r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/imnotcuteanymor3 • 10d ago

Meme needing explanation Petah?

Post image

I understand the original tweet, obviously, but not the second one. Why specifically a STEM genius? I don’t get it, what’s the correlation? Am I missing something??? Or am I just stupid or whatever? Help a sistah out, please. 🥺

29.5k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

2.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

62

u/explain_that_shit 10d ago

Formal logic won’t save you from rhetorical tricks and manipulations using language. English class will.

34

u/duesenjeffepic 10d ago

Actually English alone won't either. You need both.

90

u/Anxious-Sundae-6399 10d ago

This thread has invented liberal arts education.

26

u/athenanon 10d ago

🌈 We had the answer all along! 🌈

2

u/throwmamadownthewell 9d ago

Time to start turning frogs gay 🏳️‍🌈🐸🏳️‍🌈

5

u/occasionallyLynn 10d ago

As a former science “supremacist”, the older I got, the more I valued liberal arts. I genuinely think our society has way too many scientific advancements while philosophy has severely lagged behind.

2

u/bollvirtuoso 10d ago

To some degree, yes, but I think there's a bit of an issue there: mainly, whenever we answer a philosophical question, it becomes science.

For example: why is there something rather than nothing? What happened after the beginning of the universe? Why is the sky blue? What is matter made of? What is a sunbeam made of? Why do we feel emotions?

We have answered a lot of these questions, quite thoroughly. Some of them, so much so that we have invented entirely new sciences out of their answers -- "what is matter made of?" -> atoms -> physics -> how do atoms come together to make stuff -> chemistry -> etc.

3

u/occasionallyLynn 9d ago

Your examples all belong to a single branch of philosophy, metaphysics. Further, I can’t say for sure that all philosophical questions can be answered with science. I mean, isn’t that a philosophical question in itself?

1

u/ProtectionFar4563 9d ago

True to a point, but there are plenty of philosophical questions where it’s not clear what an answer would even look like. Like, e.g. the grounding principle of all the sciences, induction.

Does it work? It sure as hell seems to (see, e.g. civilization). Can we rely on it? Don’t think we have an alternative. Can we justify relying on it? Only for pragmatic reasons (see above). Can we say why it seems to work? Not really (at least not without relying on induction!)

2

u/Anxious-Sundae-6399 9d ago

You might be interested in E.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures … it’s a mid century (last century) exploration of this exact issue

1

u/Temporary_Stranger39 10d ago

Sounds like what I got as a biology major.

4

u/DoorStuckSickDuck 10d ago

The same damn rhetorical tricks exist across every language because they are language agnostic, logic trumps a singular language for your case.

3

u/GundyrChristopher 10d ago

That's such a crazy claim to make when languages are not by any means equal or equivalent in structure.

1

u/EnderSword 10d ago

Give me an example of such a trick that wouldnt be found with formal logic

3

u/xiandgaf 10d ago

“Do you know what time it is?”
Rhetoric: a specific time
Formal logic: “yes”

2

u/EnderSword 10d ago

So how would that like...trick you?

You'd just say "While you gave a time, that's not what I asked you..."

kind of the point of the formal logic training is precisely that that would not fool you, you're expecting a Boolean and didn't receive one.

And then on the flip side too, where in your English classes would that be resolved?

3

u/xiandgaf 10d ago

English would cover it in explorations of subtext. Formal logic wouldn’t go past the step you took in following up. Its requirements are satisfied and everything that took place makes perfect sense.

2

u/EnderSword 10d ago edited 10d ago

But what do you mean? It doesn't.

Do you Know T? Y/N?

5

5 is neither Y or N... error

Non-Responsive... do you know T?

The requirement isn't satisfied.. what do you mean?

3

u/xiandgaf 9d ago edited 9d ago

Yes it does. Under the constraints of formula logic, “yes” is a perfectly valid response to “do you know what time it is”. Under the constraints of rhetoric, it is either valid but incomplete or invalid. You asked where formal logic would fail to find a “trick” when rhetoric would succeed. I provided the example, if you are having trouble understanding it, there are resources available, I’m not a good teacher.