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02/23/11(Wed)16:26 No.23747279>>23746792
>>23746792
The moral of Feeling Pinkie Keen is that empiricism is better than rationalism. It is a love-letter to David Hume.
Despite her scientific trappings, Twilight refuses to believe in Pinkie Pie's predictions not because she can't see that there is a relationship between the two sets of events, but because she cannot understand the rationale behind them. Twilight is in this sense a rationalist skeptic - she will only believe what she can completely justify in her mind.
By the end of the episode, she begins to understand that there is a lot she can't completely explain in the world, but she would be a fool to continue doubting those events. Compare this to Hume's statement about the causal connection between eating bread and gaining sustenance - one simply cannot prove that there is a causal connection between these events in the way that rationalist skeptic needs, but such a skeptic would be extremely foolish to stop eating, doubting that there was a causal connection between his starvation and his death.
Now, the writers couch this in language about needing friends to show you the way and choosing to believe. This is partly because it's just a kids' show, but it's also a basic point about our understanding of causality - we can't prove it, but at some point you just have to accept it or else you're never going to do anything, wrapped up in a solipsistic philosophy that leads you nowhere.
tl;dr - the people who complain about the episode are either trolls or fucking idiots who need to read a fucking book about science before commenting on it. |
