A jigsaw puzzle

It is good philosophy to thing that your “knowledge” is the process of solving a Jigsaw Puzzle.

Or, a better analogy, you are creating a map inside your head by observing a paritially solved Jigsaw puzzle.

A map (made out of neurons and “weighted” by synaptic connections), is, of coruse, not the territory, but it better to be (has to be) valid.

Validity here is defined as not to represent what isn’t out there and to adequately represent what is.

The operational definition of adequacy is the same with roadmaps - every turn or a fork has to be on a map.

This philosophy (of the Mind) explains and includes all the valid mathematics.

You are observing the partially solved puzzle and notice the recurrent patterns. Mathematics is the science of patterns.

A proof thus is a sequence of validated steps by which one arrives to a statement fact.

The crucial point is that the fact is (and was) out there before you have arrived at it.

The relations of a right triangle “were out there” before the formulation of the The Pythagorean Theorem.

So were the algebraic laws of addition and multiplication. They were discovered from proper generalizations.

Not one could have an operational definition of a bullshit – what cannot be traced back to What Is (so it, technically, what isn’t) is bullshit.

This discards a lot of empty speculation and collapses whole cathedrals of socially constructed bullshit.