[FOM] Falsify Platonism

[Nick Nielsen]

Brian Hart <hart.bri at gmail.com> wrote (among other interesting things):

>  Philosophy
> teases the discursive intellect into thinking it can acquire
> cumulative philosophical knowledge with a confusing array of smoke and
> mirror tricks.  Just when one thinks one has a "proof" in one's hand
> one looks there only to find one's hand empty.

This sounds like a philosophy of philosophy. It also sounds strongly
Kantian. Whether you want to indict philosophical thought as
consisting of paralogisms of pure reason or "a confusing array of
smoke and mirror tricks," and whether your putative proof has turned
out to be empty or it can be opposed to another proof that is its
antinomy, it amounts to the dispensability of philosophy. But in the
present context, with mathematics and logic at stake, we can't just
limit ourselves to possible experience (as Kant did), so we have to
allow for some other meaningful forms of discourse. Maybe we posit a
dichotomy of synthetic and analytical truths, confining possible
experience to the former and the formal sciences to the latter. Then
someone comes along and shows us the untenability of the
synthetic/analytic dichotomy, and we are well on our way to
recapitulating the history of twentieth century philosophy.

It seems to me what is really at stake here is whether or not there is
progress in philosophy (and whether that progress is comparable to
scientific progress). I say that there is. Just the past hundred years
of thought have furnished us with more refined conceptual tools that
allow us to express ourselves with far greater precision, and avoiding
more mistakes than was the case in the past. And I would say that
Gödel was among those who contributed significantly to the progress of
philosophy. You've already formulated this quite powerfully: "...he
struggled mightily to come to grips with his own ontological and
epistemological views which is one of the reasons he published so few
philosophical works." I agree with this. One can spend a lifetime
struggling for clarity. As far as I am concerned, such a life would be
well spent.

Best wishes,

Nick Nielsen

PS - It is impossible to resist pointing out that the same point can
be made regarding science: "Science teases the discursive intellect
into thinking it can acquire cumulative scientific knowledge with a
confusing array of smoke and mirror tricks.  Just when one thinks one
has a "scientific theory" in one's hand one looks there only to find
one's hand empty." Recent philosophical thought has shown the progress
of scientific knowledge to be at least as problematic as the progress
of philosophical knowledge.