One of the painful things about having studied philosophy is experiencing the fact that nearly everyone on the Internet are absolutely sure having read a few paragraphs about the topic makes them an expert.
I hope that one day people can call themselves philosophers without feeling cringey, because the world finally understands and respects it.
I think everyone with a niche skill experiences that to some extent. Almost all posts about mathematics on lemmy attract people acting like they understand what’s going on while making wrong claims lol, I only rarely see comments that are fully correct.
I don’t think I saw any math related post tbh, other than witty 3! = 6 one
I guess me being a mathematician makes me notice them more. I’ve seen many in several communities, but me being biased makes me wish there were more.
Same with studying anything and then seeing it mentioned on the internet.
My high-school class on philosophy concerned itself with formal logic (syllogisms, really) and a little ontology, though I have forgotten most of the ontological stuff again. I don’t know just how much there is to know, so I don’t know just how ignorant I am. But where other Internet philosophers pretend to know what they’re talking about, I at least know that I don’t.
Astronomy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat by analyzing the raw image data of several insanely sensitive cameras, then finding out what the cat looks like, what it looked like right after birth, where it’ll be next year and what its gut microbiome consists of, based on a slight reddish hue in its fur.
Alternatively: Astronomy is like being in a dark room and saying “Something seems off. There must be a black cat in here.”
There are certain behaviors of ordinary cats which can only be explained by the presence of “dark cats”.
Lol, all of those are philosophies. Philosophy isn’t separate to science, or theology, of whatever. It’s the bigger group they’re all part of.
You can put an exclamation point in front of the link to get the image directly
You can embed the image, but I think you need to use the image link, rather than the comic page link:
While true, be advised that some consider it rude to hotlink images without permission
Edit: as pointed out below, Randall gives permission to hotlink/embed on each comic page.
This meme is making these different disciplines answer questions they were never intended to answer. It’s like complaining that a school principal isn’t out there teaching students: that’s not their role and it would be silly to expect them to do otherwise.
Philosophers would ask something like, “what is a cat?”
Metaphysicians would ask something like, “how can we know that the cat truly exists?”
Theologians would ask something like, “what does the Bible say about cats?”
The categories themselves also show his ignorance.
Metaphysics is a sub-discipline of Philosophy.
And theology and science stood on philosophy’s shoulders as a means to different ends. It’s almost like the author started at the beginning and selectively broke off little bits to build up a joke, in service of the joke.
The joke didn’t land. That’s cool. It’s not my joke, I’m not offended. But I am mystified by the number of “well akshully…” replies. Had this been intended to be a serious, thorough commentary on various disciplines maybe I could understand the circlejerk around pedantry. But it’s not. It’s a gag based on oversimplification. In a meme community.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Comedy can be and is used to make real criticisms of the world and various institutions. “It’s just a joke” is one of the most common lies.
People can laugh at the joke, or disagree with the criticism it communicates, or both, or neither.
But having and exercising critical thinking skills when engaging with memes in a meme community full of scholars and academics is exactly what I would expect.
Remember, who made the flashlight for the scientist? The philosopher.
I don’t see this as being dismissive of philosophy at all. Science has always stood on the shoulders of philosophy. In the context of the meme, it established the possibility of the black cat existing. It’s the baseline. Science then used tools to test the idea, while metaphysics and theology are off somewhere making unfalsifiable claims.
Judging by some of the responses, I’m in the minority with this interpretation.
If it puts us in a minority to regard scientific achievement as owing a debt of gratitude to epistemology and empiricism, not to mention ethics and countless other branches of study that cannot be taken for granted, then so be it. To take science on its own as merely a self evident and wholly objective practice solely fit for solving problems and creating better technologies is as boring as it is anti intellectual.
It’s not about whether or not the meme is dismissive of philosophy. It’s that the writer clearly doesn’t understand the basics of these fields and the kinds of questions they ask/answer, including science. Heck metaphysics isn’t even a separate field, it’s a sub-field of philosophy.
I agree with the conclusion of your metaphor but I think that literally “the scientist” invented the flashlight.
