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This meme is making these different disciplines answer questions they were never intended to answer. It’s like complaining that a school principal isn’t out there teaching students: that’s not their role and it would be silly to expect them to do otherwise.
Philosophers would ask something like, “what is a cat?”
Metaphysicians would ask something like, “how can we know that the cat truly exists?”
Theologians would ask something like, “what does the Bible say about cats?”
The categories themselves also show his ignorance.
Metaphysics is a sub-discipline of Philosophy.
And theology and science stood on philosophy’s shoulders as a means to different ends. It’s almost like the author started at the beginning and selectively broke off little bits to build up a joke, in service of the joke.
The joke didn’t land. That’s cool. It’s not my joke, I’m not offended. But I am mystified by the number of “well akshully…” replies. Had this been intended to be a serious, thorough commentary on various disciplines maybe I could understand the circlejerk around pedantry. But it’s not. It’s a gag based on oversimplification. In a meme community.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Comedy can be and is used to make real criticisms of the world and various institutions. “It’s just a joke” is one of the most common lies.
People can laugh at the joke, or disagree with the criticism it communicates, or both, or neither.
But having and exercising critical thinking skills when engaging with memes in a meme community full of scholars and academics is exactly what I would expect.
I love The Oatmeal, but yeah, this one’s a miss
One of the painful things about having studied philosophy is experiencing the fact that nearly everyone on the Internet are absolutely sure having read a few paragraphs about the topic makes them an expert.
Yeah, I’m an engineer myself, and even I can see that the take on philosophy here is really unnecessarily disparaging, and doesn’t even really fit well into the joke due to a rather meaningful lack of pertinence.
I think everyone with a niche skill experiences that to some extent. Almost all posts about mathematics on lemmy attract people acting like they understand what’s going on while making wrong claims lol, I only rarely see comments that are fully correct.
I don’t think I saw any math related post tbh, other than witty 3! = 6 one
I guess me being a mathematician makes me notice them more. I’ve seen many in several communities, but me being biased makes me wish there were more.
I just began math PhD program, maybe it becomes different after finishing it. Maybe we are in different communities? Mine is mostly this one, linux and programming.
Different communities then I guess, I browse ‘all’ a lot.
Yeah I expect climate change scientists would roll their eyes pretty hard at my post as well =)
I hope that one day people can call themselves philosophers without feeling cringey, because the world finally understands and respects it.
For what it’s worth, as a non-philosopher, I absolutely agree that it’s a field that needs and deserves to be taken far more seriously by far more people.
When I grow up, I want to work at the philosophy factory, making philosophies
Hey, I’ll have you know that I’ve read TWO paragraphs!
Shit! We got an expert here! ;-)
My high-school class on philosophy concerned itself with formal logic (syllogisms, really) and a little ontology, though I have forgotten most of the ontological stuff again. I don’t know just how much there is to know, so I don’t know just how ignorant I am. But where other Internet philosophers pretend to know what they’re talking about, I at least know that I don’t.
Same with studying anything and then seeing it mentioned on the internet.
Very true
You’re right! I read a few paragraphs about this.
Could it be me who doesnt know what metaphysics is? No, a whole sub-field of philosophy is actually useless and none of them see it.
Also hilarious seeing “philosophy” referred to like its a method you can use and not a whole field including everything from ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, epistemology, aesthetics, etc.
Also hilarious seeing “philosophy” referred to like its a method you can use and not a whole field including everything from ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, epistemology, aesthetics, etc.
well i mean, philosophically, it could be considered a framework to think about things under.
Astronomy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat by analyzing the raw image data of several insanely sensitive cameras, then finding out what the cat looks like, what it looked like right after birth, where it’ll be next year and what its gut microbiome consists of, based on a slight reddish hue in its fur.
Alternatively: Astronomy is like being in a dark room and saying “Something seems off. There must be a black cat in here.”
There are certain behaviors of ordinary cats which can only be explained by the presence of “dark cats”.
Voids, one might say.
Some catronomers suggest that ‘dark cats’ might just be bugs, but we haven’t seen any bugs in the room yet.
tips fedora
Meh. Natural sciences and philosophy/methaphisics are quite closer/more intimately linked than you seem to think.
To quote my former physics teacher:
If you remove maths from physics you’re left with philosophy.
I’m not qualified enough to approve or contest this statement, but I know for a /phisicistsfact that there was a time when great mathematicians were also great philosophers and they couldn’t conceive doing one without the other (Leibnitz or Descartes, among many others). Why I changed and exactly how, I don’t know, but I find it interesting.
Philosophy and maths are still linked via formal logic.
Indeed!
Well duh. They all deal with finding the black cat
Physics is like shooting balls at the cat and registering the sounds of pain to draw a shape of the creature. Except that it turns out to be also a dog at the same time
Lol, all of those are philosophies. Philosophy isn’t separate to science, or theology, of whatever. It’s the bigger group they’re all part of.
The meme’s accurate in that sense. All the others are also in a dark room looking for a black cat.
