Enterprise software is just a shadow of the ideal software
And enterprise developers are chained in a dark cave building it from projections of the real thing. Fitting metaphor! 8-P
Meringue Philosophy
11–13 of 13 posts
Re: Meringue Philosophy
#121. Some philosophers think many metaphysical debates meaningless. Consider the debate about ordinary objects such as chairs. These typically are the result of composing more fundamental entities (such as those of the Standard Model). Mereological nihilists say: there are no ordinary objects (such as chairs). Others disagree. /Relativists/ about metaphysics say that these disputes are merely verbal. There is no fact o…
> Relativists about metaphysics say that these disputes are merely verbal. There is no fact of the matter to discover and expound. As a relativist myself, I'd say that this description misrepresents Relativism, out of a misunderstanding. It's not that there are no facts to discover, but that whatever you discover is a mental construct that is mediated by how you think about it. This "nihilism" is popular because it's…
> this description misrepresents Relativism
The position I have outlined is fairly standard and commonplace; that it is different from the view you call ‘relativism’ does not mean that I have misrepresented you, since I did not in fact intend to characterise your specific view.
> It’s not that there are no facts to discover, but that whatever you discover is a mental construct that is mediated by how you think about it.
If the ‘mediation’ in question is sufficiently strong, whatever is discovered is not, on the usual reading of ‘fact’, really going to consist in facts.
> This ‘nihilism’
is not standardly called nihilism. Those standardly called metaphysical nihilists in the literature tend not to be relativists; in insisting on their position in the debate, they usually think that the debate is meaningful.
In the later section of your comment, the sort of mind-dependence to which you advert is unclear. One reading is that you think that the process of intellectual enquiry as we perform it is mind-dependent because it takes place in our minds; this much I think is quite plausible. Another reading is that you think that any criteria of success (e.g., correctness) will also be mind-dependent, which is fairly close to Berkeley’s idealism, in that, if Berkeleyan idealism is denied, there will presumably be mind-independent facts (up to translation schemata) that we can get right or wrong. I do not intend to debate whether Berkeleyan idealism is true, but it is certainly different from what is typically taken to be metaphysical relativism in the metametaphysical literature.
Re: Meringue Philosophy
#13Definitely agree with the author on this one in the general sense of programing is an act[1] of defining ontologies and programmers who are aware they're doing this can be more effective. Likely because doing anything deliberately is more effective.
What I wish he touched on is indiscernibility of identicals. That is, drawing a comparison between the idea that we can perceive two object having the same color that have two wildly different spectral distributions we can, also have two objects that are indistinguishable based on identical relations.
"Where does 'green' occur?" is a perfectly valid question for green objects. If we insist that green is an essential characteristic of the object, then why is it that one object emitting 525nm light and another emitting both 450nm and 575nm light are both the same color? It would seem as though green isn't an essential characteristic of the object and instead it's a characteristic of perception. Ie: green objects are perception-interchangable.
Similar to perception-interchangability is duck typing. Ie: if a thing is in all ways that matter, perceived the same as another, then they can be substituted. Though one does have to rather careful about what actually matters lest they find themselves in a plucked chicken scenario[2] with someone trying to point out the metameric folly of comparing them to men.
1. among others