{"id":1876,"date":"2010-04-30T00:34:54","date_gmt":"2010-04-30T07:34:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/?p=1876"},"modified":"2010-04-30T00:35:24","modified_gmt":"2010-04-30T07:35:24","slug":"pieces-of-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/2010\/04\/30\/pieces-of-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"Pieces of ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I’m reposting this short note from Taliesan here. I was thrilled to see someone write a coherent thought about epistemology. It’s a difficult topic to say something useful about.<\/p>\n

Uncertainty Principal<\/p>\n

There is an ancient distinction between the synthetic and analytic operations of the intellect.\u00a0\u00a0 The synthetic operation builds parts into wholes, the analytic operation breaks wholes into parts.\u00a0\u00a0 The distinction seems to have lost its usefulness among sophisticated people, as thought becomes a mess of mush.\u00a0 But reductionisms flourish from this amnesia, as minds forget that\u00a0one mind cannot do both operations at the same time on the same object.<\/p>\n

So synthetic assertions always melt away under analytic scrutiny.\u00a0 This is normal; it says nothing about the synthetic assertion itself.\u00a0\u00a0 You can\u2019t see wholes with a parts-instrument; likewise, you can\u2019t see parts with a wholes-instrument.\u00a0\u00a0 That wholes are more than the\u00a0sum of parts is not a confirmable\u00a0proposition, because you can\u2019t validate\u00a0decibel measurements with a spectroscope.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You get that? It’s normal<\/strong> for “big picture” ideas to fall apart under an analysis of the pieces. But that analysis may in fact be illegitimate because of this divide in how our minds work. A large idea can still be true, even if some of the pieces are found faulty. Likewise, a bunch of true pieces cannot necessarily be assembled together into a working big idea. To the logician shaking his head right about now – the only thing I can say to you is that even now, you’ve already reduced things down too far and thrown out important information. We are sloppy with this all the time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m reposting this short note from Taliesan here. I was thrilled to see someone write a coherent thought about epistemology. It’s a difficult topic to say something useful about. Uncertainty Principal There is an ancient distinction between the synthetic and analytic operations of the intellect.\u00a0\u00a0 The synthetic operation builds parts into wholes, the analytic operation … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Pieces of ideas”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1876"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1878,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1876\/revisions\/1878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}