The second last paragraph under the “Ideas” topic has given me a lot of clarity towards the solution to a problem that I have had for quite a while. You say that this point that ideas are interpreted in a context has caused a lot of confusion for philosophers. You are talking about the objective subjective debate here right?
My opinion of this article is that it’s good and challenging. I feel like I had to think hard, in an enjoyable way, while reading it.
Recombining and rewording parts of this article:
- Every action requires decisions which requires thinking.
- Getting good ideas requires thinking of ideas and judging ideas.
- Judging ideas means finding ideas with errors and discarding those ideas.
- Reason is the method of choosing between ideas.
- The best ways to think use error correction.
- Error correction gets better ideas but not final truth.
- There are always more errors to find or more improvements to be made.
I think I ran into some general confusion and questions in the Ideas section.
Questions about the Ideas section:
- How do you delineate between problems and context? Aren’t problems part of context? Isn’t everything part of context for that matter? If the parts of context not relevant to the problem are to be excluded, then why isn’t that context just part of the problem?
- I think I’m a bit hazy on the idea of a problem. Should I think of problems as wants? As in, problems are questions I want answers to, or changes I want to my life context. Is that general enough to encompass all problems? Is that too general a way to describe problems? What would be a better, more specific definition, or way to conceptualize, problems?
For a single problem and a single context, there’s a single truth of the matter about the best solution.
Doesn’t the idea of breakpoints in solving problems elminate the idea of the “best solution”? Won’t there be infinitely many solutions to a single problem and a single context? All the solutions will be equivalent in binary terms of success or failure at solving the problem.
Or is this quote referring to the idea reality is objective and exact, so there’s only way for things to be? So, the quote means that there is an exact truth, even though we can never know it because we would have to know everything and specify all details about the universe.
The single truth may be like “pick any one from this set of equally good solutions and do that”.