior knowledge on the subject for all to see). The point is that for all the time spent disparaging the categories on this board, one would expect at least a time or two a well-written post demonstrating why, rather than simply pointing to so-and-so.

[Anonymous No.11025311]

>>11025286
because they literally leave no room for mystery. Eliminating all possibility of mystery is the most unwise thing you can do.

[Anonymous No.11025315]

>>11025311
>>11025266
>>11025244
Wow, I'm killing it with these digits.

[Anonymous No.11025335]

>>11025286
how can positivism account for the existence of any genuine paradoxes

[Anonymous No.11025343]

>>11025286
Gödel's incompleteness theorems essentially say in a formal axiomatic system—say peano arithmetic, or any system with basic arithmetic as its base—there is a statement, G, that is true but not provable. And one could not prove this statement by adding another axiom, because that necessarily is a new formal axiomatic system that has a true, but unprovable statement. But if you wanted to prove that statement, you would have to accept the system as inconsistent—an example would be: this system which is now completely accounted for, proven entirely, can have both 2+2=4 and 2+2=5 be true simultaneously. No mathematicians is going to affirm that lest mathematics be in vain.

Given this, you can see how it is difficult—the majority of mathematicians call it impossible as does the theorems—to affirm the idea of logical positivism if you have do some sort of special pleading for some mathematical systems, that which would be the basis or starting point for logical positivists.

For naturalism, it just screams naturalistic fallacy to me. And Aquinas's five ways are logical deductions that point to an entity that is beyond physicality. To, mathematics seems to be transcendental of the physical world, rather than just figments of the human mind. It is so unbelievably effective to describe the universe and sciences; that really does make the inductive argument for mathematics existing beyond the world strong as fuck(It seems it couldn't be physical, because of the concepts of negative numbers, infinitesimally small numbers, infinity. But again, these contribute to it's effectiveness in describing the universe, aiding the probabilistic argument for its metaphysical existence)

[Anonymous No.11025346]

>>11025343
you don't know what the naturalistic fallacy is at all, the naturalistic fallacy is a meta-ethical term to discuss how people tend to believe that what is natural is good, and also something that gets thrown around in first-order discussions as an insult.

Also, materialism and naturalism don't rely on arithmatic being grounded in a formal axiomatic system

you're a fucking retard bro go do your homework and actually read some Carnap lol

sorry that your fairy tale god isn't real

[Anonymous No.11025351]

>>11025343
OP here. I don't find Aquinas convincing. Cosmological arguments are shamelessly self-indulgent. God is not something to be understood with the mind, period, full stop.

[Anonymous No.11025374]

>>11025343

The deep irony of this is that I just finished "Gödel's proof" a few days ago and although your post starts out fine, it devolves rapidly into the confusions and generalities which are often bound up with misconstruing Gödel in online nerd discussions. I also had simply asked about the above philosophical phrases generally, so that a reply would not essentially have had to bring up Gödel (though his results are related to this epistomology of course)-but there he is in the OP pic, so people are thinking about him. Both of these are better replies IMO: >>11025311 >>11025335

The final paragraph here is possibly the most embarassing one. It really does read like some 19 year old undergrad trying to impress the prof while forgetting basic sentence structure. It also reminds me of the weird prose thrust of Lyotard's "Postmodern Condition", as one example (Lyotard name-drops the Bourbaki group at one point to give himself some mathy cred and goes on).

t. guy you replied to