@krasnaya
I might add that, though I enjoyed responding to your fighting spirit with mine (hence the *slightly* inflammatory spin), I sympathize with your desire for rigor, precision, and your contempt for confused and confusing potential bullshit.
But you should recognize that it makes little sense to focus only on the things one can speak about with perfect clarity (as in fact the Tractatus recommends). When a topic matters to us, we should tackle it even if it's not easy.
If, say, you have a difficult relationship with your father, then that is a worthwhile topic for you to consider and tackle, even if it's muddier and less well-defined than some issue in the empirical sciences. Should you be grateful for his sacrifices? Does he still deserve you respect despite some shocking failings? That's not easy.
The human sciences go after topics that matter even though they are difficult to tackle. Some confusion ensues. But that doesn't mean the whole domain of inquiry is worthless. On the contrary, it is rather more important than the hard sciences. There have been successful and prosperous human communities with very little science; and with all our science we already made a few messes and may be heading to an even worse one. Science brought us a lot, but we don't really need more of it at this point. Now it has become more important to make sense of our personal and collective life.
I might add that, though I enjoyed responding to your fighting spirit with mine (hence the *slightly* inflammatory spin), I sympathize with your desire for rigor, precision, and your contempt for confused and confusing potential bullshit.
But you should recognize that it makes little sense to focus only on the things one can speak about with perfect clarity (as in fact the Tractatus recommends). When a topic matters to us, we should tackle it even if it's not easy.
If, say, you have a difficult relationship with your father, then that is a worthwhile topic for you to consider and tackle, even if it's muddier and less well-defined than some issue in the empirical sciences. Should you be grateful for his sacrifices? Does he still deserve you respect despite some shocking failings? That's not easy.
The human sciences go after topics that matter even though they are difficult to tackle. Some confusion ensues. But that doesn't mean the whole domain of inquiry is worthless. On the contrary, it is rather more important than the hard sciences. There have been successful and prosperous human communities with very little science; and with all our science we already made a few messes and may be heading to an even worse one. Science brought us a lot, but we don't really need more of it at this point. Now it has become more important to make sense of our personal and collective life.