zurew

Yeah, level of detail and the usage of words should be (imo) largely informed by the targeted audience. Academic papers are not for lay people though. They are for people who are specialized in an area, so you assume that they know a bunch about the field already and you also assume that they can understand technical detail and technical language. I generally prefer analytic philosophy and I like it more than non-analytic philosophy, because I would choose hardly understandable but crackable technical detail over gibberish and or natural language that lacks substance or conceptually confused (thats not to say that all non-analytic philosophy is trash, because thats definitely not true). Yes one can definitely fuck up with going too technical. Its also the case that we have a bunch of shared concepts that probably no one can explicate or define using other concepts.

This is true when it comes to reading books, but when it comes to reading academic articles (like philpapers or iep or sep articles), one's inability to track or to understand can be also explained by not doing enough thinking and reading on that specific subject or area. We would never say the same thing about science stuff. Like imagine someone saying "yeah, when I looked up what the academia has to say about physics , well I immediately realized that it is just a bunch of empty big words that I dont understand combined sometimes with unnecessary technical detail and arguments".

Its often times an ill-formed question. This is one move that I usually use, when I have a categorization problem: Think through a couple of examples where the categorization (in this case invented/discovered categorization) is crystal clear for you and try to analyze and explicate what made the categorization easy in those cases. Once you finish that, try to work yourself backwards from there (try to apply that gained understanding/insight to progressively harder examples and eventually to math).

You are saying things that I mostly agree with , the issue that I have is your level of certainty about those things. "Can I be wrong about this?" - as long as the answer is yes, I have 0 issue. Reality having a consistent set of rules is compatible with you having wrong ideas about what those rules are, and even your very ideas about what is supposed to be a law or rule - those ideas can also be wrong. The human body having a particular design which constrains what the body is capable of is compatible with you having wrong ideas about those limitations and constrains. This whole back and forth on my part wasn't to establish whether breatharianism is false or not, it was to establish that we shouldnt be 100% certain about almost anything science related. And no, this doesnt give credence to breatharianism, it is just an honest reflection on what we know and what level of certainty we can establish given the epistemic tools and limitations we have when it comes to science. I want you to actually engage and to give a direct answer. How do you know what is a rule and how do you know what you can get around and what you cant get around?

You still have 0 reply to the problem of induction. Yes reality is reality, hardware is hardware, but you have no clue what rules reality has, you just assume that you are right about those rules beyond any doubt, and the reason why you are pushed on this, is because epistemically you cant accept the fact that you can be wrong about this. What got us here is your 100% credence talk ,where you think you cant be wrong on this topic. Notice that I only wanted you to say "I can be wrong about this" - but you cant say that. You understand that you saying that "I can be wrong on this", from that doesnt follow, that you are commited to the position that breatharianism is likely to be true, right? Do you know why the snakeoil salesman shit works in philosophy and spirituality? It works, because people have unwarranted high credence in mystical shit. Do you know whats ironic about that? The fact that you have an unjustifiably high credence in your position. Do you know what the solution to that is? Its to reflect on what you actually know and what justifications you have for your positions and to iteratively improve on your knowledge and iteratively update your credence on things. Saying that there is room for error doesnt commit you to getting fucked over by snakeoil salesman, but it gives you room to update on your beliefs about reality if and when enough evidence / a good argument is provided. In certain cases it might actually be the case that its impossible to change your position on certain things, given all the pragmatic and epistemic limitations we have, but even in those cases the conclusion isn't that you are right beyond any doubt, the conclusion is that given those limitations you won't change your position on certain things, but thats still compatible with you being wrong about those things. Stop and actually reflect on how do you know that breatharianism is false beyond any doubt - again not just that it is more than likely to be false, but reflect on how do you know with 100% confidence that it is false. Check what actual justifications you have for that and how that actually warrants a 100% credence.

But even putting that aside and granting that to be true, its not like we have a super precise grasp about what humans can do. You could run studies on the whole population of Earth in the 12th century and then make inferences about how much a human can lift or how much and how fast they can run and you would infer a bunch of false things. Also its not like anyone here could actually spell out a deductive inference (starting with the premises of the laws of physics, and then from that deductively infer the limitation of humans). This is why I implied in the past that even the task of spelling out what law is actually violated by breatharianism would be a big task, because its not clear at all what (if any) law is violated.

