Learning a new language
On the face of it, there shouldn’t be a significant difference in how we approach a new topic in engineering or in philosophy. There is always a new vocabulary to learn, new correlations to be made between concepts, and new ideas to test out, to confirm, modify or to reject.
On the face of things, there is a huge difference between how an engineer approaches a new topic in engineering and in philosophy. In engineering you can build and test things, trial responses to inputs, generate outputs and visualisations of your data - and break things. In philosophy, that looks to be… challenging.
If I use this word instead of that, what is the difference in output, in philosophy? Right now, if you’re like me, it’s constant: “huh?” Ontology? Ontogenesis? Epistemology? Individuation? They mean next to nothing. It’s next to impossible to create a test for the difference between ontology and ontogenesis because we don’t understand how to clamp the words to “stress test” them. What is the Young’s Modulus of ontology or of ontogenesis?
Looking at it from another perspective; if I were to write a software programme in the language of philosophy, it would be riddled with syntax errors and unclosed loops.
But therein lies the appeal: philosophy birthed the world of logic, meaning [watch out: is this next clause testable, verifiable?] - meaning that logic is contained within philosophy, so logic’s rules apply.
But, I’m entering a new world, which is a bit like starting a new job: I’m meeting the people, learning their terminology. I don’t want to be too rude or disrespectful; I’ll ask questions, carefully enquire as to why they do things one way and not another - and soon perhaps I’ll be in a position to start designing tests and experiments to see what all of this means.
