Rex Kerr
2 min readSep 23, 2022

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Dialectical thinking sounds like an extremely poorly grounded version of the scientific method (and evidence-based epistemology more generally).

Once you have a good enough grasp of the scientific method so all your questions start sounding like "Is A a good model of reality? How does it compare to B?" then I don't think Hegel gives you any extra insight.

A cup of Popper plus a dash of Kuhn to taste will get you there, if you like to get there via philosophers. But ever since roughly the time of Bacon, scientists have in practice hit upon a pretty good approach.

You can pick whichever starting point you like, but you can't believe whatever you like, and you certainly can't stay alive however you like. Reality intervenes powerfully. And though this doesn't necessarily make the problem "convex" (in the analogical sense of "follow what looks good right here right now and you'll get to the universal truth"), it does cut through a heck of a lot of the differences in conceptualization.

If you want to build an iPhone 14, wherever you start from, you're going to end up believing thousands and thousands of things in almost perfect harmony with what others believe, because any other model comports too poorly with reality to make an iPhone 14.

Although other aspects of life don't have quite the same degree of collision with objective reality, the approach that lets you make an iPhone 14 works delightfully everywhere else too, so there's little harm in it. And you don't have to bother thinking about to what extent one thing is divorced from another thing that is not it etc. etc.--just focus on what your models are (when you need to put this level of self-reflection into it at all; when not, just live).

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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