/lit/ - Literature

Oh hey. It seems this thread placed an order for a healthy dose of Korzybski.

Lets have a look, we have one extra large linguistic construct, a small pepsi, and a triple the map is not the territory.

>Is philosophy nothing but semantics?

Yes. Philosophy is an attempt to describe empirical events, and concepts that impact empirical events (and occasionally postulate about non-empirical events), using a semantic framework that has a variable correlation to reality. You cannot escape semantic constructs, so there is little use worrying, but keep in mind that the linguistic description (map) is not reality (territory).

Infinite-valued determinism:

"The problem of 'indeterminism vs. determinism' is the failure of pre-modern epistemologies to formulate the issue properly, the failure to consider or include all factors relevant to a particular prediction, and failure to adjust our languages and linguistic structures to empirical facts.

We can resolve this in favour of determinism of a special kind called 'infinite-valued' determinism which always allows for the possibility that relevant 'causal' factors may be 'left out' at any given date, resulting in, if the issue is not understood at that date, 'indeterminism', which simply indicates that our ability to predict events has broken down.

All human behavior (including all human decisions) is, in principle, fully determined once all relevant doctrinal and linguistic factors are included in the analysis, regarding theories of 'free will' as failing to include the doctrinal and linguistic environments as environments in the analysis of human behaviour."