Hacker News Reader

Comment by bangkoksbest | Hacker News Reader

The Stove essay (in truth it's a prolonged rant) supposedly extols the virtues of empirical thinking, and you invoked it to back up the sense you had that the description of Deleuze's philosophy is vacuous... And yet...

Difference and multiplicity are core to empirical data and scientific & engineering modelling. To make a measurement you assume there is a scale to measure difference. To have a variable is to assume that something can vary. To be a cause is to assume something can make a difference. To have a process is to assume a system that can change and transform. There's nothing vacuous about this.

View on HN

I'm pretty sure Deleuze never said anything about difference, multiplicity, variables, or process that has proved useful to a scientist or engineer, but I'd be very interested to be proved wrong.

I'm an engineer and I find some of his stuff useful, particularly when it comes to thinking through how to think about how to use large p, small n data.

But I also don't have a strong reactionary anger to Deleuze's penchant for writing in an obscurant quasi-post-modern literary style, and I get that many do. In any case, it's not like similar ideas are not also worked through in less cryptic ways in contemporary philosophy of science journals.

That's interesting. Could you give a specific example?

> To have a variable is to assume that something can vary.

Tautology.

> To be a cause is to assume something can make a difference.

Tautology.

> To have a process is to assume a system that can change and transform.

Tautology.

Vacuous is exactly how I'd describe the above.

The only statement with potential depth is:

> To make a measurement you assume there is a scale to measure difference.

This invokes quantum mechanics a little. But if those are Deleuze's words, he's a bit late to the party. That stuff was being quantified and mathematically modelled decades before.

This is very strange.. Those are not what tautologies are.

In order for something to be tautological, you need to be working within some formal system of proof. Proposing definitions to terms could never be tautological.

I think you just want to say "I know that already!"

Also, Deleuze would love this comment, precisely because of your confusion in the term.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Sense

To be fair, I did intentionally write them in a style to mimic propositional logical statements (which are tautologies) but you are correct that they're not in a formal system so they can't actually be tautologies.

> This is very strange.. Those are not what tautologies are.

> I think you just want to say "I know that already!"

> “All humans are mammals” is held to assert with regard to anything whatsoever that either it is not a human or it is a mammal. But that universal “truth” follows not from any facts noted about real humans but only from the actual use of human and mammal and is thus purely a matter of definition. [1]

Moving on.

I assumed parent was trying to make (non-vacuous) statements, firstly because he was replying to a comment, and secondly because he followed them up with "There's nothing vacuous about this."

> Proposing definitions to terms could never be tautological.

If you treat them as statements, the tautologies clearly appear by substituting the terms' definitions in:

* To have a (thing which can vary) is to assume that something can vary.

* To be a (something that can make a difference) is to assume something can make a difference.

But if parent was just defining his terms, then let's hear those terms used in non-vacuous statements.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/tautology

As the parent commenter, I already put a reply you could respond to

Of course they're tautologies in a logic sense, and I deliberately wrote them that way (whether they are pejorative tautologies is not really a material point.) They're statements about the methods for empirical thinking, the statements were not supposed to have empirical content themselves.

> This invokes quantum mechanics a little.

It also invokes politics, economics, and all that implements some form of notional value, because as some other philosopher quipped, what gets measured gets treasured.

All of modern science is possible without philosophy. In fact, it is when what was called natural philosophy broke off into the natural sciences that philosophy per se devolved into a series of language games on metaphysics that became of little relevance aside from those in the philosophy profession itself.

All our modern advances from hypersonic missiles, large language models, quantum physics and spaceflight and are in spite of what is called philosophy, not due to it.

To turn this around, is all of modern philosophy possible without science? And critically, do we want it to be?

Advances, musings and insights in one domain do not preclude those in others, just as the ethical and epistemological boundaries (and possible trajectories) of missiles, models and spacecraft do not suddenly disappear just because we invented them.

Even moreso, the surrounding language games can be just as impactful: doomsday clocks, Turing tests and space supremacy have informed many policies on the docket, well before any practical applications were feasible. In these instances, it would be (and has been) quite difficult to seperate the science from our language, just as the other way around.

Let me see if I got this right by echoing it aphoristically: science doesn't care about epistemology?

How do you feel about falsifiability?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com