The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
Summary:
Thesis 1: A key motivation for materialism is the elevation of the sensible (chiefly, what can be best validated by multiple senses) over the intelligible (what can be best understood). The "common sensibles" (shape, size, extension, rest, motion, and number) are viewed as "most real" because they can be validated by many senses, including sight and touch, which have priority in human experience.
Thesis 2: A move to the mathematization of being is a bit of a middle ground between the sensible and intelligible. It works by prioritizing the intelligible aspects of the most consistent/strongest elements of sense experience. This poses a problem though, in that mathematization still excludes most of intelligible reality, only allowing in those elements contained in the common sensibles.
Materialism:
Materialism is a very old idea. It is arguably the first "metaphysics" ever developed. However, from the very start it had problems explaining consciousness, psychophysical harmony, mathematics, reason, etc., which is why early materialists often had to introduce extra factors above and beyond the material elements, e.g. love and strife, Logos, Nous, etc.
The Hard Problem and the problem of psychophysical harmony are very old problems, it is just that they slipped out of view because materialism was unpopular for the better part of two millennia following attacks by Plato and Aristotle.
My question then would be: what makes materialism so appealing and intuitive? Why is the idea that 'everything is collocations of atoms, ensembles of balls of stuff,' or that 'things are what they are made of,' intuitive?
My guess is that the answer lies, funny enough, in phenomenology. We find this sort of explanation appealing because of the way we experience the world through the senses. Our senses are subject to error, so we often use one sense to cross-check another. If we wonder if a flower is real or fake, we hold it to our nose. If we think a rock is fake, we lift it. People reach out to touch confusing optical illusions, etc.
Error is a very real risk we must contend with. We have a natural drive to avoid error. A major part of metaphysics has always been trying to avoid error and see through illusions. Hence, materialism is often framed as a question of "what truly exists?" "what is really real (as opposed to mental/illusory)?" or "what is fundamental?"
Materialism is intuitive because our "internal model" or understanding of the world as a three-dimensional space filled with extended bodies in motion is reinforced by several senses, not just one. Size, shape, texture, local motion, etc. come to us through sight, hearing, touch, the vestibular sense, etc. Intensity of odor even seems to reveal at least something of spacial location. Taste is experienced at different locations on the tongue.
Size, shape, number, motion, and rest were called the "common sensible" because they were accessible to many different senses. They can be verified by each sense as well, hence their claim to being "more real," or "primary qualities." Moreover, sight and touch relate to these "common sensibles," quite directly and these are man's most potent senses. "Seeing is believing." Touch is particularly potent and a greater conveyor a sense of "reality" because it is the sense that relates most immediately to danger, acquisition of resources, and the generative/sexual act (i.e., it requires immediate proximity to the objects of attraction or aversion).Touching is, most of all, believing. For example, Saint Thomas will not believe in the risen Christ until he [I]touches[/I] his wounds.
Hence, the common sensibles of size, shape, quantity, etc. get considered "most real." We can see this in Galileo, Locke, etc. with the demotion of color to a "less real" (merely mental) "secondary quality," while shape and motion, etc. remain fully real "primary quantities." In scholastic terminology, we might say this is because color is only the formal object of sight, and can be confirmed and experienced by no other faculty.
Materialism builds on this intuition about sensibility and reality. What is "most real" is size, shape, extension, motion, etc. because these are what we can touch and what we can confirm with many senses. Moreover, if we adopt a mechanistic view, touch becomes particularly important because it conveys causal influence (although note that materialist systems have always had difficulties with occult forces that seem to act at a distance, such as gravity in the Newtonian model or electromagnetism in early modelsquantum mechanics was hardly unique in posing a problem here).
Next, we get smallism, the idea that all facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller parts. Smallism and reductionism need not go with materialism, but they very often do. And this makes sense if one considers that in our experience of sensible things we see how they can be broken apart. Smallism also helps materialism explain how one thing becomes another despite everything being reducible to size, shape, extension, motion, etc. For instance, if a man can live off beans, he must somehow "come from beans." One intuitive way to explain this is to say that everything is made of different building blocks that get rearranged by motion (i.e. the elements or atoms). Hence, a bean can contain all that is needed for a man. It just needs to be rearranged.
Problems for Materialism:
We have already mentioned the problems of occult forces and non-locality. Another problem here is that there is no prima facie reason to think smallism is true. Indeed, it seems that some parts are only definable in terms of the wholes of which they are a part. In terms of modern reductionism, it has a pretty poor empirical track record. Not that many phenomena have been successfully reduced. A century on, the basics of molecular structure has yet to be reduced for instance, and numerous other examples abound, with unifications (explaining disparate phenomena through a single principle) seemingly far more common than proper material reductions.
Another question is, should we trust sense intuition in this way? Many scientific theories would suggest not. Donald Hoffman's "The Case Against Reality," a book with many problems, still manages to make at least this case fairly well.
The point here is that, once we understand [i]why[/I] materialism is so intuitive, it is unclear if we should trust this intuition. In particular, much of what we know about how the senses work, and how they developed, might undermine how much faith we put in these intuitions.
Inversions:
What Plato, Aristotle, and most philosophy following them for the next 1,700 years represents is the elevation of the intelligible over the sensible, and the actuality of determinant form over material potency (the universal, intelligible form over changing, material particulars). They, and later thinkers like Hegel, have their own reasons for why the intelligible is "more real" (or so least, less illusory) then the sensible.
Of course, this isn't always framed as a dialectical opposition (often in medieval thought, it isn't). For example, for the great Byzantine thinker Saint Maximus the Confessor (in some ways a proto-Hegel) the sensible and intelligible reflect and reveal each other. The key image here is of the two wheels moving within one another in the Prophet Ezekiel's vision of the divine chariot. The intelligible is not subsistent either (a point going back to Aristotle). The sensible and intelligible are two sides of the same coin, it's just that the intelligible has metaphysical priority in being actual rather than material potential for actuality. For the Christian Neoplatonists, only in the fullness of the Logos do the sensible and intelligible find their ground.
