Search the Community

I recently received a comment from someone that said “philosophy has to be universal and absolute”, and this got me thinking…. While I agree that some things can be/are universal and absolute, like in ethics where murder, theft, and rape can be universally and absolutely proven to be immoral [see UPB for logical proof]. Not everything can be shown to have an absolute universality, and furthermore, a proof for their absolute universality may not always be immediately available, or practical to develop for the application (i.e. the precision of absolute universality is not required for all applications at all times). Furthermore, I think the standard of absolute universality has directly lead to an analysis paralysis which is freezing the progress of philosophy. The physical sciences do not wait for absolute universal proofs, or a complete understanding of every single mechanism, of their scientific models/theories before they are functional for practical applications. They simply detail out the precision of the model/theory, the assumptions that were made in the derivation, and boundary conditions indicating any and all known limiting factors. This mechanism/process has allowed the physical sciences to take advantage of incremental progress building toward a more detailed and precise understanding of reality, with the ultimate goal of absolute universality. This goal is still on the leading edge of physics and is typically referred to as ‘The Theory of Everything’. A great example of this mechanism/process is the development of our understanding of gravity. As we were all taught, Newton developed the ‘Law of Universal Gravitation’ in 1687, which was able to predict the forces excreted by objects on each other given their mass, separation, and a gravitational constant. These laws have been critical to our understanding of the world around us, and their contribution to technological progress is priceless. However, as many of you probably know, Newton’s law of universal gravitation is hardly absolutely universal from the sense that it is not able to predict gravity for all conditions or to an infinite level of precision. It took Einstein’s work on relativity before a more precise (still not absolute!!) model of gravity could be derived. Newton’s gravitational model does do a good job at predicting gravitational effects, and in most cases provides all the precision one would need. Its predictive power is precise enough that most engineer’s still use it any time a problem requires that gravitational effects be quantified (i.e. skyscrapers). However, if we had tried to create a GPS system before the development of general and special relativity, it would have never worked. Imagine what would have been the course of human civilization if we held the same standard of ‘absolute universality’ to gravitational theories and claimed that because it doesn’t work for GPS systems we can’t use it for skyscrapers? If we had to wait for Einstein before we could start applying our understanding of gravity, there would have arguably never been an Einstein. I am still trying to work this idea out, so I am not even quite sure yet what providing a ‘delimitated’ (boundary conditioned, limiting conditioned, etc.) universality to philosophical theories would even look like practically. However, this does initially seem like it could be a potential tool/organizational mechanism to use against the onslaught of analysis paralysis from the nitpickers who are holding philosophy down in the mud by expecting any theory to immediately be universally absolute and solve any and all “life boat” problems (or equivalent irrelevancy) they can throw at it. If anyone has any thoughts, or potential flaws, about this it would be greatly appreciated.