Yeah you can use a notion of deductive that is applicable there, I guess I used deduction in a slightly different way. You can make deductive inferences where some of the premises are actually inductive or when there is a hidden inductive premise that you already take to be true (like the uniformity of nature) - so in reality, you are still engaging in induction. For example, even if you can falsify something given some precise set of conditions, from that doesnt necessarily follow that will hold up in the future (what you actually show there at best, is that given those set of conditions at that given time, you showed that that particular thing is false) but at the end of the day, you are still relying on induction, because you make an inductive inference from there that your deductively derived conclusion will hold up in the future given the same set of conditions. And yes , you are totally right about Thomas Kuhn as well, because one can infinitely delay falsification by adding auxiliary hypotheses to one's already existing paradigm.

Read just a little bit about the problem of induction and you will understand what im talking about. You need to understand how much science relies on induction. Im extremely surprised that you dont know about this. You have this very naive view that scientific facts are well justified things to the point where there is no room for any error anymore, but that couldnt be further from the truth. Science is an inductive and abductive project and it definitely isn't a deductive one, where you can have 100% credence about almost anything. I can walk you through multiple different examples to showcase the issues about induction. The black swan one is one such example, and the exact same logic is used to establish scientific laws. Just because you observe a pattern repeating multiple times, from that doesnt follow that it will definitely without a doubt repeat forever and it also doesnt mean that it is applicable universally everywhere, those things are justified by inferences and not by validation, because you practically cant validate such claims.

It is closed-mindedness , because you quite literally dont even want to entertain the alternative. The fact of the matter is that you rely on inductive reasoning and refuse to acknowledge the limitations that comes with that. You are the skeptical dude in the 16th century saying: "I'm 100% confident without any doubt, that black swans dont exist, because no one has ever seen any black swan" and also say "cmon dude, stop the bullshit and the fantasy - we are not on the same level - you are telling me this nonsense that I should be open to the possibility that there are black swans? Stop the nonsense! I have the highground, because for all the existence of humankind, none has ever seen a black swan" and you would be right, but after that you would get completely obliterated by dutch mariners who were the first to discover black swans.

It isn't too abstract. it is the difference between saying that there cant be anything shown to you to change your mind on it, and between there could be hypothetically something that could change your mind on it.

Thats not what the claim is - this is the issue "Do you actually know that the claim is false?" 'No?' "Okay, then dont say that it is definitely false." This is compatible with you labeling it as fantasy and absurd and wishful thinking and this is compatible with your argument about what should or shouldnt be entertained (which again I agree with generally speaking).

That doesnt contradict what I said. But what you still fail to engage with is the fact that what I or you consider to be obvious and what my or your sense of rationality is - those things are subject to be wrong. All of what is absurd, what is rational, what is nonsense - all of that shit is informed by things that are subject to be wrong. You labeling that abstract or intellectual or nonsense doesnt show that your considered nonsensical thing is actually false, what it shows is that given your current understanding of reality (Which may or may not be accurate), that thing goes against it. So if we want to talk about honestly - lets be actually epistemically honest about what our sense of absurdness, rationality, experience, and nonsense is actually informed by.

I agree - thats why we shouldnt make claims with certainty what is fantasy and what is not. It wasnt me who claimed that it is true, it was you who labeled it as a "fantasy". All of this shit comes back to what I said - if you dont want to entertain it, thats fine, but the moment you start to make claims about it you are in trouble.

I could just negate this and say "Your notion of closedness is superficial and merely intellectual". But in any case, I dont think you know what I mean by openness. Openness doesnt mean that I assign a high probability to the given proposition being true , I just mean that unless I actually explicitly know with 100% certainty (which is almost never the case) that given thing is false, the door remains somewhat open. And in certain cases that openness could be 0.00000000000000000001% ( but still its different than the claim that "its definitely false", because there it would be actually 0%). Its nothing more than an epistemic attitude of "I can be wrong about this".

Wait, what do you think you are doing here other than purely intellectualizing about it? You are not doing anything more than expressing your skeptical beliefs about it. Yeah and thats fine. But I am not as myopic and superficial as "X thing isnt true in my current experience right now, therefore X is definitely false". X might actually be false, but an appeal to my current experience is a super weak appeal.