Relation premise between epistemic activity and ontological principle?

Question

Background

I'm trying to teach myself philosophy and heads up it's not going well. A philosopher friend of mine gave me the following text (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oGAQan6iaYNlfPTQvqNHfwpsowg9junV/view?usp=sharing) Hasok Chang ontological principles. Perhaps I am unable to comprehend what he's going on about. He creates a table which I'll modify as:

Epistemic activity	Ontological Principle	Counter Example
Counting	Discreetness	Temperature
Testing by overdetermination	Single Value	Superposition
Prediction	Uniform Consequence	Noether's Theorem

1: The top four comments of the link show something can be discrete but not countable.

2: Superposition of position of a particle shows a particle can be at 2 places at once.

3: Uniform consequence seems like another name for invariance which is derived from Noether's theorem except we know when it "fails" i.e: when continuity is lost for example the measurement.

Question

All this makes me suspect the relation premise between epistemic activity and ontological principle. Where am I going wrong?

Answer 1

There's an online text here.

Your friend seems mean, or at least keen to throw you in at the deep end. I would describe the ontology-epistemology distinction as very much the helicopter-view, about quite subtle distinctions in the focus of discourses.

Few professional physicists genuinely understand Noether's theorem, so throwing that in, for a beginner at philosophy..! Temperature is only 'not countable' because lumps of matter of a few grams have of the order 10^23 constituents, often with multiple vibrational states. I'd relate overdetermination to consilience, the convergence of evidence, rather than to asserting a set of truth values completely defining 'objective reality' (which for reasons irrelevant here, I think is a canard anyway).

Just don't teach yourself philosophy from there. I mean what do you expect it to do for you, jumping in with abstruse terms about highly abstract debates?

Some quotes from Wittgenstein:

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

"The philosopher treats a question, like an illness."

"What is your aim in philosophy? — To shew the fly the way out of the bottle."

I think your friend mistakes the power of bewitchment by convoluted terminology and discourses, for the clarity and dispelling of that, which embodies good philosophy.

I'd strongly recommend Vervaeke's lecture series 'Awaking From The Meaning Crisis', not only to anyone new to philosophy, but to anyone interested in philosophy. Vervaeke is part of a modern movement to recover the term 'wisdom' in philosophical discourse, and in that pursuit he links Socrates & Plato's mission to dispell the bewitchments of sophists' rhetoric and poets' literature-devices, which philosophy was originally defined against, to Harry Frankfurt's 'philosophy of bullshit' or self-deception, and resisting the powers of advertising. Vervaeke's framing of salience landscapes seems an advance to me on Wittgenstein's “The work of the philosopher consists in marshalling reminders for a particular purpose” (PI 127).

It's about developing your own toolkit of psychotechnologies: don't get fobbed-off by someone telling you all you need is their approach - and Vervaeke's series is a great introduction in that regard, a history of philosophy as people reacting against what did not work so well in past thinking, as successive thinkers defined their own freedom of thought, for their own modes of life.

So what are your concerns? How do you see society? How do you see yourself? Begin there, and dwell on those questions, and only then can your philosophy begin, and from your own questions, look in the toolbox of philosophy for things to help 'shew you out of the bottle'.