Right. This is why the wet monkey theory (along with many other false but useful for manipulation heuristics) fails to capture anything important about "groupthink". We can re-orient Dave's no-largest-model objection toward any just-so manipulative rhetoric. Of course the choice of language biases the description written in it! Sheesh. And, yes, it's important to make that clear to any novice entering whatever domain. Pluralism (or parallax) of languages is one mitigation tactic. But another common one is basic error-checking, the social process of saying out loud your construction and listening as others criticize, deconstruct, or outright ridicule it. Spend too much time stewing in your own juices and your constructs become private. Spend too much time socializing with those who agree and your constructs become groupthink. Nick likes to say he's grateful for anyone who reads his writing. But the actual good faith action is to criticize it. Reading it is like nodding politely with the occasional "ah", "yes", "uh-huh" while someone tells you their boring story. Engagement is the real objective. Reading is a mere means to that end. And disagreement is demonstrative engagement.
But [dis]agreement isn't well-covered by "contrarian", "oppositional", or "adversarial". Dualism is just one form of foundationalism. Monism < dualism < trialism < quadrialism < ?. 4 forces? 17 objects? 3 types of object? Who cares? Those particular numbers are schematic in the larger discipline of disagreement. The foundation is important. But getting hung up on the particular number/value misses the forest for the trees. Arguing over the number of things in the foundation is akin to arguing about the meanings of words. In the spirit of "not even wrong", it's not even sophistry. On 5/16/22 14:41, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Glen writes: < Of course, we *could* be working our way into a fictitious corner. (E.g. the just-so story of the wet monkey thing <https://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2009/08/wet-monkey-theory/>, where all the kids who believe in the ability of formalism(s) to capture the world are simply thinking inside the box.) But what's the likelihood of that? I claim vanishingly small. > Using the Standard Model, applied physicists and engineers build careers and do useful work. Are they thinking in a box? Perhaps. But there are also physicists who are obsessed with poking holes in it and generalizing it.
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