from Hacker News

Philosophy as Math-Like Thinking

by gsjbjt on 2/8/20, 9:40 PM with 33 comments

  • by pmoriarty on 2/8/20, 11:40 PM

    "Philosophy is a way to address these questions more systematically -- it takes our fuzzy concepts and intuitions and makes them rigorous... In metaphysics, for example, when we talk about ontology, we try to formalize our natural intuitions for objects"

    This is only true of certain types of philosophy -- analytic philosophy and its brethren in the 20th and 21st Centuries, and some systematic philosophers of earlier times.

    Nietzsche is one of the most well-known counterexamples. Writing in an intuitive, aphoristic style, he was far from interested in any kind of systematization or formalism.

    The playfulness of Derrida and the approaches of some other of the Postmodernists are also the antithesis of what this article claims philosophy is about.

    The Pre-Socratics and Socrates himself were not interested in systematization or formalism either. Neither was most Eastern philosophy.

    Philosophic interest in formalizing only rears its head in philosophy towards the end of the 19th Century with Frege and the logical-positivists (themselves ancestors to the Analytics) who followed him.

    There's plenty of philosophy that just isn't interested in this.

    On the other hand, if what the author is getting at is that philosophers tend to examine the questions and subjects that interest them in a deeper way than most other non-scientist do, then I would agree with that.

  • by derex on 2/9/20, 5:48 AM

    > You learn to find an isomorphism between the concepts in your brain and someone else’s.

    Coming from a math background myself, this is a really great way to relate philosophy to something I'm used to thinking about. So many times in conversations I've noticed that people talk about the same fundamental ideas but use different language and constructs to express them, and end up thinking (mistakenly) they disagree with each other.

  • by mwlp on 2/9/20, 5:39 AM

    I had similar thoughts after finishing an engineering ethics course. Everything is an argument. Strong arguments often demonstrate their superiority over alternatives. The more dimensions the problem context has (or, of course, the more alternatives), the more difficult this becomes. Luckily, arguments can usually be abstracted to ethical frameworks or philosophical traditions.

    Sometimes these wrappers are easier to reason about. Sometimes, if the problem context is a foreign government's pending social credit system whose design and implementation is clouded by deceit and unknown consequences, all we can do is turn to Aristotle and ask, "[How] can we teach others to be good citizens?"

    ---

    Don't take philosophy for the math-like thinking. Take math for that. Take it for the cool readings, discussions, and qt existentialist girls rarely found in compilers.

  • by zozbot234 on 2/9/20, 1:52 AM

    'Philosophy is like math's ne'er-do-well brother. It was born when Plato and Aristotle looked at the works of their predecessors and said in effect "why can't you be more like your brother?" Russell was still saying the same thing 2300 years later.' ~pg

  • by jamesrcole on 2/9/20, 8:22 AM

    I've read a fair bit of philosophy, and I think the approach this post describes is often problematic.

    They try to treat concepts as if they were like mathematical symbols that they can reason precisely with. The problem is when they don't understand the concepts involved well-enough to be able to treat them in this way. This is often the case, given that the subject-matter is in philosophy.

    So you end up with a situation where it looks like they're drawing conclusions in a rigorous fashion, but where it's actually a kind of garbage-in-garbage-out situation.

    Precision is really important. But you have to acknowledge the level of precision that your level of understanding affords. Trying to be more precise than that makes things worse.

  • by ngcc_hk on 2/9/20, 9:16 AM

    It is the argument and the process that counts. The destination is never satisfactory. Like a tourist who enjoy the train (of thought) journey. Get out and and onto another.

    There is no answer. Those have answer like Maths or Physics is not superior but just left. What remains are the hard part. And we left with only with signpost and past journeys.

    Philosophy is post-thinking. Nothing like maths.

  • by jpster on 2/9/20, 2:39 AM

    I’d be interested to hear book recommendations that discuss “fuzzy thinking” and how to avoid it.

  • by stiglitz on 2/9/20, 1:32 AM

    I’ve read some po-mo stuff (like Baudrillard). Terms are constantly used without clear definitions, and rather than a logical progression of thoughts it’s a snaggle of metaphors. That kind of reading is very thought-provoking, but it’s the antithesis of math.

  • by coldtea on 2/9/20, 2:37 PM

    This person confuses philosophy with what anglosaxon barbarians consider philosophy...

  • by romwell on 2/9/20, 7:53 AM

    Math is just a branch of philosophy which is not constrained by reality.