If you make a question ambiguous enough, can it have an answer?
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Actually, if the bar on your satisfaction is low enough, you can literally answer any question.
If you can post enough vaguely-phrased questions with no context, is that philosophy?
Oh whine me a sad song why don’t you? Plenty of nice convo happening. Participate.
Aristotle and Essence : To describe a thing is to name it, and to name it is to describe it. But… there is debate ;)
Well to name is to distinguish and to distinguish is to classify. A whole implicit description right there.
I suppose this process is clearer irl (as opposed to this symbolic ghostrealm here)
It’s relative. If I ask you about a trash can, you can say it’s a can for trash and yeah, you know what it is. But if we’re talking about a person, you can rattle off an entire Wikipedia article of facts about Taylor Swift but you don’t know her.
Offhand I can’t think of any knowledge about the real world that doesn’t amount to “a bunch of facts”. A big predictive model basically.
Strictly no. But the overlap is significant.
Being able to say things about a thing can be accomplished by memorizing trivia.
Knowing what the thing is implies understanding. This does not automatically follow from knowing trivia.
Though people tend to build an understanding while amassing trivia, so it’s considered a good enough approximation for schools. Hence multiple choice tests. Personally, I think it is lazy and incentivizes wrong ways to teach and bad ways to study.
Also also, this is why the prevalence of internet access and now ChatGPT is so scary for schools: Students can easily provide this appoximated understanding without having any.
What’s the difference between knowing what a thing is and knowing a bunch of things about a thing?
Is it backstory? Is that the key thing to know?
It depends on things.
What’s the difference?
lolwut