Hence, materialism could be seen, in many respects, as the mirror image or inversion of the philosophies of intelligibility/quiddity (at least in a broad sense).
Mathematics:
Of course, mathematics plays a role too. Mathematics, for most of its history, meant the study of magnitude and multitude. Hence, it's easy to see why so many philosophers accepted that it was the study of the form of bodies as abstracted from matter, (a form given to us by the senses.) And indeed, we still teach geometry with drawings, sensible image, manipulibles, etc. Children are still taught arithmetic by counting beans, division by cutting up pies, etc.
At first glance, mathematics offers a sort of via media here. It takes the intuitions of materialism but then turns the focus to the intelligible content of the sensible experience of shape, size, extension, motion, etc.
One can see the appeal of this way of thinking in ontic structural realism, with physicists such as Max Tegmark and his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. We can also see how some people strive to remove the echo of the senses from this way of thinking, to make mathematics more abstract and thus, presumably, "more objective." For instance, LeGrange's 18th century mechanics textbook proudly announces that it uses no diagrams or drawings, only formulae. Yet do we have any reason to think the world is truly, objectively, more like a string of symbols than a diagram?
The bigger challenge with this pivot is that it seems to only abstract away a very few features of the sensible and intelligible world, namely, those of the common sensibles. Hence, the overcommitment to sense intuition still remains.
Afterall, how does one mathematically describe greed, pleasure, the color red, justice, goodness, or beauty? My point here would be that, while mathematization seems like a pivot back to the intelligible, it is in fact still slavishly bound to the sense intuition guiding materialism. Aside from appeals to terms like "informational strong emergence," which seems to be more an appeal to magic or another love/strife or Nous type "x factor" than anything elsethere seems to be absolutely no way to get most of human experience back into the mathematized cosmos (even as mere epiphenomena). How does something compute so hard it begins to feel, for instance?
Thesis 1: A key motivation for materialism is the elevation of the sensible (chiefly, what can be best validated by multiple senses) over the intelligible (what can be best understood). The "common sensibles" (shape, size, extension, rest, motion, and number) are viewed as "most real" because they can be validated by many senses, including sight and touch, which have priority in human experience.
Thesis 2: A move to the mathematization of being is a bit of a middle ground between the sensible and intelligible. It works by prioritizing the intelligible aspects of the most consistent/strongest elements of sense experience. This poses a problem though, in that mathematization still excludes most of intelligible reality, only allowing in those elements contained in the common sensibles.
Materialism:
Materialism is a very old idea. It is arguably the first "metaphysics" ever developed. However, from the very start it had problems explaining consciousness, psychophysical harmony, mathematics, reason, etc., which is why early materialists often had to introduce extra factors above and beyond the material elements, e.g. love and strife, Logos, Nous, etc.
The Hard Problem and the problem of psychophysical harmony are very old problems, it is just that they slipped out of view because materialism was unpopular for the better part of two millennia following attacks by Plato and Aristotle.
My question then would be: what makes materialism so appealing and intuitive? Why is the idea that 'everything is collocations of atoms, ensembles of balls of stuff,' or that 'things are what they are made of,' intuitive?
My guess is that the answer lies, funny enough, in phenomenology. We find this sort of explanation appealing because of the way we experience the world through the senses. Our senses are subject to error, so we often use one sense to cross-check another. If we wonder if a flower is real or fake, we hold it to our nose. If we think a rock is fake, we lift it. People reach out to touch confusing optical illusions, etc.
Error is a very real risk we must contend with. We have a natural drive to avoid error. A major part of metaphysics has always been trying to avoid error and see through illusions. Hence, materialism is often framed as a question of "what truly exists?" "what is really real (as opposed to mental/illusory)?" or "what is fundamental?"
Materialism is intuitive because our "internal model" or understanding of the world as a three-dimensional space filled with extended bodies in motion is reinforced by several senses, not just one. Size, shape, texture, local motion, etc. come to us through sight, hearing, touch, the vestibular sense, etc. Intensity of odor even seems to reveal at least something of spacial location. Taste is experienced at different locations on the tongue.
Size, shape, number, motion, and rest were called the "common sensible" because they were accessible to many different senses. They can be verified by each sense as well, hence their claim to being "more real," or "primary qualities." Moreover, sight and touch relate to these "common sensibles," quite directly and these are man's most potent senses. "Seeing is believing." Touch is particularly potent and a greater conveyor a sense of "reality" because it is the sense that relates most immediately to danger, acquisition of resources, and the generative/sexual act (i.e., it requires immediate proximity to the objects of attraction or aversion).Touching is, most of all, believing. For example, Saint Thomas will not believe in the risen Christ until he [I]touches[/I] his wounds.
Hence, the common sensibles of size, shape, quantity, etc. get considered "most real." We can see this in Galileo, Locke, etc. with the demotion of color to a "less real" (merely mental) "secondary quality," while shape and motion, etc. remain fully real "primary quantities." In scholastic terminology, we might say this is because color is only the formal object of sight, and can be confirmed and experienced by no other faculty.
Materialism builds on this intuition about sensibility and reality. What is "most real" is size, shape, extension, motion, etc. because these are what we can touch and what we can confirm with many senses. Moreover, if we adopt a mechanistic view, touch becomes particularly important because it conveys causal influence (although note that materialist systems have always had difficulties with occult forces that seem to act at a distance, such as gravity in the Newtonian model or electromagnetism in early modelsquantum mechanics was hardly unique in posing a problem here).
Next, we get smallism, the idea that all facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller parts. Smallism and reductionism need not go with materialism, but they very often do. And this makes sense if one considers that in our experience of sensible things we see how they can be broken apart. Smallism also helps materialism explain how one thing becomes another despite everything being reducible to size, shape, extension, motion, etc. For instance, if a man can live off beans, he must somehow "come from beans." One intuitive way to explain this is to say that everything is made of different building blocks that get rearranged by motion (i.e. the elements or atoms). Hence, a bean can contain all that is needed for a man. It just needs to be rearranged.