The most useful branches of philosophy are important enough we’ve given them other names like “math” and “science”.
philosophy is my single favorite field ever invented.
I fucking love it so much. Some fuckhead somewhere was like “wait, why do things mean things, and what does meaning mean?” and now we have fucking nihilism. Truly an incredible field of scientific discovery.
You’re thinking on epistemology, not nihilism.
that was just the example i picked to make a funny haha.
Too bad it peaked 2000 years ago.
I know it’s kind of a meme, but Diogenes was really onto something. Don’t keep what you do not need, how can someone be respected as a person if they depend on servants, a wealthy ruler is no different from a slave once they’ve died, etc.
it’ll peak once we figure out how the universe was created, and how it relates to the rest of human existence.
Philosophy is often more like looking for things that can’t be seen with a flashlight but hypothesizing that they must exist and proving it logically.
Philosophy is determining that there is, probably, a cat in the room. And science is using a flashlight to find it.
Sci-fi is a little more about theorizing science before it gets there. I feel like philosophy is more like: “Why are we looking for the cat?”
It ascribes meaning to the actions that science makes possible. I can find that cat if I use science. But why do I want the cat and what will I do once I have it?
But sometimes philosophy is also like not knowing that flashlights exist and looking for a cat in the dark, sadly.
Remember, who made the flashlight for the scientist? The philosopher.
The amount of “science fans” dismissing philosophy is ridiculous
I don’t see this as being dismissive of philosophy at all. Science has always stood on the shoulders of philosophy. In the context of the meme, it established the possibility of the black cat existing. It’s the baseline. Science then used tools to test the idea, while metaphysics and theology are off somewhere making unfalsifiable claims.
Judging by some of the responses, I’m in the minority with this interpretation.
This meme is highly misinformed about how any of these academic subjects work though. (Meta)physicists and theologists don’t make claims, they research the consequences of certain assumptions. Most elementary sciences work that way.
If it puts us in a minority to regard scientific achievement as owing a debt of gratitude to epistemology and empiricism, not to mention ethics and countless other branches of study that cannot be taken for granted, then so be it. To take science on its own as merely a self evident and wholly objective practice solely fit for solving problems and creating better technologies is as boring as it is anti intellectual.
It’s not about whether or not the meme is dismissive of philosophy. It’s that the writer clearly doesn’t understand the basics of these fields and the kinds of questions they ask/answer, including science. Heck metaphysics isn’t even a separate field, it’s a sub-field of philosophy.
It’s completely insane how they think science somehow invalidates philosophy. First off, it doesn’t even ask the same questions, and only really applies to the physical aspect of the world.
I agree with the conclusion of your metaphor but I think that literally “the scientist” invented the flashlight.
who made the flashlight for the scientist? The philosopher.
You misspelt engineer.
tbf, being in a dark room with no flashlight will give you lots of undistracted free time to work through complex problems and ideas. The presence of a cat in there with you is largely irrelevant.
I work in an underground mine and sometimes when I’m waiting for someone to come pick me up, I torn my cap lamp off and sit on a rock. It’s the darkest dark you can imagine. No shadows, no pin pricks of light just your thoughts. All you can hear is the sound of moving air and the occasionally the rock moving.
It’s genuinely peaceful and so so relaxing. Definitely had some philosophical moments down there
If the cat comes over and let’s me pet it then I can think better
Metaphysics isn’t looking for a black cat that isn’t there. It’s assuming that there is a black cat even though there might not be one, because flashlights don’t exist yet.
Metaphysics is about how things that don’t exist affect what does exist. Things that don’t exist include law, money, superstition, and belief. Santa clause isn’t real, but everyone acting like he’s real makes for a very real effect.
Metaphysics is telling everyone there’s a black cat so they step more carefully.
What about superstitions about black cats being the reason everyone is looking in the first place?
No but like stuff like Santa and money ins’t part of metaphysics. It’s like an attempt to answer stuff because we don’t have the tools to know certain stuff. God would be metaphysics, but not Santa because we know we made Santa up, but the existence of some supreme being (while not exactly how we portray him) is unable to be unproven or proven
You’re talking about theology, not metaphysics.
I meant as in trying to figure out how the universe came to be etc. Not the study of religions.
Like yeah could of been “god” but it also could’ve been nothing at all, or something else
Yeah that’s not what metaphysics is.
Yeah it is
metaphysics, branch of philosophy whose topics in antiquity and the Middle Ages were the first causes of things and the nature of being. In postmedieval philosophy, however, many other topics came to be included under the heading “metaphysics.” (The reasons for this development will be discussed in the body of the article.)
Read more: https://www.britannica.com/topic/metaphysics/Problems-in-metaphysics
Robert Anton Wilson would disagree.
I don’t like this allegory because if the room is perfectly dark the color of the cat doesn’t matter, and if there’s a bit of light its eyes will glow.
Engineering is crinkling the treat bag so the cat comes to you.
