<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 2:06 PM, spike </span><span dir="ltr" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><<a href="mailto:spike66@att.net" target="_blank">spike66@att.net</a>></span><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"> wrote:</span><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div lang="EN-US" link="blue" vlink="purple"><blockquote style="border-style:none none none solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-width:1pt;padding:0in 0in 0in 6pt;margin-left:4.8pt;margin-right:0in"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:11.55pt"><span style="font-family:'Comic Sans MS'"></span></p><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">></div>>…<span style="color:black"> Issue: how many teeth does a horse have? Some wag suggested they get a horse and he was kicked out of the meeting: only rationalism can decide truth - </span>….<span style="color:black">bill w</span><p></p></blockquote><span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:11pt">BillW, the question is less absurd than it sounds. Any empiricist can count. The philosopher’s job is to define the term “teeth.”</span></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>
<p class=""><font size="4">When he was a student at Princeton Richard Feynman had an encounter with philosophers, years later this is what he had to say about it and why he developed a contempt not for philosophy but for philosophers</font></p><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><font size="4">:</font></div><p></p>
<p class=""><font size="4"><i>"In the Graduate College dining room at Princeton everybody used to sit with his own group. I sat with the physicists, but after a bit I thought: It would be nice to see what the rest of the world is doing, so I'll sit for a week or two in each of the other groups.</i></font></p><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><font size="4"><i> </i></font></div><font size="4"><i>When I sat with the philosophers I listened to them discuss very seriously a book called Process and Reality by Whitehead. They were using words in a funny way, and I couldn't quite understand what they were saying. Now I didn't want to interrupt them in their own conversation and keep asking them to explain something, and on the few occasions that I did, they'd try to explain it to me, but I still didn't get it. Finally they invited me to come to their seminar.</i></font><p></p>
<p class=""><font size="4"><i>They had a seminar that was like, a class. It had been meeting once a week to discuss a new chapter out of Process and Reality - some guy would give a report on it and then there would be a discussion. I went to this seminar promising myself to keep my mouth shut, reminding myself that I didn't know anything about the subject, and I was going there just to watch.</i></font></p>
<p class=""><font size="4"><i>What happened there was typical - so typical that it was unbelievable, but true. First of all, I sat there without saying anything, which is almost unbelievable, but also true. A student gave a report on the chapter to be studied that week. In it Whitehead kept using the words "essential object" in a particular technical way that presumably he had defined, but that I didn't understand.</i></font></p>
<p class=""><font size="4"><i>After some discussion as to what "essential object" meant, the professor leading the seminar said something meant to clarify things and drew something that looked like lightning bolts on the blackboard. "Mr. Feynman," he said, "would you say an electron is an 'essential object'?"</i></font></p>
<p class=""><font size="4"><i>Well, now I was in trouble. I admitted that I hadn't read the book, so I had no idea of what Whitehead meant by the phrase; I had only come to watch. "But," I said, "I'll try to answer the professor's question if you will first answer a question from me, so I can have a better idea of what 'essential object' means.</i></font></p>
<p class=""><font size="4"><i>What I had intended to do was to find out whether they thought theoretical constructs were essential objects. The electron is a theory that we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real. I wanted to make the idea of a theory clear by analogy. In the case of the brick, my next question was going to be, "What about the inside of the brick?" - and I would then point out that no one has ever seen the inside of a brick. Every time you break the brick, you only see the surface. That the brick has an inside is a simple theory which helps us understand things better. The theory of electrons is analogous. So I began by asking, "Is a brick an essential object?"</i></font></p>
<p class=""><font size="4"><i>Then the answers came out. One man stood up and said, "A brick as an individual, specific brick. That is what Whitehead means by an essential object."</i></font></p>
<p class=""><font size="4"><i>Another man said, "No, it isn't the individual brick that is an essential object; it's the general character that all bricks have in common - their 'brickiness' - that is the essential object."</i></font></p>
<p class=""><font size="4"><i>Another guy got up and said, "No, it's not in the bricks themselves. 'Essential object' means the idea in the mind that you get when you think of bricks."</i></font></p>
<p class=""><font size="4"><i>Another guy got up, and another, and I tell you I have never heard such ingenious different ways of looking at a brick before. And, just like it should in all stories about philosophers, it ended up in complete chaos. In all their previous discussions they hadn't even asked themselves whether such a simple object as a brick, much less an electron, is an "essential object"."</i></font></p>
<p class=""> <font size="4">John K Clark</font></p></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br></div><br></div></div>