Problems for Materialism:
We have already mentioned the problems of occult forces and non-locality. Another problem here is that there is no prima facie reason to think smallism is true. Indeed, it seems that some parts are only definable in terms of the wholes of which they are a part. In terms of modern reductionism, it has a pretty poor empirical track record. Not that many phenomena have been successfully reduced. A century on, the basics of molecular structure has yet to be reduced for instance, and numerous other examples abound, with unifications (explaining disparate phenomena through a single principle) seemingly far more common than proper material reductions.
Another question is, should we trust sense intuition in this way? Many scientific theories would suggest not. Donald Hoffman's "The Case Against Reality," a book with many problems, still manages to make at least this case fairly well.
The point here is that, once we understand [i]why[/I] materialism is so intuitive, it is unclear if we should trust this intuition. In particular, much of what we know about how the senses work, and how they developed, might undermine how much faith we put in these intuitions.
Inversions:
What Plato, Aristotle, and most philosophy following them for the next 1,700 years represents is the elevation of the intelligible over the sensible, and the actuality of determinant form over material potency (the universal, intelligible form over changing, material particulars). They, and later thinkers like Hegel, have their own reasons for why the intelligible is "more real" (or so least, less illusory) then the sensible.
Of course, this isn't always framed as a dialectical opposition (often in medieval thought, it isn't). For example, for the great Byzantine thinker Saint Maximus the Confessor (in some ways a proto-Hegel) the sensible and intelligible reflect and reveal each other. The key image here is of the two wheels moving within one another in the Prophet Ezekiel's vision of the divine chariot. The intelligible is not subsistent either (a point going back to Aristotle). The sensible and intelligible are two sides of the same coin, it's just that the intelligible has metaphysical priority in being actual rather than material potential for actuality. For the Christian Neoplatonists, only in the fullness of the Logos do the sensible and intelligible find their ground.
Hence, materialism could be seen, in many respects, as the mirror image or inversion of the philosophies of intelligibility/quiddity (at least in a broad sense).
Mathematics:
Of course, mathematics plays a role too. Mathematics, for most of its history, meant the study of magnitude and multitude. Hence, it's easy to see why so many philosophers accepted that it was the study of the form of bodies as abstracted from matter, (a form given to us by the senses.) And indeed, we still teach geometry with drawings, sensible image, manipulibles, etc. Children are still taught arithmetic by counting beans, division by cutting up pies, etc.
At first glance, mathematics offers a sort of via media here. It takes the intuitions of materialism but then turns the focus to the intelligible content of the sensible experience of shape, size, extension, motion, etc.
One can see the appeal of this way of thinking in ontic structural realism, with physicists such as Max Tegmark and his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. We can also see how some people strive to remove the echo of the senses from this way of thinking, to make mathematics more abstract and thus, presumably, "more objective." For instance, LeGrange's 18th century mechanics textbook proudly announces that it uses no diagrams or drawings, only formulae. Yet do we have any reason to think the world is truly, objectively, more like a string of symbols than a diagram?
The bigger challenge with this pivot is that it seems to only abstract away a very few features of the sensible and intelligible world, namely, those of the common sensibles. Hence, the overcommitment to sense intuition still remains.
Afterall, how does one mathematically describe greed, pleasure, the color red, justice, goodness, or beauty? My point here would be that, while mathematization seems like a pivot back to the intelligible, it is in fact still slavishly bound to the sense intuition guiding materialism. Aside from appeals to terms like "informational strong emergence," which seems to be more an appeal to magic or another love/strife or Nous type "x factor" than anything elsethere seems to be absolutely no way to get most of human experience back into the mathematized cosmos (even as mere epiphenomena). How does something compute so hard it begins to feel, for instance?
Comments (149)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Apparently there are two modern emphases you are bringing out. One is an emphasis on common sensibles, and the other is an emphasis on mathematics and mathematicization. What's curious is that they seem opposed. The first tends towards materialism and the second tends towards Platonism, and yet both flow in a special way out of the modern period.
I am not sure how to reconcile those two strands. If they are left unreconciled then the modern period appears schizophrenic, torn between an emphasis on common sensibles and an incompatible emphasis on mathematicization. Is there a ready way to reconcile the two? To reconcile thesis 1 and thesis 2? Or am I incorrect in thinking that they are opposed?
My thoughts were that they are ultimately connected. Mathematics is, at least initially, based on abstracting the common sensibles from any underlying matter and other qualities, including from time. So you get a timeless, changeless "platonic," intelligible subject that is nonetheless based on what is common to the senses (i.e. the experience of magnitude and multitude through shape, number, extension, etc.).
So, I'd argue that mathematization is sort of a blending of the two. It is materialism pulled back up into the intelligible realm, or the intelligible truncated down to just what is abstracted from the common sensibles.
It's obviously also intuitive in much the same way, which is why it is almost as old (e.g., Pythaogreanism).
But, aside from the objection that this cuts out far too much, I think there is also a good argument to be made that a recognition of both magnitude and multitude is reliant on a [I] measure[/I] (e.g. "one duck" must be known as such to know three ducks, or half a duck, etc.) and measure itself requires going beyond mathematics, to a recognition of unity and wholes (virtual, as opposed to dimension/bulk quantity, i.e. intensity of participation in form). That puts some recognition of whole, and so intelligible form, prior to dimensive quantity.
Second , mathematization struggles with existence. Even if one accepts that "what everything is" can be described by mathematics, this does not seem to explain "that it is." Hence, mathematization still tends to either tend back towards materialism (e.g. "these particular mathematical objects really exist just because, for no reasonwhich essentially puts potency before act or potency as actualizing itself) or towards extremely crowded and inflated multiverse ontologies. For instance, Tegmark cannot fathom how mathematics can explain existence (fair enough) so he had to suppose that every mathematical object exists (and that some just happen to have experiences).
I suppose empiricism leans towards the materialist side, rationalism towards the platonist side. Either way though, they have to somehow reduce the fullness of experience to a part of experience (quantity).
Great question.
