PP5 How does Standard Western Philosophy stack up as a philosophy paradigm?

PP5 How does Standard Western Philosophy stack up as a philosophy paradigm?

G'day my name is Bruce Robertson and this is Pirate Philosophy. In this series of videos I will be describing an original philosophy, one that you will not find anywhere else; but it is one that is logical and dynamic. Welcome to pirate philosophy.

In today's video I will be looking at Standard Western Philosophy and assessing how effective it is as a philosophical paradigm. I will first take a look at Standard Western Philosophy as a whole, and then I will examine it according to the criteria for a good philosophical paradigm that was discussed in the previous video. I have given the criteria the acronym SCALES for Self consistency, Comprehensiveness, Accuracy, Logic, Explicitness and Simplicity.

And what do I mean by standard Western philosophy? As mentioned in a previous video, I mean everything that is in the canon of modern Western philosophy, including all of what might be found in any university library in the philosophy section.

Standard Western Philosophy is a collection of ideas on philosophy with many different facets and assertions; yet they all share a common set of core ideas. Standard Western Philosophy sets the benchmark for philosophy. It can trace its roots to the start of philosophical investigations in ancient Greece. It focuses heavily on language with its propositions, arguments and statements; it considers that truth is a property of statements and that an objective truth can be encapsulated within true statements.

It is the assumptions associated with this focus on language, the logic of language and truth as a property of statements together with its assumptions about the importance of the history of philosophy that define, in part, its particular paradigm.

I will now turn to the 6 SCALES criteria.

Self-consistency

The criteria of self-consistency looks at whether the ideas within the paradigm are consistent with each other. While Standard Western Philosophy does try to be self-consistent, there are two problems of self consistency that come to mind. First, the paradoxes of language such as 'the ship of Theseus' and 'the mound' as discussed in a previous video. Standard Western Philosophy considers these to be problems of philosophy but of course they are only problems of the Standard Western Philosophy paradigm. The second and more significant one is that while it has been identified in Standard Western Philosophy that there is a distinction between the noumena, the things that supposedly actually exist and the phenomena which are the perception of those things and that the divide between the two cannot be crossed, i.e. all we actually know about the physical world are phenomena. Nevertheless Standard Western Philosophy still holds that truths about the world are identifiable and further that these truths can be expressed in statements. This is a major inconsistency. Nevertheless I will give Standard Western Philosophy a score of 5 out of 10 for self-consistency

Comprehensiveness

Philosophy is about everything in the world and an effective philosophical paradigm needs to cover all aspects of the world; hence comprehensiveness is important for a philosophical paradigm. Standard Western Philosophy does cover many aspects of the world but there are a few glaring omissions.

1 In its ethics it focuses solely on what is best for the community and other people. It has very little to say about what is best for the individual.

2 It says nothing about the very human activities of sleep, consciousness or laughter.

3 Despite using the word 'truth' a lot, it has no definitive theory of what truth is, how it is used nor how it can be determined what is to be labelled as 'truth' and what is not.

4 Despite being focused heavily on words and language, it has no theory for how words are logically linked to the real world. Instead it relies on defining words in terms of other words but this is ultimately circular. It lacks an effective theory of how words are linked to the world. And this is problematic, for without such a theory and with a focus on language, there is no process by which meaningful words can be distinguished from non-meaningful or fanciful words that belong more to the realm of fantasy than philosophy.

Overall I can score Standard Western Philosophy 5 out of 10 for comprehensiveness.

Accuracy

Accuracy is important to any philosophy in that it is an indication of how well that theory fits the facts. If this connection is not well established then it may be that the philosophy only has relevance to a fantasy or non-real world and not to the actual real world. It is not sufficient to merely take normative facts of the world and claim that they are 'true'. There needs to be powerful explanative theories that describe many and possibly diverse facts of the world. Standard Western Philosophy seems to lack these powerful theories. Its theory that every statement is either true or false might seem to be reasonable, but if this is an accurate theory then one would expect there to be a list of statements that were 'true' and another list of statements that were 'false' however these seem to be missing from the canon of Standard Western Philosophy, presumably because such a list cannot be formed.

Nevertheless I will give standard philosophy a score of 5 out of 10 for accuracy.

Logic

Standard western philosophy certainly tries to be rigorous and logical, but because it focuses so much on language and words it is not really rigorous nor even logical. Its problem stems from failing to distinguish between a word as a string of alpha-numeric symbols, words in a dictionary, ideas in one's head and something that exists in the real world. For example, in its logic is the word 'tree' to be treated as a string of alpha-numeric symbols 't', 'r', 'e', 'e' or as a word in a dictionary that can be linked to other words such as 'shrub' or 'bush' within the dictionary or is it as the idea of a tree in one's head or is it the possibility of a real tree existing somewhere in reality. Standard Western Philosophy does not distinguish between these possibilities; instead what it does is to bundle all these different interpretations of 'tree' together and use them in a logic that is little more than hand waving. I call it hand waving as it is not using any explicit nor logical process by which words can be manipulated or processed.

So overall I can only give standard western philosophy a score of 3 out of 10 for logic.

Explicitness

Philosophy needs to be explicit with regard to its foundations and its processes of inference; otherwise it is indistinguishable from opinion. And by 'opinion', I mean the conclusions reached by means of a process that is hidden to everyone else. It is therefore entirely subjective and specific only to the person presenting the opinion. Others might agree with it if they share similar knowledge and thought processes, but even so it remains a subjective opinion. And Standard Western Philosophy is not at all explicit as to its foundation nor its processes of inference. It has its claims of logic, but as already discussed, this logic is not particularly rigorous, and even so, that logic is not used very much in the actual inferential processes within the treatises of Standard Western Philosophy. And as such, much of Standard Western Philosophy can be classified as opinion. It may be a considered a thoughtful opinion but nevertheless remains as a subjective opinion. And this applies also to its claims of 'truth'; as previously mentioned Standard Western Philosophy has no explicit and logical theory of truth; the best it can do is to claim that a statement is 'true' if it corresponds to the facts of reality; but it has no theory for the logic of 'corresponds' nor any process by which it can be determined whether a statement actually 'corresponds' to the facts of reality or not, that is anything more than a hand waving process. And so its claims of truth are no more than subjective opinions.

So I can only give Standard Western Philosophy a score of 2 out of 10 for explicitness.

Simplicity

Simplicity is important as it indicates clarity of thought and clarity of ideas. Standard Western Philosophy is neither simple in its ideas nor in its communication of those ideas. The lack of clarity in its writings is undoubtedly linked to the lack of clarity of its ideas.

So overall I can only give Standard Western Philosophy a score of 1 out of 10 for simplicity.

So now totaling up the scores and taking a simple average, one arrives at an overall score of 3.5 out of 10 for the efficacy of the Standard Western Philosophy as a philosophical paradigm.

And while this score is entirely a subjective opinion, it is one that may be well shared by others. In any case, I think I have shown that there is room for considerable improvement in Standard Western Philosophy. Quite whether this improvement can be achieved within the paradigm and using the precepts of Standard Western Philosophy or whether a new paradigm shift is required is a moot point. For myself my interest lies in creating and presenting a whole new paradigm and one that I will be discussing in future videos.

Well, that is all I have for you today. If you have any interesting comments or questions about today's video, please leave them in the comment section below and if you would like to continue this journey with me, then please subscribe to my channel. Give it a thumbs up and ring the bell.

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