Time to flood this community with educational memes! We have to meet the people where they are, and memes are the true art form of the people.
Time to flood this community with educational memes! We have to meet the people where they are, and memes are the true art form of the people.
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The only thing I ignored was the piling up of words on top of other words. If you retrace the steps you will see that the discussion was about whether any specific item of knowledge can be divorced from the context it was first discovered in. My contention is that not all knowledge automatically assumes ideological character. One could even argue that all ideological knowledge is possibly not knowledge at all but rather a creed, though the discussion never even went that far, nor am I going to push it there (others might). If anyone it's the person in question who can be more credibly accused of side-stepping the discussion as they went at length about colonialist book-keeping, ancient Greek grasp of mathematics, property relations etc, but no matter how far down the philosophical or philosophy of science rabbit hole you've sunk the fact remains that when you add two items together you get the sum of those two items. Trivial but true and true in any context. To imply the opposite is to engage in magical thinking (you see actually 1 + 1 is not 2 but...). The same goes for the earth orbiting the sun. It was worked out in its modern elliptical form by a deeply religious man trying to better understand god's plan and safeguard the sanctity of the divine. That was the context of Kepler's discoveries. Yet it has zero bearing on a communist society using the calculations standing on the shoulders of that knowledge to launch rockets into space and have them land where they want to. The same goes for pretty much all knowledge.
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I'm reading and re-reading your last sentence but can't make heads nor tails of it, can you please expand on what you mean there?
As to the 1+1 thing - reads like pure sophistry to me. It doesn't matter if the chairs are part of the room or not, it doesn't even matter if there are any chairs at all, the fact remains that if you take an item, a purely abstract item, a totally shapeless and formless item that has the completely arbitrary assigned value of one and add to it another item that has the same arbitrary value you get the sum of those values when you group them together. Yes, this is predicated on an axiom but the axiom is for us, in our general reality in this universe undeniably true. Until it maybe isn't in some hypothetical future but until such a time we have no reason to assume so and thus such a hypothetical overturning of the axiom is completely irrelevant, a navel gazing exercise. The example of adding items is a very apt one because it demonstrably applies to non-human species as well. Many kinds of birds can count, apes can too, as well as elephants and highly probably many many other animals throughout the animal kingdom. This operation transcends not only any ideological stance both geographically and historically but even entire species. What more reasonable proof of universality do you want that knowledge is not tethered to its historical origins?
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https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2016.0513 https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(20)30055-0 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/science/animals-count-numbers.html https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-animals-have-the-ability-to-count/ https://www.friendsofanimals.org/counting-capabilities-in-nonhuman-animals/
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We certainly are and I never implied that the gathering and application of knowledge is an exclusively human practice or ability, quite the contrary.