I want to say, because people dont appreciate Aristotle.
Descartes may have theoretically doubted everything but his own understanding of his being, but practically speaking, he still went back to bed and used a candle to find the way.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If all is matter, we get some ancient issues you point out, but to distinguish something else besides matter (or with or in the matter) we get other ancient issues you point out.
Matter, it seems, remains where all inquiries begin. Even Parmenides needed motion and change as his foil.
Science, since the enlightenment has gotten better at mathematizing matter, so much so that weve flown to the moon and split the atom. This is enough experimentation with matter to bolster the naive intuition that matter undergirds everything.
And math is just not enough to subsist absent its matter.
But you are right:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If the scientist thinks he always and only is using matter to measure matter for his matter-based mental state called science, such scientist is only reducing the fullness of his work to a mere part of his work.
I think the materialist intuition is so appealing simply because it is easier to shrug off the invisible. We get to call the invisible nonsense and relegate Socrates musings to a parlor trick. It is just that simple.
When our eyes are open we are easily distracted from seeing the invisible things. And when our eyes are closed we obviously lose sight of the physical things. We need our eyes to be open to survive, so the physical things win the day.
But Aristotle gave us the best model - a starting point that is incomplete, but he was both the first true empiricist and the first true metaphysician qua logical scientist of being human.
The materialist intuition seems naive and incapable of discussing vast swaths of human experience.
Imagine discussing your brother, sitting next you in a chair, with a materialist philosopher and a biologist - you could spend an eternity counting his cells and atoms and all of their functions and motions and the organs and how they interact with each other and track electrical impulses and measure the shape of the face as it smiles and endorphins and serotonin level changes, and on and on, and never start the actual conversation about your brother. That is what materialism, like the hard problem, will always have to avoid discussing. (And ironically, you could just ask your brother to explain if he was not too insulted by all of the experiments.)
Situated historically, modern materialism arose as a consequence of, and part of, Rennaissance humanism, allied with intellectual movements such as the emerging nominalism and the proto-empiricism of Francis Bacon and other early modern scientists. So much of early modern science defined itself in opposition to 'the Schoolmen' and scholastic realism. Recall Hume's closing words in his Treatise: 'Take any book of scholastic philosophy....and burn it.' The emphasis became the physical world, the world knowable by the senses, to hell with metaphysics. And looking at the material consequences of those shifts, its proponents may well feel vindicated.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Absolutely central. The division of primary and secondary attributes, allied with Descartes' division of extended matter and incorporeal mind, lays the foundation of modernity proper.
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. [/quote]
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What we got was atomism, as originally propounded by the Greek atomists Leucippus and Democritus. The etymology of 'atom' is 'uncuttable' or 'undivisible'. Atomism provided a means by which the One, which is similarly not composed of parts or division, was able to account for the manifold world of change and decay. The Atom was the eternal and imperishable, but now at the very heart of matter itself. This was the subject of the classical prose poem De Rerum Natura, Lucretius, which is still on curricula to this day (indeed subject of an undergraduate unit that I took.) Lucretius work was seized on by the Enlightenment philosophes - Baron D'Holbach 'all I see is bodies in motion'.
That seems right to me. I am just trying to think of the wider picture within which to situate the OP. Mathematization could derive from an emphasis on the common sensibles, sure, but what else could it derive from? Mechanistic philosophy and the Baconian desire for control over nature, for one. Quantifiability and univocal, tidy reasoning schemes, for another. Along with this quantifiability is the neatness with which mathematics represents reasoning, which is apparently why many philosophersfrom Plato to Descarteswere so fond of mathematics.
Also, your other point could be extrapolated out. It is the idea that where overdetermination exists, "testimony" is subject to confirmability. This happens with common senses, and it also happens with intersubjective consensus, repeated scientific testability, large sample sizes for the sake of induction, and probably many others. That desire for confirmability is surely present in many ways in our own age.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes and this relates to the transcendental of "unum." Cf. <This post> and others within that thread.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, good points.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, and Lloyd Gerson would also juxtapose nominalism, mechanism, relativism, and skepticism with materialism. I am wondering if that constellation of materialist notions is bound up with the primacy of the pragmatic over the speculative. To prefer the pragmatic to the speculative is perhaps to inevitably reduce the fulness of experience to a part of experience. It may be that speculative reason is the only thing that can truly resist that reductionism. In his book on Illiberalism Peter Simpson seems to think that a society which honors truth will resist such problems.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I was an engineer and I've always had a strong interest in science. I started out from materialism but have developed a more nuanced philosophy from there. I think the simple answer to your question is that materialism is not intuitive at all except to a specific limited group of people in particular locations and time periods. Perhaps it is the least intuitive metaphysical position.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This sounds like the kind of discussion that started taking place in the late 1500s and early 1600s - Kepler, Copernicus, Descartes, and, as you note, Galileo. As I understand it, they were new and radical ideas then - again, not intuitive at all. I am aware that it was also discussed, as you note, by philosophers in ancient Greece.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Another simple answer - it's not true, it's metaphysics.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The uncertainty of all knowledge is a well-plowed field in philosophy. I guess I would be considered a pragmatist. As I see it, uncertainty is an issue that has to be addressed in any philosophical system that claims to be of value.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Perhaps you might consider this naive or shallow, but I ask whether we have any reason to think the world is truly anything in particular. Again, it's metaphysics - a way of thinking, a perspective - not immutable truth.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I strongly disagree with dismissive statement about emergence. Let's not take that up here.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Isn't this just the hard problem, which you and others have discussed in this thread? I don't find it a very compelling argument. Again, I'd rather not take that up here.
Taking your discussion as a whole, the first thing that came to mind was the definition of what is real and what is not - another issue the forum has discussed many (many) times. It seems clear to me that what is considered real is not a matter of fact. We can define reality as anything we want depending on our preferred metaphysical stance. The position I find most congenial is one that recognizes that "reality" isn't really anything at all unless it's connected to our everyday human lives at macroscopic scale. I think my perspective looks a bit like yours and doesn't necessarily contradict it, but comes at it from a different direction.
