When we want to explain the world around us, our immediate intuition is to ask about the newest developments in the field of physics, to describe the world in terms of numbers. We create a formula here, which has numbers plugged in there, and we get a simple numeric answer to whatever question we might ask. Essentially, discovery becomes a numbers game. So how, then, can 2+2=5?
“A western anthropologist is told by a Voohooni that 2+2=5. The anthropologist asks him how he knows this. The tribesman says, ‘by counting, of course. First I tie two knots in one cord. Then I tie two knots in another cord. When I join the cords together, I have five knots.’ “
Philosophical Engineering Quintessential Knowledge:
Of course the question to ask now is whether we are comparing apples with apples, or perhaps considering apples next to the newest apple-like GMO’s. Appealing to answers in physics can be both illuminating and mind-boggling, but they’re not always the answers we’re looking for when we’re not looking at numbers themselves, but looking at the world.
From Chapter 3 Epistemology of Cathcart, T and C. Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar… . Penguin Books: 2007