If you aren’t denying or opposing anything, then what work is “only” doing in the sense “the natural world is the only world”?
In that there is “no more than”, in ontological terms, there are no other fundamental categories of being. I don’t have to explicitly deny that unicorns exist in order to rule them out of any taxonomy of equine animals.
If you’ve presupposed a worldview that allows for “supernatural” or “mystical” or Cartesian mind-substance or what have you, then of course the opposition seems obvious, but modern analytical naturalism as it stands makes no such allowance. This is why we cannot take our presuppositions for granted.
Define ‘science,’ while you’re at it.
You don’t have the space on this forum for that debate. However, for pragmatic purposes, let’s (roughly) call it the social activity of institutionalized formal empirical inquiry, inclusive of the error-correcting norms and structures meant to filter our systematic errors.
The vagueness of the term ‘naturalism’ is the primary reason it’s a bad habit to define your methods or world-view in terms of it.
Maybe if you didn’t take flippant comments and run with them you wouldn’t encounter this problem. I brought up naturalism because I found it hilarious that “even modern analytic philosophy” teaches these laughably vague “bad habits”—which you still seem surprisingly unconcerned with, given the far more serious issues there—and contemporary naturalism as practiced by many philosophers in the English-speaking world is as pro-science a set of ideas as you’ll find.
Spiraling it out into this protracted debate about whether we can accurately define naturalism—on your terms, no less—is not the point of the exercise (and I suspect it’s only happened to take the focus off the matter at hand: that there is no adequate account of these “bad habits” and we’re seeing an interference play to keep eyes off it).
There is virtually no content to ‘naturalism’ or ‘scientism,’ beyond the fact that both are associated with science and the former has a positive connotation, while the latter has a negative connotation.
Yes I’m well aware of the dislike of anything intrinsically opposed to the formal and computable around these parts, and I also find that position to be laughable (and a shining example of why you folks need to engage with philosophy rather than jumping head-first into troubling [and equally laughable] moral-ethical positions).
But, as per the thread, there is a more interesting and proximate criticism: your intuitions on such are unreliable, by your own lights, so you’ll pardon me if I am hardly persuaded by your fiat declaration that i) there is “no content” to a whole wide-ranging debate (of which you seem barely familiar with, at that, with your introduction of yet another nonsensical opposition that might as well be fiction for all it reflects the actual process*) and ii) that we should—again by decree—paint as “useless” the tools and methods used to engage in the debate.
We are only fortunate that the actual intellectual world doesn’t conduct itself like a message board.
PS There is no serious debate “between” naturalism and scientism. The latter isn’t even a “position” as such, even less so than naturalism could be.
In that there is “no more than”, in ontological terms, there are no other fundamental categories of being. I don’t have to explicitly deny that unicorns exist in order to rule them out of any taxonomy of equine animals.
If you’ve presupposed a worldview that allows for “supernatural” or “mystical” or Cartesian mind-substance or what have you, then of course the opposition seems obvious, but modern analytical naturalism as it stands makes no such allowance. This is why we cannot take our presuppositions for granted.
You don’t have the space on this forum for that debate. However, for pragmatic purposes, let’s (roughly) call it the social activity of institutionalized formal empirical inquiry, inclusive of the error-correcting norms and structures meant to filter our systematic errors.
Maybe if you didn’t take flippant comments and run with them you wouldn’t encounter this problem. I brought up naturalism because I found it hilarious that “even modern analytic philosophy” teaches these laughably vague “bad habits”—which you still seem surprisingly unconcerned with, given the far more serious issues there—and contemporary naturalism as practiced by many philosophers in the English-speaking world is as pro-science a set of ideas as you’ll find.
Spiraling it out into this protracted debate about whether we can accurately define naturalism—on your terms, no less—is not the point of the exercise (and I suspect it’s only happened to take the focus off the matter at hand: that there is no adequate account of these “bad habits” and we’re seeing an interference play to keep eyes off it).
Yes I’m well aware of the dislike of anything intrinsically opposed to the formal and computable around these parts, and I also find that position to be laughable (and a shining example of why you folks need to engage with philosophy rather than jumping head-first into troubling [and equally laughable] moral-ethical positions).
But, as per the thread, there is a more interesting and proximate criticism: your intuitions on such are unreliable, by your own lights, so you’ll pardon me if I am hardly persuaded by your fiat declaration that i) there is “no content” to a whole wide-ranging debate (of which you seem barely familiar with, at that, with your introduction of yet another nonsensical opposition that might as well be fiction for all it reflects the actual process*) and ii) that we should—again by decree—paint as “useless” the tools and methods used to engage in the debate.
We are only fortunate that the actual intellectual world doesn’t conduct itself like a message board.
PS There is no serious debate “between” naturalism and scientism. The latter isn’t even a “position” as such, even less so than naturalism could be.