Good morning, everyone and welcome to Saturday’s Morning Open Thread.
Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
Join us, please.
For the next few Saturdays, I’m exploring language—its ways of working and our attempts to understand how it actually provides commonalities universal (or at least public) enough to allow communication. The main focus of the short series (like much of contemporary philosophy) is with the inconsistency, inadequacy, and muddle which characterizes ordinary language: how people actually tend to speak spontaneously.
The first week we explored some limitations on language (symbols and their meanings) in a lecture on the famous "Chinese Room" thought experiment. Last week we explored the basics of our present day understanding of how language works with Gottlob Frege's theory of sense and reference. Given what’s going on in the world, though, I wanted to shift slightly from purely how language works (or doesn’t) to the ethical realms of human thought. Today, it’s Occam’s Razor and Objective Morality.
Before you stop reading, I do want to point out that this series is leading somewhere. There is, in my thinking, a connection between language and moral principles. Still, I won’t belabor these videos—let’s begin with the idea that Occam’s Rasor is essentially a problem solving calculus that posits that the simplest explanation is probably the correct explanation. The first video, though, is presented for the few seconds of where it introduces the philosophical explanation of an ontological approach to life: simply, a study of what it means to “be.” So this week the question is, gently put, is there something that defines or explains what it is we believe?
Cheers all, and do enjoy your weekend.
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For the visual parts of this series, I am using various lectures by Jeffrey Kaplan and his wonderful instructional videos—he has a variety of subjects, and I would highly recommend you head over to his page and explore.
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?