Do you think Nationalism is a good or bad thing?

No, not particularly... But I'm not in the mood to be condescended upon, especially by sophist pricks who think they know philosophy. So, let me teach you.

If you're going to act like you know philosophy let's start as good philosophers should in defining "belief system". You seem inclined to define it as a set of ideas about the nature of reality. Frankly, that's incomplete.

See the thing about beliefs is that they differ significantly from opinions. This is clearly a concept you've never been introduced to, and I'm sure you'll resist it passionately in favor of your own definitions; however, it is the reason we're downvoting you, so I'll explain it.

Basically, I'm saying beliefs tell us something about the nature of these ideas that differs fundamentally from the ideas of mathematics and science. To understand how they differ it might help to have the philosophical basics of math and science explained to you.

Congratulations, you're talking to one of very few people who can actually do that.

Now, we'll start with something all philosophers are quite familiar with: the A-Priori. A-Priori essentially means self proving or self evident. There are three significant a-priori's: Nothing, Existence, and Logos. Nothing's rather hard to explain and more than a few good philosophers don't have a grasp on it. Essentially all we can say about nothing is: Nothing. Heidegger said: "The Nothing itself Nothings." It is, properly, the first a-priori; however, it's best understood after the other two. Existence is. It is mere being. It is self evident because to suggest existence isn't is suggest, is to is, is to exist. Logos is variability. It's the difference between x and y, and everything else. The most obvious proof of Logos is that to suggest Logos isn't is to distinguish between is and isn't, which of course requires/is Logos. Now with existence and variability you have everything / all of existence / the universe. The logical negation of the universe creates a logical layer that before you referred to it was Nothing. Of course you can't actually refer to nothing because it neither exists nor is varied. But you can keep referring to this logical region just beyond existence. Existence will expand infinitely, but nothing is always just beyond it, just beyond infinity (that's the reason it's the first a-priori). You can see why some philosophers struggle with the concept?

Now at this point we have to take a philosophical back-road so to speak. After the a-priori, is Alethiology, or the study of truth. Philosophers have nearly forgotten about this field; never-the-less, It is the most important field within philosophy and ontology. It deals with three things: the criteria or standards of truth, truths, and Truth. Yeah, that's right capital-T Truth, it's the real one, the actual one, the universal one, etc. Now, these lower case truths are sets of criteria competing to be capital-T truth. There are three (it'll be four) criteria of truths you'll have to keep an eye on. The first one is Well-Definedness. It's the single criteria of rationalism and mathematics because it is the criteria that requires perfect consistency. The second criteria is the single criteria of simple empiricism and the second criteria (after well-defindeness) of individual level science: it's correspondence. Correspondence is exactly what it sounds like: The criteria requires that the theory correspond to empirical observations. The final criteria is actually a catch all here's-the-rest criteria. It's social criteria. There are two significant social criteria: those based on authority and those based on consensus.

Science has the two criteria of well-defined-ness and correspondence. Sciencism is all social, and simply identifies scientists as the authority. You'll be itching to say right there is your point two belief systems, but the thing is these are where beliefs and opinions fundamentally differ. Beliefs are based on social criteria. Opinions aren't.

That's not to say scientists at large don't have beliefs, they do. For example most modern scientists prefer a probabilistic rather than a deterministic "nature of reality". These beliefs are based on the heisenberg uncertainty principle sure, but they aren't actually indicative of probabilitism. It certainly opens the door to it, but all we know from a scientific perspective is it's not indeterministic.

This leads us right into how we know things in science. Science acts a bridge between rationalism and empiricism. It's all about math (if you're a biologist logical relations are math, yes). Science gives rational relations between variables that correspond to empirical observations. What I mean when I say what we know scientifically largely refers to an idea about dependent and independent variables. In this case the nature of the world is our variable of interest, and while we can prove probabilistic theories can work we can't actually prove deterministic ones don't: what if it is deterministic, but we just can't measure it. It's not even something science can know: how would we test for it? (This is actually the original logic behind the principle.) The only reason we know it to be non-in-deterministic is because we've defined consistency into our impression of the world in-the-first-place with well-definedness.

The only additional things you'd need to know-- and this is just for sake of completion, I made my point a while back -- is how to take measurements (quantitative, qualitative, reproducibility, consistency, etc. ) and scientific best practices namely note and label everything.

Anyway, ... Yeah. Hope you learned something. Cheers.

/r/InsightfulQuestions Thread Parent