<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><p style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif"><font size="4"><i></i></font></p><div class="gmail_default" style="display:inline"><font size="4"><i>Feynman (by John) </i></font></div><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></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">An argument in ancient Greece, which I remember well, Spike, about what a human was, ended with a definition that man was a featherless biped. At the next meeting a guy threw a plucked chicken on the table.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Once you start arguing definitions, it will always end up in chaos. In psych we used the term 'operational definition'. I don't know what terms other areas like physics use, but it have to be something similar. So, say, 'intelligence for the purposes of this study is defined as scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC)". Since what intelligence 'really is' has never been settled, we have to use such operational definitions. Of course, many will say that that test doesn't really measure intelligence, and so we day, OK, go do your own research.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">And so they do. Multiple intelligences were popular at one time and still are in places, but the scores seemed to correlate so highly with the conventional tests that a separate definition of intelligence seems unnecessary. This has been the fate of quite a number of different definitions and tests of intelligence.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">What John seems to be arguing, and I fully agree, is that philosophers keep on arguing about the same old things and never get off the pot and do something. Maybe these new 'experimental philosophers' will.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Then some wag like me will come along and say: you don't understand. Any concept - any word - is no more and no less that what you define it as. It has no separate existence.. </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">It's an abstraction. And then you can be the one to go refute that by kicking a rock.</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">bill w</div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 2:34 PM, John Clark <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:johnkclark@gmail.com" target="_blank">johnkclark@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><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 dir="ltr"><span><div 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></span><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><span><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 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></span><div>
<p><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 style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><font size="4">:</font></div><p></p>
<p><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 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><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><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><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><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><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><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><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><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><font size="4"><i></i></font></p><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:'comic sans ms',sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0);display:inline"><font size="4"><i></i></font></div><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>
<p> <font size="4">John K Clark</font></p></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br></div><br></div></div>
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