Contemporary academic philosophy consists of asking questions of the form 'Why do so many contemporary philosophers order salad at the cafetaria when, everybody agrees, nothing but one's own shit can be, or ought to be, eaten'? It is pointless to complain that nobody thinks coprophagy is a good thing. Why? Because this shows you aren't an academic- let alone a philosopher.
As a case in point, Amie L. Thomasson, whom some consider one of our greatest living philosophers- which is like saying my neighbour's cat is the most proficient living alchemist- has a recent paper titled-
SHOULD ONTOLOGY BE EXPLANATORY?
The answer is no.
'What' questions are ontological. 'Why' questions are aetiological. What types of things, a particular discipline or discourse, exist or are posied as existing is the ontological question for that discipline or discourse. Why a thing arises is a question about causation and is aetiological because the Greek word for 'cause' is aitia (αἰτíα).
Abstract. The central question of ontology has long been thought to be ‘What is there?’.
The central way of answering it has been to consider which entities we must posit as part
of a best total explanatory theory.
This begs the question- be it central or peripheral- as to whether thoughts exist. We may, for certain purposes, posit their existences just as we can posit other things- e.g. cuddliness- but nothing is explained by saying 'the cuddliness of the baby causes me to cuddle the baby' or ' thought cause us to think there are thoughts'.
This paper argues against this ‘explanatory’ conception of metaphysics,
Nobody thinks of metaphysics (literally 'what is beyond natural science') as aetiological. Diseases have aetiologies and curing diseases by understanding their causes is useful and noble. Philosophy is jejune and useless.
by showing that it relies on an unarticulated assumption that all the terms at issue in these metaphysical debates serve an explanatory function.
If so academic philosophy is even shittier than we imagine it to be.
Making use of work in systemic functional linguistics
can't help unless philosophers suffer some sort of nuerological disorder when it comees to language processing.
enables us to identify the many different functions played by terms of interest in metaphysics.
The functions of interest to metaphysics are metaphysical. But language- it now appears- isn't beyond physics at all.
And that makes it clear that ‘contribution of explanatory power’ should be rejected as an across-the-board criterion in ontology.
Who accepted it? Name & shame the cunts!
This work in functional linguistics also enables us to see why it is useful to have a language that entitles us to use redundant inferences
e.g. 'that utterly cunty cunt'
to introduce terms for properties, numbers,
e.g. cunty cunt as opposed 'not that cunty cunt, I meant the other cunty cunt'
and the like, giving us new reason to accept ‘easy’ inferences that there are such things.
cunty cunts?
As a result, we should give up thinking that ‘what is there?’ provides a deep and interesting question for a discipline called ‘ontology’ to answer,
Quantum onlology- sure. But that's high IQ stuff. What this lady is doing is finger painting with her own faeces.
and give up thinking that the task for ontology is to determine which entities to ‘posit’ as part of a best total explanatory theory.
Since we don't know what that is- but are pretty sure the best one we have will soon be superseded- nobody has ever applied themselves to any such task.
The central question of ontology, as Quine presented it, could be expressed in three
words: “What is there?”
Quine was wrong. To find out what there is, you need to get out of your armchair & go look. For a example, to find out what is in the cupboard, I have to open the cupboard door. OMG! It's a ga..ga..ga ghost! I shut the door quickly. But that doesn't mean a ghost exists in the cupboard. I have to apply various verification protocols.
Ontology is what you must content yourself with because neither direct obversvation nor verification are possible. Equally, it may be purely dogmatic- what in Sanskrit is called 'matam' as opposed to 'vigyan'.
But those who aim to answer this question
are either doing 'vigyan' (science) or else they are talking about how many angels can dance upon the point of a pin.
generally do not take their goal as simply to generate a list or inventory,
Physicists would love to have an inventory of elementary particles or to find out whether hypothetical ones- e.g. gravitons- can be verifiably produced in the laboratory or detected in the cosmos.
and tend to deny that answers are easy to come by. Instead, the project of ontology has been
thought of
by whom? Usless shitheads.
as a matter of determining what entities we should or must ‘posit’ as part of
a best total explanatory theory.
which is that these cunty cunts are copraphogous cunty cunts.
Amie's paper shows a complete absence of thought. This is a sample-
Here is the idea. In early language—both developmentally and evolutionarily
we know nothing about 'evolutionarily' early language. As for 'developmentally' early language- all we can say is that infants are different from mature people. If some fundamental change occurs in our fitness landscape, we have no idea how language will 'develop'. Overy my own lifetime it has become much more mathematical.
(and across languages)—we begin with ‘congruent’ meanings: nouns for things, verbs
for processes. . . (Halliday 2009, 117).
but anything can be a gerund or a denominal verb or whatever. What is certain is that philosophy is now only taught and studied by those who are developmentally challenged.
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