Rhino,
You are getting into some fairly deep areas for Hermit. Not that there isn't
room to disagree with him, but in philosophy, he can go on ad infinitum.
Thank goodness I have only a limited appetite for philosophy, for I know that
Hermit would fill me up with it every day if I so truly desired it.
In philosophy, I generally go for the most parsimonious bang for the buck,
-its my "Duh, I'm Jake!" philosophy that realizes I simply don't have the
philosophical stamina of some. That's why I like pancritical rationalism.
And for me, not even the higher brow Bartley's approach, which I respectfully
honor as inspiration for my own. My version of this basically comes down to
one statement, "All representations remain in principal subject to rational
criticism." The statement itself is self referential and generally holds
true, or at least enjoys a fairly robust existence among other very close
conceptual configurations of roughly the same idea. That of course is a
strictly linguistic representation of that underlying truth, but I imagine
that other media and languages can provide us with some other interesting
perspectives on the same idea. From this underlying principle, the
scientific process as we know it has emerged, or at least enjoys strong
confirmation in its compatibility with pancritical rationalism. My personal
theory on this is that some sort of scientific process and culture, roughly
recognizable as such will always attend, be supported by, if it was not
itself birthed by such a pancritical rationalist attitude, whether or not
this attitude gets explicated in a statement such as I have done above.
Now that was certainly a mouthful above, but it remains relatively short
compared to many more common philosophical renditions. I could add more, but
then that starts to get into some of my ideas about memetics, cognitive
science, and so forth, and we all know that's a bunch of hooey anyway ;-) ,
so I will leave it that. Of course I'd never offer this for more than
amateur philosophy. But then isn't all philosophy an amateur sport anyway?
Doh!!!
-Jake
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