analytic – Grigori T. Cross

One reason I decided to study philosophy at an academic level—the reason I suspect Wittgenstein would appreciate most—is that I found I couldn’t stop thinking. There were moments that the Buddhist/Dharmic (and I can’t say a word like that without my raised-in-the-‘90s brain interjecting “yoga flame!”) ideal of clearing my mind was achievable and desirable, such as in moments of crippling self-doubt, but, as much as I wanted those moments to stop, I wanted more that I should continue, that I should not let the venomous thoughts and feelings swallow me whole, that I should think my way through them. Thinking was and remains a useful pastime that I cannot help doing. It only made sense that I should apply whatever talents I had for it to the recorded thoughts of the great minds from the ancient, medieval, or contemporary world. It was through my schooling that I was introduced to the analytic and continental schools of philosophy inquiry. So as not to overwhelm you with digressions, I shall make understanding the difference between the two a sub-topic for another day, but it will suffice and oversimplify to say that the former is more purely scientific and the latter artistic. I have been trained more thoroughly in the former, but my preference by far is the latter.

The portion of my mind trained in the analytic tradition sees this question simply as a kind of absurd paradox. While I am not skilled enough to formulate the question in formal logic, I know the basic structure would be something like, “If x, then how would you know not-x?” The easiest way to answer this is to disregard the human experience of sentences, by which I mean all one need do is to chop off the antecedent in the conditional, as the truth value thereof will be the same even if all that is addressed is the consequent. It is then a simple epistemological question that will be answered differently by rationalists, empiricists, and Kantian lambs who will soon serve as my dinner.

That isn’t very fun, though, is it?

No, indeed, and it’s only half-right.

It is an epistemological question cloaked in an absurd paradox, to be sure, but it is only by taking into consideration the antecedent, the head we chopped off, that the question can be answered thoroughly. Curiously, a thorough answer is quite short:

“If you did then how would you know you didn’t?”

Whatever way you would otherwise know you didn’t.

Now, I’m about as hardcore a skeptic as they come, especially where epistemology is concerned. The senses are not wholly reliable, reason is not wholly reliable, and the two acting in concert can be a death trap. I’m a stickler about certainty, and certainty is a concept relying to whatever degree on objectivity, which I do not believe exists. This is all to say I am in no way the best person to ask. That said, there are certainly rationalists and empiricists and Kantian lambs who will read these words and they will answer according to their methodology, regardless of any epistemology that I might propose. The easiest part is that there is no verb attached to the question, so anything can be supplied.

For example:

“If you made, how would you know you made not?”

Let us expand:

“If you did make, how would you know you did not make?”

Simply:

You probably would not, provided there was no alarm set up to alert you that you had not made.

Back to the original, this time as dialogue:

“If you did then how would you know you didn’t?”

“I would know I didn’t if there were a wire tripped to let me know I didn’t once I hadn’t done, but I did. Relax.”

With care,

~ Grigori

In a word, the difference between a duck is: substance. That’s the word philosophers used back in the time before the dinosaurs to say that something was there. Elon Musk eventually came along and gifted us humans with jetpacks and flamethrowers and we all joined forces to melt the dinosaurs’ faces off. It was then that the philosophers had a change of heart and decided “matter” was better, cleaner, or at least less pretentious as a way to describe the same stuff referred to by “substance.” The decision was objected to by all the usual suspects, including those two or three philosophers who had intended to count both anti-matter and that chthonic weirdness that was most definitely NOT matter they had discovered just a few days before among That Which Should be Studied, but they decided to keep their mouths shut upon remembering that they’d told no one and now here we are.

Analytic philosophy tends to approach language in a formulaic and mathematical fashion. It’s the kind of thinking one might expect from a man whose intent is to simplify language as much as possible so as to maintain clarity to the utmost degree. If objective reality—that which would be left remaining, were all human experience to be removed—is in some basic sense static and unchanging, many of the problems in philosophy may very well be due to misunderstandings and the lack of clarity in the language being used. I happen to think this approach is fundamentally mistaken in a number of ways, but it is worth engaging in such methodologies to see what these undeniably brilliant philosophers concluded AND for the purpose of answering a question such as this.

Within mathematics, the directive to simplify equations often results in numbers being added together, subtracted from each other, or otherwise consolidated. For example, before simplification, an equation might read:

10+4x+7y+0=43

For the purpose of illustrating the way I see and interpret the original question, I will translate the alphanumeric equation using words used in common language as opposed to those usually confined to mathematics, such as “plus” and “are”:

“Ten and four X and seven Y and nothing are forty-three.”

The simplified alphanumeric equation would be:

4x+7y=33

Translated:

“Four X and seven Y are thirty-three.”

I bolded “and nothing” in the translated equation before simplification and removed it in the simplified translation to illustrate the superfluous nature of such phrases in mathematics. Using analytic philosophy’s mathematical approach to language, the question I see is: “What’s the difference between a duck and nothing?” It is merely simplified. The only other possible answer as I see it is to get the nothing that comes from subtracting a duck from itself or comparing/contrasting the duck to that which is not there in between it, and “nothing” isn’t at all an interesting point to make, is it?

With care,

~ Grigori