Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Ways of Worldmaking', 'Epistemic Two-Dimensional Semantics' and 'Sapiens: brief history of humankind'

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3 ideas

1. Philosophy / B. History of Ideas / 5. Later European Thought
The Scientific Revolution was the discovery of our own ignorance [Harari]
     Full Idea: The great discovery of the Scientific Revolution was that humans do not know the answers to their most important question.
     From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 14 'Ignoramus')
     A reaction: I think of that revolution as raising the bar in epistemology, but this idea gives a motivation for doing so. Why the discovery then, and not before?
For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another [Harari]
     Full Idea: For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another, …and the only machine capable of performing energy conversion was the body.
     From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 17 'Intro')
     A reaction: Hence the huge and revolutionary importance of the steam engine and the electricity generator.
1. Philosophy / F. Analytic Philosophy / 5. Linguistic Analysis
Without words or other symbols, we have no world [Goodman]
     Full Idea: We can have words without a world but no world without words or other symbols.
     From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.3)
     A reaction: Goodman seems to have a particularly extreme version of the commitment to philosophy as linguistic. Non-human animals have no world, it seems.