I am also trying to understand. I've seen many people claiming to be Zetetic observers, yet they try to explain things to me. So you're saying that since you cannot directly observe the cause, you do not believe it because you cannot see it with your own eyes and it remains an unanswerable phenomena?
Belief is a word associated with faith and witchcraft, accept is more appropriate for the idea i'm trying to convey.
Zeteticism can be described as anti-theoretical. Gravitation and Magnetism are both just theories and should not be accepted as fact. Until all questions are answered absolute truth still eludes us.
Magnetism has been studied very much as is very much understood. You can find research on it anywhere. Internet, or if you don't trust that, the library. Gravitation is an ample name for the force that holds us down. I mean, obviously there's a force holding us down, or else we would float away.
Read chapter 1 of Rowbotham's work 'Earth Not a Globe' to get an idea of the difference between the Zetetic and Theoretical - then disregard the rest of the book.
That's good, I like that. Fun stuff.
Thanks burt for covering my ass after I thought I had sufficiently covered my ass (lol). But yes, from my view, Zeteticism seems to be phenomenology. The results of it seem to be made up explanations for why and how things happen, and in modern times, using a lot of ideas from modern science (bendy light) and skewing them to fit the observations.
You are welcome.
your statements, as all statements are, are true in some sense and false in some sense. the kinds of zeteticism available on this website are almost equal to the amount of adherents of the flat earth. but there is a kind of zetecism that does not involve making any definite statements about anything, in fact zetecism (from the magazine the zetetic inquirer) involves making people aware of all the different competing theories and getting the most lucid adehrents of each and giving them somewhere to publish.
this magazine split from the sceptical inquirer some time in the mid 20th century, because they did not like some of the acrobatics that sceptical inquirer went through to hide research they did not want published, because it went against their theories. The best minds with zetetic leanings, I can think of, are Buckminster Fuller, Alfred Korzybski and Robert Anton Wilson, though they did not class themselves as this; Buckminster was a self-described "Generalist" Korzybski was a General Semanticist, and Wilson described himself as a "Damned Old Crank".
[edit] sorry a bit of a name mix up: the sceptical inquirer was once called the zetetic inquirer. the split off magazine was called the zetetic scholar, sorry.
I've heard of Mr. Fuller, the other two don't ring a bell. I can't tell you where I heard of Fuller, just that I have. But anyway, those are just the impressions I get of Zeteticism from what I've seen here on this website, as this was (oddly enough) the first place I heard of the practice.
Buckminster Fuller was once times man of the year, he discovered a sub branch of geometry, the prinicples of which led him to invent the geodesic dome.
Korzybski is an obscure scientist whose majore scientific theorys have been either refuted or subsumed under better theories.
Robert Anton Wilson is too hard to explain, he is a trickster and a mischievous writer. His stance is the more hilaritas the better. He was part of the counter-culture that involved leary, kesey, mckenna and thornley.
Wilson was involved with Leary, as in Timothy Leary? That should explain itself right there.
What is it that it explains and why does it explain it? The implications in your sentence already seem like you have made a judgment on Leary's character and then, by association, extended it to Wilson's; have you ever read either of their works? If you have I would like to know what you think.
I was being sarcastic. I want to read Leary's stuff at least. But I was simply making the statement because I know the name only because he's the psychologist that went around handing out LSD to people as a "cure."
Leary did not hand out LSD; He did professional research on LSD while at harvard with Richard Alpert, managing to reverse the statitics of criminal re-offenders. He became an advocate of LSD, until he saw that Internet was gonna be a major influence on Culture and turned to his formulation SMI2LE (Space-migration, intelligence increase and longevity) admittedly a bit utopian, and some would say eccentric. During this time, He warned about the recreational use of LSD, especcially during USA's rampant scaremongering over the drug, which caused undue paranoia.
read his peer-reviewed (and might I say, groundbreaking work) "The Interpersonal Dimension of Personality". Journal of Personality 20.
Sorry to derail the line of argument, probably best to take this to PM if you wanna know more. but anyways, happy reading.
Perhaps I've been reading the wrong things? All I've heard about Timothy Leary was that he was a big proponent of LSD and that he gave people insanely large doses and insisted that it would cure them.
The USA certainly did do a lot of scaremongering. People thought that LSD killed you, burned holes in your brain, stayed in your spine for the rest of your life, all of which was wrong. I believe that LSD administered in controlled environments, in low doses, can be therapeutic. But certainly not in large doses, it just makes you (for lack of a better word) bug out and loose control over where, when, and how your thoughts are happening.