What is human nature--is there such a thing?

[aperson]

Originally Posted by The_Q

And this is the reason I rarely reply to your posts. Not once have you stated an absolute. Surely, you've defined your parameters for discussion, but always you make philosophical conclusions part of your assumptions.

Not once have you attempted to use empirical data to support a point, only quotations and citations from sections of "science" that are barely considered to be scientific.

What you're missing, dear sir, is economics. Rational, reasonable, mathmatical economics.

Q

Sorry, Q, but his response that "the only absolute is that there are no absolutes" is spot on for his discussion. You are suffering from tunnel vision, and believe it or not, empirical evidence is not sufficient to analyze this discussion.

Math is useful when studying things that are pattern like. The object of study of the human sciences are humans and humans are not very pattern like.

This, however, is absolutely absurd. If I'm not mistaken we wake up in much the same place day to day, have similar day to day routines, and are incredibly patterned individuals on pretty much any level from which you can examine us: The biological level is patterned from well-controlled, repeatable cell development and consistent methods of neural firing and wiring, the mental level is patterned in that we create concepts, abstractions, and analogies to which we constantly refer and use as heuristics in our mind, and the social level is patterned on a clearly observable level (just look at language, that's about as clear of an example as you can get; language is just patterns).

Coberst, you are also suffering from tunnel vision. The pure sciences such as mathematics, metamathematics, logic, and physics do say a lot of the same things about knowledge and observation; if they don't directly speak to it, then they do address it on the first meta-level analysis of the subject. They say the same things that the "human sciences" do, in fact they all point back to larger issues of epistemology.

I suspect you need to open your resources up or you are going to lock yourself into the same pits as Q has.