Methodological Metaphoric Nominalism

Subtitle: The beginning to doubt everything, Cogito ergo sum
Author: Double Knot
Published At: 9th Oct 2020, 12:00 am
Keywords: methodology, metaphoric nominalism, language of thought, private language argument, intersubjective justified true belief, lifeworld, from perspectivism to intersubjectivity, dialectic game

People come from different regions and cultures of the world, they don't know most of the names or books popular within each circle's mundane life, true universal common world names and concepts are rare, that's why I emphasize math (Indo-European language morphology hint: math~=meta+form~=material~=magic~=~mega~=moha~=matrix~=morph~=monad~=wedding~=wisdom~=way~=vision~=vedic/Vedanta) is the more universal clear language to describe all other less precise metaphors in other levels. Per my philosophy, there's NOTHING BUT confusions (i.e. conflations) about very similar metaphors formed in human minds, thus the only real job left for us is to more or less clarify all kinds of confusions disguised as questions, and the true skill to achieve so is the artistic and careful usage of more-clear-precise-while-maybe-abstract metaphors to describe other less-clear-murky-while-maybe-concrete metaphors as human perceived phenomena, this is essentially what modern science does. After all, we are all more or less imperfect human beings with our own confusions... May I ask do you have any confusions or questions even equipped with your firmly established religion or philosophy?

Someone once complained to me about "This thinking that my truth is as valid as yours and there is no truth better than any other...it's all how one interprets, it will get one nowhere". Well, this is definitely common relativism or perspectivism observed everywhere. Of course our knowledge is always more or less subtly subjective hinted from its western philosophical definition as justified true belief following Plato. In this sense, everyone's private idea always seems justified by one's own private language (logos, logic?) and this is exactly the basis of the universal belief that everyone has right to have one's own belief. Take another example, if a fraud deceived me, wasted my time and some good money, the fraud is a bad deed and thus its orchestrator is punishable within social justice system. However, it's not absolutely so for myself. Like a Buddhist, I may be even sincerely thankful for this evil fraud since it taught me a good lesson how to identify and avoid similar frauds in my future, it's my holy teacher who is hard to find, or even it can reduce some of my own craving-while-proud-and-careless sins in this life or in previous lives so that I can ascend further up, I may be even enlightened by this event if I went deep enough to reflect on juxtaposed similar past personal lessons to synthesize some common illuminating holy spirit.

However, per Wittgenstein's famous private language argument our internal ostensive definitions and conceptions which are only understood by ourselves from our own perspective may be hopelessly inconsistent and thus useless for much broader public communications, there may not be a language of thought as Jerry Fodor famously hypothesized in cognitive sciences. Fortunately there seems to be some independent and perhaps mysterious realm like Democritus' truth in a well or Leibniz's monad or Kant's synthetic a priori or Hegel's dialectic unity notion where we can all intuitively access and share certain knowledge in an intersubjective way forming a Husserlian lifeworld web. Numbers like 2 attract us as a more precise trope, it's an abstract-but-more-clear analogy of an exact copy of something, but we all agree there're no two exact leaves in this contingent world so where did you ever see and experience 2? However, analogy is nothing but genuine analysis, it works fine in applications and has not been falsified so far as a formal language. Literally written as an Arabic symbol, its semantic meaning can be limitless, it may be forming 2 apples (object) in your mind, double an existing action (function) in my mind, etc. Our mind just sees and hopefully honestly describes phenomena via appropriate languages. In this sense, Stoicism which only emphasizes virtue ethics shines here since the only real job left for us is to justifiably represent this world full of confused metaphors and private ideas imagined by naive minds per my metaphoric nominalism, otherwise we're either forever-painfully-confused, or indifferently proudly confused, or intentionally deceitful to take advantage of the confused.

Once you realize sometimes (or maybe most of the times) you need to edit and add accurate-while-prone-to-be-misunderstood public language words to honestly express some delicate murky phenomena (be it physics, biology, economics, software, religion, opinion, or anything), you'll feel you're more and more like defining a much more precise and long quantified logical form, less and less like a layman... Yes, in my world there's no need for any arguments or debates aiming to defeat someone, as Socrates famously emphasized that dialectic conversation should only be an efficient way to help dispel mutual misunderstandings so that ironically both sides can quickly attain the ever-escaping undefinable truth...

In conclusion, based on my above philosophical axiomatic belief that all knowledges belong to the same metaphor family resemblance of different clarity levels under different perspectives, the higher the clearer the perspectiveless and thus more sharable...