First, everything which I write here, please consider as a draft which may be modified or retracted.<\/p>\n
Second, when I look back at things which I have written, they are mostly criticisms — rejections of this or that.<\/p>\n
Third, what I have to say about metaphysics and epistemology, I have said in my Ph.D. dissertation, Critique of Wilfrid Sellars’ Materialism<\/a>, 1990. \u00a0I characterize myself as an Emergent Materialist, and I agree with Sellars that “in the dimension of\u00a0describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is, that it is, and of what is not that it is not.”\u00a0In light of the existence of artifacts (things created by humans), the Sellarsian claim has to be qualified. When Sellars uses the term “world” he must be talking about — to use his term — the “physical-2” world (this is the physical world before the emergence of life, i.e. the inanimate world). If he includes the “physical-1 world,” then the term “science” must be expanded to cover intentional phenomena (function, teleology). And “explanation” must be expanded to cover not only causal explanations\u00a0but explanations by reasons.<\/p>\n Fourth, \u00a0I believe that Curt Ducasse was correct in viewing philosophy as dealing with appraisals — both positive and negative. \u00a0To call something bullshit is to express a very strong negative appraisal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" First, everything which I write here, please consider as a draft which may be modified or retracted. Second, when I look back at things which I have written, they are mostly criticisms — rejections of this or that. Third, what I have to say about metaphysics and epistemology, I have said in my Ph.D. dissertation, … Continue reading “Why about bullshit?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":493,"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions\/493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ditext.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}