It seems to me - no, I can't provide specific evidence or references - the first, or at least the most fundamental - reality is food, tools, homes, and people. Everything else we encounter can be seen as developing out of and connected with those basic elements. How can something be considered real if it doesn't affect our human lives? I think that's materialism of a sort and I think it represents a humanizing force in our thinking rather than an alienating one.
I'll go out on a limb here based on my limited reading of the history of science in the 1600s. Looking at reality as made of of things with physical properties was a new idea in that period. Physical properties are only observable by our senses. Mathematics depends on measurable properties. Otherwise it wouldn't have anything to operate on.
But is mathematics observable by our senses?
Count Timothy pointed to those who think that mathematics is what is ultimately real, and where the senses and mathematics conflict, we should trust mathematics. At that point there is certainly an opposition between sense knowledge and mathematics, but perhaps that extreme point is merely an aberration?
The issues we are discussing are metaphysical. In "An Essay on Metaphysics" R.G. Colling wrote
What I take from that is we use different points of view depending on what we are talking about. We use different ones when we are talking about electrons than when we are talking about our brothers.
This is my understanding also, probably because we got them from the same source. I think this is a good answer to @Leontiskos question about whether an emphasis on properties and one on mathematics contradict each other.
I responded to this in my previous post, on which I neglected to include a link.
No, but properties are and properties, measurements, are required for mathematics.
Let me highlight a few things from that quote:
This is much to my point. To systematically exclude sound and smell is to abandon a motive of "common sensibles." If one were motivated by common sensibles there would be no reason to systematically exclude two of the senses. For Galileo and Descartes the point is not epistemic; it instead pertains to quantitative description and the fact that quantitative analysis is eminently rationally manipulable and transparent. It is that some qualities are deemed objective and others subjective, and the senses that pertain to the "subjective" pertain to secondary qualities.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
...so it is more than just color that is less real. It is also sound and smell, which are directly correlated to two of the senses.
But if everything is collocations of atoms, ensembles of balls of stuff,' or that 'things are what they are made of, what does my brother really add to a scientific discussion of things? What point of view isnt reduced to its matter? What does point of view matter, apart from its material cause?
So discussions of nature or essence or my brother are all in my mind, which is really neurons and balls of stuff.
It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.
Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36
That is basically the same point. Subtract my actual brother when discussing my brother, which is really a discussion of atoms and physics.
Nice post again, Count. Youre an enjoyable read.
At the outset I am inclined to believe that these sensibles, too, are not sensible, but the abstractions of a sensible object: properties. The referents here invariably reside in the mind. But like you said, this sort of materialism is doomed to waiver between the insensible and the sensible insofar as it is about the measurements of objects considered, in abstracto, where we begin to examine the measurements more so than we do the object.
Dont be opaque.
Well, it WAS intuitive. QM is extremely counter-intuitive. Matter used to be little particles that stuff was made of. Now it's excitations in quantum fields. WTF is that?
"are people excitations of a quntum field?
ChatGPT said:
Yespeople, like everything else made of matter and energy, are ultimately excitations of quantum fields."
I think that the use of mathematics in physics actually undermines the materialist project. It is based on the assumption that there is an intelligible structure in material reality which is to be discovered. And this 'structure' is not perceived by the senses but it is grasped by the intellect.
Some materialists, I believe, reject the assumption but this, IMO, leads to quite undesiderable consequences. For instance, if there is no real intelligible structure in material reality, is scientific knowledge really knowledge? One might insist that it would be so because predictions would be still valid. But, again, is the ability to predict and make applications really knowledge? Would we say, for instance, that ancient geocentric astronomers had 'knowledge' when they made correct predictions? Furthermore, if there is no intelligible structure how could predictions even be possible, especially as precise as those of science?
So, it seems that there is an intelligible structure of the 'material (or physical) reality'. If this is the case, however, it seems to me that such a structure would not be material. It lacks the characteristics of what can be thought as material and it is neither detectable by the senses nor by scientific instruments. It can be grasped through sensory and instrumental data but it cannot be detected. This is also the same as saying that meaning is something essential to material reality, as meaning is graspable by the intellect. Anyway, all of this implies IMO that materialism must either (1) allow that there is some irreducible non-material reality or aspects of reality or (2) reject altogether the existence of an intelligible structure. If one adopts (1), there is no reason to think that there aren't other 'nonmaterial' aspects of reality, irreducible to the material. If one accepts (2), however, I don't see any way to escape a radical skepticism, a transcendental idealism and so on. If there is no intelligibility, how can we claim to know?
Mathematicism wouldn't even lead you to materialism, IMO - because what is the intrinsic connection between mathematicism and matter? Mathematics is a science of structure and relation, but not of the intrinsic essence.
Mathematicism leads you to ontic structural realism, the modern day analog of Pythagoreanism. There are actual proponents of that view, like James Ladyman and his Everything Must Go, and I think certain other positions commit to structural realism at least implicitly, like Bayesian Brain theories.
"Matter" is indeed an extrapolation of sense - the felt 'otherness' of resistance as we experience it, and even then, matter was necessarily bound up with form and formal causation before we artificially considered it as a solipsistic sort of corpuscular, particular existence.
I thought it might be that, but I wasnt sure.
As for your post, its not clear to me that the discontinuity between the classical and quantum worlds is as profound as you, and I assume most others, think it is. That would only be true if physics represents a more fundamental reality than phenomena at larger scales. I dont see things that way.
Yet in fact Galileo's theory was empirically inferior to the geocentric model, which is why it was not adopted by the scientific community. It was Kepler's elliptical orbits that made heliocentrism plausible. Galileo wanted circular orbits due to their perfection and elegance, and this error was in fact based in Galileo's more ancient approach to the Heavens.
So the story is more complicated. The geocentric model was in many ways much more mathematically sophisticated than the heliocentric model. The desideratum initially had more to do with elegance than predictive power. Before the findings of Tycho Brahe's superior telescopes were compiled, the predictive power question was moot. The myths that have grown up around Galileo are legion.
