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.
I hope that one day people can call themselves philosophers without feeling cringey, because the world finally understands and respects it.
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.
Yeah I expect climate change scientists would roll their eyes pretty hard at my post as well =)
Hey, I'll have you know that I've read TWO paragraphs!
Shit! We got an expert here! ;-)
Same with studying anything and then seeing it mentioned on the internet.
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.
You're right! I read a few paragraphs about this.
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.
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.
You can put an exclamation point in front of the link to get the image directly
You can embed the image, but I think you need to use the image link, rather than the comic page link:
While true, be advised that some consider it rude to hotlink images without permission
Edit: as pointed out below, Randall gives permission to hotlink/embed on each comic page.
The most useful branches of philosophy are important enough we’ve given them other names like “math” and “science”.
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.
I love The Oatmeal, but yeah, this one's a miss
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.
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.
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.
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.
Engineering is crinkling the treat bag so the cat comes to you.
Science is more like systematically searching the room while exhaustively documenting all findings to define every place the cat wasn’t, as well as where it was. Then you release the cat and do it several more times. Then you invite your peers to come in the room and try to achieve the same results, comparing their findings with yours, so everyone can have a better chance of finding the cat in future attempts.
Science isn’t easy. It is precise because it is tediously thorough.
But observing the cat with the flashlight fundamentally affects the cat.
The cat both has and hasn't knocked something breakable off a counter or table before you enter the room.
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.
If the cat comes over and let's me pet it then I can think better
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
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.
tips fedora
What's the one that's in a perfectly lit empty white room, with a decently sized black cat thats covered in arrows flashing towards it with a loud siren blaring from it and signs saying "the cat you are looking for is right here!", who still can't find the cat?
I think religion is represented wrong. It should read :
Being in a dark room looking for a black cat, believing that it is there.
I get where the OP is coming from and many religious people have been loud, vocal and hostile recently but it's not a core principle of religion to be that way.
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.
Problem: Can a black cat be found in a dark room?
Hypothesis: yes
Variable: flashlight
Control: no flashlight
Findings: "v" group found the cat; the "c" group didn't.
Theory: You can find a cat in a dark room using a flashlight.
Law: cats land feet first (indisputable)
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
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.
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.
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.
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