Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged ontic

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Measurement and Its Discontents - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ement-and-its-discontents.html

measurement ontic ontological

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • why are controversies over measurement still surfacing? Why are we still stymied when trying to measure intelligence, schools, welfare and happiness? The problem is not that we don’t yet have precise enough tools for measuring such things; it’s that there are two wholly different ways of measuring.
  • In one kind of measuring, we find how big or small a thing is using a scale, beginning point and unit. Something is x feet long, weighs y pounds or takes z seconds. We can call this “ontic” measuring, after the word philosophers apply to existing objects or properties.
  • This involves less an act than an experience: we sense that things don’t “measure up” to what they could be. This is the kind of measuring that good examples invite. Aristotle, for instance, called the truly moral person a “measure,” because our encounters with such a person show us our shortcomings. We might call this “ontological” measuring, after the word philosophers use to describe how something exists.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Intelligence is fundamentally misapprehended when seen as an isolatable entity rather than a complex ideal. So too is teaching ability when measured solely by student test scores.
  • As the modern world has perfected its ontic measures, our ability to measure ourselves ontologically seems to have diminished. We look away from what we are measuring, and why we are measuring, and fixate on the measuring itself. We are tempted to seek all meaning in ontic measuring
  • How can we keep an eye on the difference between ontic and ontological measurement, and prevent the one from interfering with the other? One way is to ask ourselves what is missing from our measurements. Are the tests administered by schools making students smarter and more educated, or just making us think we know how to evaluate education?
  • In our increasingly quantified world, we have to determine precisely where and how our measurements fail to deliver. Now that we have succeeded in defining the kilogram by an absolute universal standard, we still have to remind ourselves of the human purposes that led us to create the kilogram in the first place, and always to make sure that the kilogram is serving us, and not the other way around.
Javier E

Renaming Philosophy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...-philosophy-as-ontical-science

philosophy language knowledge

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 12 - Cached
  • I suggested in my earlier essay that philosophy so conceived is best classified as a science, because of its rigor, technicality, universality, falsifiability, connection with other sciences, and concern with the nature of objective being (among other reasons). I did not claim, however, that it is an empirical science, like physics and chemistry; rather, it is an a priori science, like the “formal science” of mathematics.
  • This is not a matter of dubious public relations for a languishing field of study; rather, it is simply the recognition of the intellectual substance of the discipline — its power and achievements
  • There is plenty of room here for ethics, philosophy of art, value theory, and even “practical wisdom.” In my terminology, we might label these parts of philosophy “axiological ontics”— that is, the study of the nature and being of value in all its forms.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • My main question was what to call this subject, in view of the confusions wrought by its current name and the ancient origin of the word.
  • The general reaction to my original essay from people not professionally involved in philosophy rather proves my point about the need for linguistic reform. There is precious little understanding of what the subject is really like, but a lot of opinion about its demerits and betrayals of its historical ideals. To be sure, we will not cure such ignorance and hostility — either from the dogmatists of empirical science or the disappointed fringe mystics — by simply relabeling the subject; but we should at least forestall some of the ire that stems from the etymology and popular meaning of the word “philosophy”
1 - 2 of 2
Showing 20▼ items per page