Is Philosophy a paradigm?
Hi my name is Bruce Robertson and this is Pirate Philosophy. In this series of videos, I'll be describing an original philosophy, one that you won't find anywhere else but it is one that is logical, rigorous and dynamic. Welcome to Pirate Philosophy.
While I am keen to get on and describe my particular approach to philosophy, there needs to be some preparation made beforehand, primarily to show where my philosophy fits in with other approaches to philosophy. So today, I wish to discuss how philosophy is a paradigm. By paradigm, I mean, a collection of ideas that are all associated and which have a degree of self consistency and cohesion. Philosophy is all about everything in life. That's what philosophy is; it covers all other disciplines and there is no domain for which philosophy does not have something to say, even it is only in a very minor way.
And what do all the different domains within philosophy have in common? Well, clearly it is the human mind; with its perceptions and cognitions and ideas and everything; that is what philosophy is all about. And the human mind is what is at the heart of it all. One of the first ideas that you need in order to understand philosophy is that our minds create a model of the world. What we have in our minds is not the world, it is merely a model of the world; and it is one that we use to interact with the world. We have knowledge of the world but it is quite distinct from the world itself. Our knowledge resides in our minds. Therefore, we create a model of the world within our minds.
So, it is essential for understanding philosophy to realise that we create a model of the world and it is not the world itself, it is a model. Considering now philosophy as a whole; what philosophy does, if you like, is that it creates a model for how that model of the world that we have in our minds is created and how we use it and all those sorts of things. That is what philosophy is all about. And so, we create a model for how a model is created but that model cannot be created out of thin air, it requires assumptions to be made, as foundations upon which other ideas can be built and once those foundations have been established, logical inferences can be made to construct the whole model. As such, the model, being a collection of associated ideas can be considered to constitute a paradigm and the paradigm is built upon assumptions with logical inferences to create a whole philosophy.
Other examples of paradigms are things like science. Science is a paradigm it makes assumptions about the physical realities of the world and then builds on those using logical inference. But the science is not the physical world itself, it is a model of the physical world and as such, it is a paradigm. Even a religion can be considered to be a paradigm because it makes assumptions. It makes assumptions like typically, that a god or gods exist and that is an assumption. Religions that are based on such an assumption, constitute a paradigm.
Philosophy is a paradigm for it creates a model of everything in the world. Yet in Standard Western Philosophy, the philosophy that you learn in university or you find in most philosophy books, the assumptions that are made are not explicitly stated. They are instead implicit and are hidden within normative presumptions about the world. For example, one might make the statement within philosophy or someone might make the statement 'the Sun is shining'. This requires the assumption that that object that seems to be shining up in the sky, is being correctly identified as being the Sun and it also assumes that the receiver of the communication will use the same word to describe the same object up in the sky. There are implicit assumptions within Standard Western Philosophy and their assumptions are assumed rather than being explicitly stated. But even if the assumptions are not explicit, they are still assumptions. And perhaps within some philosophies, the assumption is made that an explicit statement and identification of those assumptions is not required, but in that case, it's merely an assumption about an assumption.
Assumptions define paradigms. The assumptions that we make have similarities with the axioms of mathematics. In the same way that the axioms of mathematics define the system of mathematics, so too can the assumptions of philosophy be used to define the particular philosophical paradigm. And of course, different assumptions will lead to different paradigms. So different assumptions in philosophy will lead to different philosophies. The idea that a particular philosophy has a direct and perfect fit with the actual real world and is not merely a particular philosophical paradigm can be termed as 'naïve philosophy'; for it is over simplistic and naïve. Philosophy is a paradigm and it needs to be recognised that philosophy is a paradigm.
Well, that is all I have for you today. Thank you for listening and watching. If you would like to continue the journey with me, please subscribe, give it a thumbs up and click the bell.
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