Definitions: Science, Scientism, Pseudoscience, Pseudo-rationalism, and Literature.


THE DEFINITIONS

i) SCIENCE: a warranty of due diligence against ignorance, error, bias, and deceit.

ii) SCIENTISM : overstating empiricism (correlation), without completing the applicable scope of due diligences, or attempting to apply tests of truth in matters of preference or good.

iii) PSEUDOSCIENCE: Testifying to the truth of statements without having performed due diligence against ignorance error, bias, and deceit.

iv) PSEUDO-RATIONALISM: Attempts to claim closure where closure does not exist in the logics without appeal to the next higher dimension (empiricism). In other words sophisms, no matter how skilled. Contradictions proposed rarely exist, and almost all questions of philosophy are non-existent bits of fraud due to the use of poor grammar and incomplete sentences. (For example, the liar’s paradox is not operationally possible.)

THE ARGUMENT

(1) The sciences consist of logical and physical means of falsification in each dimension of possible human action (categorically consistent, internally consistent(logical), externally correspondent(empirical), operationally possible(existential), rational choice(voluntary), reciprocal rational choice(moral), scope-completeness/limits-defined/surviving-parsimony.)

(2) the sciences can therefore tell us what is false, and what at present appears to be true (meaning the science allow us to testify to having performed due diligence against ignorance, error, bias, and deceit.)

(3) For some reason, we still conflate the logics (tests of constant relations between two or more states, in a set of dimensions), including mathematics (tests of constant positional relations given scale independence) and the deducibility (‘inference’) of relations given the inviolability of those constant relations. Very little of meaning can be said of logic other than it is extremely useful in the falsification of the logical – which is how we use it. Proofs appear to have very little value since given enough time nearly anything can be justified by verbal ‘proof’).

(4) Philosophy at present is limited to the exploration and determination of preference (personal), and good (collective). But philosophy has a tragic reputation for nearly universal falsehood outside of those choices. In fact, current philosophy consists largely of self help on one side and a catalog of human errors in intuition on the other.

(5) Literature consists of envisioning possible and impossible worlds, for the purpose of exploration, advocacy, and criticism.

(6) We tend to conflate literature and logic (philosophy), and conflate History (myth), law (norm), literature (parable), and pseudoscience into theology, just as we inflate literature and reason into philosophy.

(7) So while there is value in via positive imaginings (theology, philosophy, mythology) there exists only decidability (conflict resolution) via mathematics, science, history, and reciprocity (law).

Ergo, if we must disagree, we must resort only to decidability independent of good or preference. If we seek possibilities, we must resort to literature, myth, and philosophy.

Truth can only be produced via-negativa, and choice only by via positiva.

Sorry. That’s all there is to the scope of human knowledge.

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine

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