I responded:
Quoting T Clark
I want to change that - That might only be true if physics represents a more fundamental reality than phenomena at larger scales.
Seems to me they were excluded for a practical reason - sounds and smells don't generate easily measurable properties. Beyond that, I guess it probably also represents a metaphysical principle. I think all science, and human thought in general, has a bias toward sight over other senses, i.e. it is considered more fundamental.
I'll go back to my quote from Collingwood:
One metaphysical position does not, can not, address all of reality. We need to use different ones in different situations. With electrons we talk about mass and velocity. With our brothers we talk about history and personality.
I dont know if I agree with that.
I am making the grossly imprecise observation that if materialism was correct, if someone followed this intuition, my brother could not refer to anything other than atoms, and similarly, any references to history and personality would be references to my own mental abuses of words, unspeakable and incommunicable, until translated back into atoms perhaps.
Im not a materialist. My brother is real. His atoms will never explain, or be useful to demonstrate, his sense of humor.
Quoting T Clark
I like what you say here. I believe it was the philosopher Simon Blackburn who said that even the idealist philosophy professor adopts realism the moment they leave home in the morning.
I'm not sure anyone on this site actually defends materialism as a full-blown worldview, though they may draw from some of its strands and influences. What seems more prevalent today is a commitment to methodological naturalism - the stance that scientific inquiry should proceed without invoking supernatural explanations - rather than metaphysical naturalism, which asserts that only natural, physical entities and processes exist. The former reflects a pragmatic stance, informed by an awareness of the limits of what can be known, the latter is a stronger ontological claim, one that is itself subject to philosophical scrutiny.
Agreed, but I would have thought "the limits of what we know how to investigate". At least that's how I think of naturalism; it's a program for further investigation that can actually be carried out. It may not get you everything that could be known -- how could anyone know that? -- but at least it's a definable plan for encroaching on the unknown.
Yes, that's an improvement. I'm not attached to my wording. I quite like this as an approach and it seems to avoid scientism.
[quote=Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy]Once, in Karl Popper's living-room, I asked him why he rejected it (Kant's idealism), whereupon he banged his hand against the radiator by which we were standing and said: 'When I come downstairs in the morning I take it for granted that this radiator has been here all night' - a reaction not above the level of Dr Johnson to Berkeley ('kicking the stone').[/quote]
---
Quoting T Clark
The point I was making is that, during the heyday of modern physics, it was widely believed that the methods of the new scienceswhich, of course, are no longer new to usoffered a universal framework for natural philosophy. This framework rested on the precise mathematical description of physical bodies, grounded in the laws of motion and Cartesian coordinate geometry.
As an historical heuristic, I would mark this era as spanning from the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687 to the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927. That conference, in many ways, pulled the rug out from under the feet of the scientific realism that had been assumed in the modern perspective. The Solvay Conference is the line between the modern period proper, and the beginning of post-modernism in philosophy and culture. Its a large claim, I know, but one that can be supported with ample documentationboth from within the scientific tradition and from philosophy of science.
During the modern period, physics was regarded as paradigmatic for science generally, indeed even for philosophy, hence physicalism and all that it entails. Postmodernism blurs all the boundaries considerably.
Quoting boundless
As do I. Hence the interminable wrangling in academic philosophy over the reality of number.
If I had to list the five beliefs that best represent my understanding of philosophy, of reality as understood by humans, this would be one of them. If you don't buy it, there's not much more to say. You certainly aren't alone.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Here's what Collingwood wrote about absolute presuppositions which are, roughly, metaphysical positions:
I recognize he's not the clearest of writers but it comes down to this - metaphysical positions are not true or false, therefore materialism is not true. You've already indicated you don't find this idea convincing.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I'm sometimes a materialist, sometimes not. Depends on what I'm doing. One size metaphysics does not fit all.
My argument is not so much against a commitment to materialism, but rather to any all-encompassing metaphysical system. It does seem to me that most people on the forum see one particular metaphysical system as right and all the rest as wrong. Do you disagree with that.
Quoting Tom Storm
This makes sense to me. It set me thinking... Don't tell anyone else I said this, but I wonder if there are really no true ontological positions, only methodological ones. It's not what is real, it's where and how do we look.
Yes, that's hwo I read you as well. Agree.
Quoting T Clark
It's an intriguing idea.
My own tentative view is that we do not access reality directly, nor can we claim any definitive knowledge of what reality ultimately is. What we encounter instead are multiple realities, each intelligible through particular conceptual frameworks or perspectives. The pursuit of a single, foundational, unifying reality strikes me as superfluous in that it overlooks the plural and interpretive nature of our engagement with the world.
Quoting T Clark
That's right, and the motive for "easily measurable properties" is different from the motive for "common sensibles." Hence my point.
You have summarized the fundamentals of my personal metaphysics.
It's the view Nelson Goodman defends in Ways of Worldmaking, and one consequence I found particularly appealing is that it puts you in a position to take seriously sciences which are not physics. Goodman argues that "reduction" is basically a myth, with no known exemplars. (It is true that physics constrains chemistry, which constrains biology, which constrains ethology, which constrains anthropology, but no one really thinks ? and there's no reason to think ? you could "explain" traditional religious practices in West Africa in terms of physics.) There is, on the contrary, no real reason for treating other sciences as "second class citizens" that might someday qualify as the real deal if you can show how they are consequences of physics.
The alternative is to believe that there is only ever one thing to say, and anyone not saying that is wrong. But rather than see divergence as disagreement, it's possible in many cases to realize that it's only another perspective being offered. "But look at it this way ..." doesn't have to imply disagreement. Knowledge production is a communal enterprise.
Do you think it is appropriate to treat certain disciplines as paradigmatic sciences, such as physics or geometry? Along the same lines, would the pedagogue be equally justified in starting with any discipline they like, if they wish to teach their pupil about scientific reasoning?
I don't really understand the question. "Appropriate" in what sense?
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't understand this question either. "Justified" in what sense?
Truly don't know what you're getting at here.
