Commonality

The previous section led me to reflect that 'commonality' is a better keyword for level 1 commensurability than 'agreement'. I have therefore changed it accordingly, but as this is not a substantive change in my understanding of commensurability, I have not seen fit to give it a new version number. Furthermore, I think that the propositions put forward in the account of commensurability are now relatively strong and detailed. I therefore now think that I have enough there to constitute a veritable theory of commensurability. I will therefore name it as such in my hypertext link on the right-hand side of the page.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Philosophy of Al Qaeda

People out there seem pretty interested in the philosophy of Al Qaeda. Three of my most recent hits have involved searches on those words. Mine is the top-ranked page when "Al-Qaeda" is spelled with a hyphen, and the second-ranked page when it is not. And my page was only referring to someone else's blog page in the first place! So let's talk about the philosophy of Al Qaeda. Paul Berman wrote an excellent article about it. He identifies Sayyid Qutb as the most important philosopher behind the movement. Qutb is Qaeda's intellectual hero, its "Karl Marx". In this respect, Qutb's best known work is Milestones , his Das Kapital . Berman, however, calls attention to Qutb's deeper work, the enormous In the Shade of the Koran . It is full of literary beauty and deep ideas. Just because ideas are deep, however, does not mean that they are true, and many of Qutb's ideas, Berman argues, are indeed false. Qutb opposes the separation of church and s
Read more

Am I a reductive or non-reductive naturalist?

I tried to get The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding from the university library today after work, but the library still has limited hours until 7th March. It won't be open after business hours until Tuesday, by which time I will be busy rehearsing for my play, so I won't really be able to get to the library until 8th March anyway. I was only curious about the term anyway. But if attitudinalism is meant to be similar to non-cognitivism, then I am sure I will not accept that as an approach to ethics, because as I understand it, ethical non-cognitivism means that moral statements have no truth-value, which I cannot believe. They do have a truth-value; it is simply what determines that truth-value that can be problematic. The difficulty of classifying any view as non-naturalistic is, at bottom, the cost of allowing non-reductive versions of naturalism. Excuse me, WTF is non-reductive naturalism?? Some lecture notes from the University of Michigan
Read more

Commensurability 5.0

Key concept: commensurability Dictionary Definition: measurability by a common standard (Based on definition of "commensurable" in WordNet 2.0 .) Substantive Account: of a claim, measurability of its truth or falsity by a common standard that falls along a continuum of degrees, or levels , of conduciveness to non-coercive agreement. I distinguish the following four levels: Level 1 Keyword: Commonality. UPDATE 2014/12/28: Could also be triviality. Necessary and sufficient condition: Pre-existing agreement about truth or falsity of claim. Examples: "The Pope is Catholic" is at level 1 because of pre-existing agreement of its truth. "The moon is made of green cheese" is at level 1 because of pre-existing agreement of its falsity. Additionally, non-trivial claims can be at level 1 relative to a particular discussion. For example, assumptions made in a scientific paradigm are at level 1 relative to all who share that paradigm. Level 2 Keywor
Read more