In Exile wrote...I will say, Satyricon331, that you did a marvelous job in the last post of ignoring large swaths of my post that were problematic for you. It's admirable dodging, I'll give you that much.
Since it's been such a long exchange, I have been trying to narrow the exchange down to the key points of exchange, though I disagree elsewhere and often can't even see how you think those arguments are successful or even reasonable (not that you think mine are). Since you've said you're done, I'll pare things down even more aggressively and just offer some closing observations.
No. Let's rephrase your statement: "If you prefer to take the game world the real world as its statements the empircal senses most immediately suggest, that’s a preference like any other".
I think that parallel is deeply wrong, and I think it's our core disagreement. There is no DA world; it's a fiction, and it has no empirical truth to know. There are real DA games, and there are dev intentions, and claims about those things aren't under my "discretion," to use your term; there are empirical truths about those things as the games and the devs are a part of "objective reality"/"external phenomena". I deny that Thedas itself is part of "objective reality." Where you say, "You are not operating on inference to the best explanation," yes, exactly, if by "best explanation" you mean scientific induction from the game's statements and depictions to arrive at a view of the DA world (I would use a process more like yours to form expectations of dev intent, since that's real). I'm constructing an imagined, fictional world at the game's prompting, just as anyone is. If someone wants to imagine the world most supportable through the lore, that's great, but it's not necessary and it was up to that person's discretion.
You're throwing the word "epistemology" around; if I wanted to maintain that my fictions are what the games best support, that would be unjustified as what the games say or don't say are an issue of fact, but even though you keep assuming it, I never said that. So where you say, "The insistence that the rules of the game world ought to adhere to any kind of theory that we use to describe our world is the problem," no, I never insisted any such thing; I prefer playing by mitigating the "distance" (so to speak) between Thedas and our world, but it's not a normative view; I think other people's playstyles are just as "valid." I think other people should feel free to follow their own imaginations on the matter. In my imagination, I take facts in the real world and play as if they were true where I can. If you've chosen to play by imaging a fictional world as close to the games' depictions as possible, that's fine, but it's a mistake to think it was necessary to do so, or somehow not under your discretion to do so, or that you're discovering some truth by doing so.
The second you want to use a law of nature, you have by necessity used scientiic induction as that it is the only possible way to have formulated that proposition in the first place. It's "truth" depends entirely on the validity of inductive knowledge.
I think we can illustrate the disagreement with that statement. Since I don't think there is truth in Thedas (I think it's a fiction), there is no "knowledge" about it, inductive or otherwise. If I take a fact from RL and see the game doesn't contradict it, and then pretend's it's true in my fictional imaginings, I'd agree that process is not induction but it's not at variance with any truth in the DA world. Induction from the games' statements etc. can yield information about devs intentions, but again, I never indicated that I expected my fictions to be identical to the devs'. Where you say that my statement that it isn't right to speak of a "right answer" (at least when not taking conversational conveniences) is "false," I'm sorry, but I think that's really beyond bizarre. You're really talking as if Thedas were a real place (though unattached to this universe) and the games were accurate documentaries. If you wanted to play as if that were the case, that'd be great, but it's not necessary to do so.
I'll add that where I said "small," I meant between any two adjacent people rather than any arbitrary pair, as the talk about comparable peers suggested. You were making invalid inferences about what my preferences were, but as the part you left out illustrated, it does not per se have to do with how far the extreme is from the mean or 40th percentile, as you keep insisting. And no, I don't think law is axiomatic-deductive; I was discussing the word "dispositive," but obviously what suffices to dispose a matter depends on what the matter is.
Modifié par Satyricon331, 11 janvier 2013 - 10:41 .
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