I'm just asking if you think some disciplines are more paradigmatically scientific than other disciplines (including especially those disciplines that tend to be dubbed 'sciences').
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You're a teacher. You have a student. You want to teach them about scientific reasoning. Will one discipline provide a better starting point than another discipline, or not?
[Reply="Bodhy;992041"]
Well, the bridge between the two is that our understanding of mathematics, at least initially, comes from our sense experiences of the common sensibles. This is true developmentally (we teach kids to count with beans, we teach them geometry with wooden triangles, etc.), but it is also true historically that this is how mathematics was conceived (as magnitude and multitude). Shifts, like the redefinition of mathematics in terms of "games" is a relatively recent development.
Essence versus existence seems like another reason. The ontic structural realist still needs to give some account of why some math 'exists' and some doesn't, or else seemingly be committed to an incredibly bloated ontology where Boltzmann Brains (or some variant) and "random universes" would vastly outnumber people with coherent lives (as opposed to randomly generated memories).
...or not. "Every Thing Must Go" seemed comfortable with just leaving this unexplained:
[I]What makes the structure physical and not mathematical? That is a question that we refuse to answer. In our view, there is nothing more to be said about this that doesnt amount to empty words and venture beyond what the PNC allows. The world-structure just is and exists independently of us and we represent it mathematico-physically via our theories.[/I]
If there are no true ontological positions, in virtue of [I]what[/I] are some methodological positions true (or false)?
There is thermodynamics ? statistical mechanics, often offered up as the paradigmatic example, but there are very few examples that even fit that standard. Reductionism does not have a sterling track record, that's for sure, but it's also unfalsifiable, so it hasn't been "ruled out" either.
I don't think this is true. Actually, I think bolded is generally a strawman of objections to pluralism (and it is one that gets hauled out on this site with extreme regularity). A rejection of pluralism re metaphysical foundations and ontological truth (we could say, a refusal to jettison to principle of non-contradiction), is not a blanket refusal to countenance some degree of relativism, contextualism, perspectivism, pluralism in descriptions, etc. Indeed, I think virtually every philosopher allows for [I]some[/I] degree of cultural/historical relativism, some degree of contextualism (e.g. the truth value of "it is raining right now") etc.
Varieties of "aletheiatic monism" need not (and normally do not) need to claim that there "is only ever one thing to say," or appeal to the "One True..." (always in caps!). There can be many ways to express truth from many disparate angles. Different true descriptions might be more or less useful in different contexts.
Rather, what the monist says is that not every description is correct, that not all "things to say" are true, and that truth does not contradict truth (barring unclear terms, equivocation, or a lack of proper distinctions). That is, something cannot be both true and not-true, correct and not-correct, without qualification. All truthful descriptions then, will share some sort of morphism.
The monist can agree that "but look at it this way..." need not imply disagreement. However, they can also recognize substantial disagreement. Such disagreements might deal in matters of fact, and thus have reason as their arbiter (as opposed to power relations).
Right, given "we encounter... multiple realities," as a starting premises, "the pursuit of a single, foundational, unifying reality" would be superfluous. Perhaps? Do the different realities share anything in common? Or are there as many realities as possible assertions?
The reason for so very, very many problems in modern philosophy... :rofl:
What they might share, I guess, is us working hard to make sense. We do cherish our overarching models and unified field theories. But Im not especially concerned by notions of infinite regress if thats where we end up.
What if we left out "paradigmatically" in your question: are some disciplines "more scientific" than others? If you take "discipline" reasonably broadly, the obvious answer is "yes": writing poetry, for instance, is a discipline that, for the most part, does not even aspire to be scientific. Are you asking if some sciences are "more scientific" than others? Is physics more scientific than biology? Is biology more scientific than sociology?
I'm having trouble imagining a reason to ask. It's clearly possible to make up an answer, to make a long list of characteristics of "science" and then count how many boxes each discipline checks. I think most of the natural sciences check whatever boxes you might come up with, and it wouldn't be surprising if the social sciences checked fewer, but it doesn't seem like a helpful exercise. It suggests that there is a difference due to the domain, when it's the approach that matters.
Quoting Leontiskos
I think not in principle ? not on account of something "especially scientific" about any given field ? but for pedagogical reasons, probably so. What would the students already have some familiarity with? What would most engage their attention? What would give them opportunities to participate and see for themselves ? to, in a fundamental sense, do science themselves?
Maybe this is a variation on your question: isn't it the case that some domains are simply less suited to scientific study than others? Suppose you wanted to teach science and chose to begin with "the science of beauty", for instance ? how far would you get? I expect most of us would agree, not very far, but I don't think we have to dismiss the idea out-of-hand: why not explore and see if the process itself reveals the limits of what we can do here? ? Maybe this is the right point to mention that Goodman, in particular, insists that literature and the arts are not competing with the sciences and are not failing to meet a standard that is set by the natural sciences, but offer alternative frameworks for knowledge. (The word "knowledge" looks slightly odd there, but he would probably be fine with it.)
I don't know ? is any of this in the ballpark of what your were looking for?
That's a lovely point.
I recall the philosopher Susan Haack having some interesting things to say about the so-called scientific method. In her view, the principles of good inquiry, like respect for evidence and critical reasoning, apply not just to natural sciences but also in fields like law and journalism. She argues that science is not one method, nor is it a fundamentally different way of thinking from other forms of disciplined inquiry.
:100: :up:
I ask in order to try to erect a second erroneous extreme within which to situate the question. So that rather than saying, "Monism bad; pluralism good," we can begin to identify two errors and then try to find a mean between them. I think this is helpful in understanding things, such as science. It also gives different perspectives or considerations their due in a way that a one-dimensional approach cannot. And even where we fail to find common ground, that too is helpful. Maybe you will disagree with my answers to the questions I asked.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Sure, that's workable, although I will revisit the difference below.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think it is helpful to consider all disciplines, but I did add an elliptical comment in an edit, in which I tried to emphasize those disciplines that are generally seen as scientific. So yes: both questions are on the table.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
So you seem to be saying that the natural sciences check more of our "science" boxes than the social sciences, but that's not because natural sciences differ from social sciences, but rather because, "it's the approach that matters."
