cant they just do it the easy way like the jc does here and have “eastern philosophy class western philosophy class” ect?
How do you prove anything subjective? Is there even such a thing as subjective reality? If so, how do you study it? What does “proof” or “rigor” even mean? Can you prove Freud wrong? How?
If you can demonstrate that certain things are true, through testing, then you have an axiom from which to develop a philosophy. If you can then, mathematically prove that your ideas are purely and inarguably derived from your axioms, then you have established a rigorous philosophy.
Freud hasn’t been demonstrated correct on anything testable. His psychological teachings would need to better a control group of people who received non-Freudian advice from another human. They don’t.
Can you cite this definition of an axiom? I always thought that you don’t prove an axiom. An axiom is assumed to be true, and then things are proven based on it.
Subjectivity, though. Does it not exist in your world? There are things that fall outside of “testably correct” and “false”.
For a relevant example, do cows experience pain? How about wheat? And I’m not talking about studying their organs to discover if there are nerve impulses. But what is it actually like to be a cow or stalk of wheat? To be swiftly killed or harvested? You can study brains from the atoms up using all the cutting edge science in the world, but you’ll never know what it feels like to shed your skin, say, or navigate by echolocation, or have fruit picked off your limbs.
Do these things simply not exist? Are they not worth thinking about?
That’s literally the opposite of what “axiom” means.
How do you feel about teaching literature in schools?
A few points.
- Philosophy isn’t a science.
- There’s more to philosophy than logic.
- Non-European philosophical schools developed formal systems of logic. (There was even a philosophical school in ancient China called the Logicians).
To what extent are philosophy courses in China Sino-centric? To what extent are philosophy courses in India Indo-centric? Etc.
You don’t prove an axiom logically: it’s a starting point for your deductive reasoning.
But IIUC, Sage Rat isn’t completely off base if you’re going by the classical, Aristotelian understanding of “axiom,” according to which axioms and postulates are seen to be true based on our experience with the world.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
An “axiom”, in classical terminology, referred to a self-evident assumption common to many branches of science. A good example would be the assertion that
When an equal amount is taken from equals, an equal amount results.
At the foundation of the various sciences lay certain additional hypotheses which were accepted without proof. Such a hypothesis was termed a postulate. While the axioms were common to many sciences, the postulates of each particular science were different. Their validity had to be established by means of real-world experience. Indeed, Aristotle warns that the content of a science cannot be successfully communicated, if the learner is in doubt about the truth of the postulates.
[/QUOTE]
The modern understanding of the word, at least in some contexts, is a bit different, in that it’s not about what’s true:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
It is not correct to say that the axioms of field theory are “propositions that are regarded as true without proof.” Rather, the field axioms are a set of constraints. If any given system of addition and multiplication satisfies these constraints, then one is in a position to instantly know a great deal of extra information about this system.
…
In the modern understanding, a set of axioms is any collection of formally stated assertions from which other formally stated assertions follow by the application of certain well-defined rules.
[/QUOTE]
But they’re not proven, which is what the claim was.
Cite?
An axiom is assumed to be true from the vantage of the math and, as you say, that doesn’t mean that the axiom is in any real sense true. But a scientific philosophy should be based on axioms that are as unimpeachable as possible.
For example, if I want to use “murder is bad” as an axiom, I would first need to define “bad” and then use evidence to support adding murder to the set of bad things.
So, say that I define “bad” as meaning “economically disadvantageous” and then I can find (or run) studies which confirm that higher murder rates are causitively negative on the market. So I write that all up and then I can submit my axiom for review.
Others might object that a better definition of “bad” is needed than economic effect, so I might have to go back to the drawing board. Others might argue that the methodology of the studies I used was flawed, and so I will need to go back and revise the techniques that were used. But, eventually, we will be able to find some axioms which no one can find any reasonable arguments against and which are well supported by real world evidence. Or, at least, any philosophy would first have to state what the axioms are and how they were derived, so that the person reviewing it can decide whether the philosophy seems reasonable at its fundamental level and decide whether to attribute it any merit. But, in the long run, unimpeachable axioms would be the first target.
10 seconds on Google. You couldn’t have done that yourself?
They all seem very Greek centric.
I dunno man. It’s all Greek to me.
The posts in this thread go a long way toward showing the need for more balanced philosophy education.
There is such a thing, for example, as Chinese epistemology. It is not mystical or unexamined or any of the other Orientalist bullshit was spouted so far.
Reading that, it is merely random sophistry – at most the feeble beginnings of an intellectual process that might eventually have led to something like Aristotelian formal logic or Euclidean geometry or Platonic idealism, but somehow never did. Qin Shih Huangdi’s fault, perhaps (no, not our Qin, I mean the First Emperor) – the Hundred Schools of Thought pretty much came to an end for all time after he gained the Hegemony.
No, no, no. Whatever your claim is, if you have proven it, then it’s not an axiom. In general, you only have to specify something as an axiom when (a) you need it to be true to support the argument you are making, but (b) you can’t prove it. An axiom is typically not only unproven but unprovable. In general you invite people to accept axioms not by demonstrating a proof for them, but by suggesting that the axiom is self-evidently true, and doesn’t require demonstration.
If it’s true that scientists use the word “axiom” for a proposition which is proven then they should probably stop doing that. It’s going to cause a lot of confusion.
More to the point, in the present context, is that if scientists are using the word in that sense that doesn’t provide any foundation at all for a criticism of philosophers, mathematicians and others who use the word in the more usual sense, and it’s not going to support an argument that philosophy, mathematics, etc should stop being studied in universities. If you use words in a way that scientists don’t, there’s no place for you in universities. Seriously?
OK, now we’re getting somewhere. Tell us more.