Revealing expose on the methodology that non-science people are trained to think within...
— Critical Reading (@CriticalReading) July 9, 2015
For centuries stretching back to the ancient Greeks and culminating in the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment era, the development of scientific knowledge about the world had largely consisted in breaking up everything in the world into discrete parts, defining what's essential to each part, and making a record of these properties.
The aim was to separate the objects under investigation into ever-more specific classifications. One good example is the way of defining biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics and assigning them to ever more specific categories--domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and finally species.
The philosophical underpinning of this pursuit of knowledge was grounded in the empirical method, which guided the scientific inquiry into the interactions conceived of as external to these discrete and now well-defined entities.
The law of identity was critical to the project: A thing is always equal to or identical with itself. Or stated in algebraic terms: A equals A. One corollary of the idea that A is always identical to A is that A can never equal not-A.
But the law of identity troubled Hegel...
No wonder things are so screwed up...
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