John Freestone
Graduate Poster
We have different ways of thinking about this. You seem to want to exclude impossible definitions at the outset, where I was saying that we can come up with definitions that fit our intuitions and folk understandings, to get at what we're really interested in testing for ontological reality, and then work towards grappling with its existence. To my mind, we can only do it this way, since until we have a definition, we can't discover whether the thing to which it refers exists. I think you gave an example of the Michelson-Morley experiment. If they took your advice, wouldn't they never have got to the point of doing the experiment, since aether didn't exist? You seem to be suggesting we can know what exists before we test for it. How can we dispense with a defined-thing (concept) as non-existent until we've tried to find it, and how do we know what we're looking for until we've got a definition?
Oh, is this just another confusion? When you say, 'knowledge theory' and 'cognitive theory', do you mean 'Knowledge Theory' and 'Cognitive Theory', the name of your up-coming publications? I thought you were referring to extant areas of psychology or philosophy.
Thanks.
I spent about 21 years doing research without making progress.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Research that is making progress, research that only seems to be making progress, and research that clearly isn't, all might open up more questions.
Hmm, I wonder if one sign of it is defining a term for someone who introduced it. I generally try to know what I'm talking about, and I did in this case. You're half right, but you got the right half (it's also the self-underestimation of people with high ability).
That depends a great deal on your use of the word 'familiarize'. If it's an understatement, and you mean 'study asiduously', fine; if it means what a lot of people mean by it, it's perhaps an indication of 'DK'. At the serious end of the continuum, the Dunning-Kruger effect is like a narcissistic disorder, where people parade what they imagine is their expertise, write books (or say they will), even set up lecture tours and try to inveigle their way into academic circles they have little right to be in. They have 'familiarized' themselves with current theories and imagine they know better than the experts...and obviously vastly more than ordinary folk.
This is true, but why not get help. Look, I'm not trying to be nasty. You just keep telling the world (on this public forum) that you've worked a whole lot of stuff out, you pronounce a lot of things you can prove or disprove, you correct people (incorrectly) on a whole lot of things, and you've been talking about publishing your work for years (I looked back at some of your other postings), and it all amounts to a lot of hot air, as far as I can see. What's the point? If you've not put the last piece of the jigsaw in place and can't publish until you have, you need to be doing more work or talking to academics who can help you, not repeating yourself. It reads as though you're at the cusp of some major discovery. I don't believe you for a moment. Especially when your familiarity with several relevant subjects is clearly inferior to mine, which is lay by most standards. One glaring example is that, as far as I'm aware, vast numbers of computer scientists, cognitive psychologists, biologists, neurologists, etc., consider human intelligence as fundamentally no different from what computers do, brain function is essentially computation, they will tell you that. You can read it over and over on the Net. You say otherwise, but seem unable to tell anyone why you think that. You come across, therefore, as maybe a dualist or mentalist, someone who thinks human intelligence, or just biological intelligence, is 'special', ineffable, spiritual maybe. What else can we do but guess?
Maybe you've looked at this deeper than is evident here. I wonder if your sticking point is the idea of 'general intelligence' as an ability to understand anything in any situation. Again, I'm just left guessing, since you're so vague. If this is what you think human brains can do, and that if a mechanical system can't do it, it's not 'intelligent', then I'd be glad to disabuse you of the idea. Human intelligence is very constrained (largely by evolutionary pressure), which is why we make so many errors. It's a wonder we ever stumbled our way to the scientific method.
