Rex Kerr
1 min readDec 30, 2022

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Thank you for the conversation. I have enjoyed parts of it, but it is ultimately unsatisfying because your perspective is all vague promises that never materialize into actual insight.

Of course there are epistemological and metaphysical questions that inherently can't be answered by science. This is a place where philosophers can add considerably to our understanding, not because we can prove any of it (unless we can simply through logic--which sometimes we can), but because even if we're not certain we still want to have a more usable framework and want not to get caught by wrong assumptions that we might be able to reveal as unfounded.

However, you never actually got to any of that, so that wasn't very satisfying. It's all mostly unhelpful analogies to illustrate simple points could have been conveyed much more accurately in a sentence or two--and your last reply is, alas, no exception. You spent four paragraphs on a bread analogy that could have been better stated in a single sentence, e.g., "The pursuit of science, especially in practice, involves at least implicit commitment to structural and metaphysical principles that it cannot internally justify." Or you could have given a link to an exposition of the perspective you are trying to give--which because of all the analogies I can't even discern, but might be structural realism, possibly ontic structural realism? (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/)

So, anyway, I appreciate the effort, but, unfortunately, the exchange has mostly not been particularly productive.

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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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