Is that what you are saying? And when you say it's the approach that matters, are you saying that we approach the natural sciences differently than we approach the social sciences (and that this is not due to a difference between the two sciences)?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Okay, and therefore it seems like you would say that if the students are equally familiar or unfamiliar with all of the "scientific" disciplines, then neither one discipline nor another would be a more appropriate starting point for the pedagogue?
For Aristotle (and myself) it is not right to disentangle the domain from the approach. Put differently, the reason we approach different things differently is because they are different things. The reason we approach physics differently than mathematics is because of the difference between physics and mathematics. Similarly, if humans were equally familiar with the various objects and methods of each of the sciences, then the pedagogue could start wherever he likes, but the crucial point is that humans are not equally familiar with all domains of study. Note that this is not an idiosyncrasy depending on the student, for there will be commonalities between all students and all humans. For example, Aristotle thinks mathematics or physics is a much better starting point for humans than political philosophy, and that this has to do with the objects of study as they relate to the human mode of being and development.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Right. Classically science pertains to natural realities and artifice pertains to man-made realities. In that way science pertains to knowledge (scientia) and artifice pertains to know-how (praxis). And then each would also include the specific ordered body of knowledge/know-how as well as the learning involved. So classically aesthetics is the science of beauty.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
At this point it depends a great deal on what we mean by "science." In what way might an Aristotelian say that mathematics (or physics) is more scientific than political philosophy? Probably in the way that mathematical reasoning is more certain than political reasoning, and that our mathematical knowledge possesses more certitude than our political knowledge. At least on that criterion mathematics will be more scientific, but on other criteria it need not be. Similarly, Aristotle will chastise the political philosopher or the metaphysician for desiring the same degree of exactitude and certitude that is available in mathematics; and yet given that mathematics possesses this greater degree of exactitude and certitude, it forms a better introduction to the very notions of inference and knowledge. It's a bit like starting a student reading with big letters rather than small letters.
This hearkens back to my original point about paradigmatic sciences, and what is paradigmatically scientific is a bit different than what is most scientific. Presumably Aristotle would say that something like geometry is paradigmatically scientific, but not most scientific.
Why do you suppose the modern holds that the natural sciences are more scientific than the social sciences?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, thanks. :up:
First of all, I specifically asked @Tom Storm not to tell anybody about this.
Also, I tossed this out as an impulse. Im not at all certain I even believe it is a useful way of thinking about things.
From what Ive seen of your posts, I dont think you really think this is a very interesting idea. I think you think of metaphysics more strictly than I do.
To answer your question, I can boil water in a kettle or I can put it in a cup and heat it in a microwave. Is one of those methods true and the other false?
Im indiscreet.
But physicalism will nevertheless insist that traditional religious practices, whether African or other, will depend on causes which ultimately supervene on the physical. A physicalist might agree that the anthropological description of the culture is true on a different level to the physical, while still insisting that all of the factors are still ultimately physical or reducible to the physical. In fact, physicalism is obliged to believe that.
The Stanford entry on physicalism has it that 'the general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists dont deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance dont seem physical items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social, or mathematical nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are physical, or at least bear an important relation to the physical.'
As to why physics, in particular, is paradigmatic for the other sciences, and philosophy generally. Physics, historically, became paradigmatic not because it was declared so a priori, but because it achieved an extraordinary degree of mathematical formalism, predictive power, and empirical confirmation. From Newton to quantum mechanics, physics has yielded universal laws, often with breathtaking precision, and this led to the belief that any successful science should strive for the same kind of mathematical rigor and explanatory depth. This was not merely an aesthetic preference; it was assumed that to really know something was to be able to describe it in physical terms.
Allied with this development were the ontological implications of Cartesian dualism, which sharply distinguished between res extensamatter, extended in space and measurableand res cogitansmind, the domain of thought and subjectivity. The success of science in predicting and manipulating the physical world proceeded without any clear account of how mind could interact with matter. As technology advanced without reference to mental causes, it became increasingly natural to treat mind as a kind of epiphenomenon, a ghost in the machine.
None of this is meant as an apology for physicalism, but it does help explain why it became so dominant in contemporary intellectual culture. The extraordinary effectiveness of physical science cast a long shadow, and many came to believe that anything real must ultimately be physicalor reducible to the physical.
Quoting Tom Storm
I would make the claim that philosophy is concerned with the nature of being, rather than reality in the scientific or objective sense, which is nowadays such a vast subject that nobody can possibly know more than one or two aspects of it. And also that this is a philosophically meaningful distinction although not often mentioned in Anglo philosophy (while it's fundamental to Heidegger, as I understand it.)
Given that perspective, the question is, how to come to have insight into the nature of being - not how to understand how the strong force is or why it works.
Of course, the only people I see claiming that science is one unified method, and the inarguably superior epistemic method, are online atheists in the thrall of scientism.
This just perpetuates the myth of the Positivist Uniqueness of Science, that science and science alone has some privileged form of insight that sets it apart from other ways of knowing. But no such holy grail exists - testability, falsifiability, experiment, repeatibility etc. all have shortcomings, or exlcude some form of inquiry that is indeed scientific.
AFAIK no one has a viable solution to the demarcation problem as of now.
Ok. I think this makes sense, though Im using the term reality loosely here. Isnt it the case that what youre really talking about is some kind of ultimate concern, or a hierarchy of meaning within this understanding of being?
Quoting T Clark
I agree with that. Except maybe the reality associated with our own existence. But thats a small, lonely piece of being.
Quoting T Clark
This itself is knowledge.
I think we have knowledge. I think some of it is absolute, but that as an honest scientist, we should be skeptical of its absoluteness. But as a person, interacting with other people, we claim absolute knowledge between each other all of the time. Otherwise in all disagreements we should all be saying you might be right and in all agreements we should all be saying we might both be wrong but people are not so agreeable as that at all.
Quoting T Clark
That sounds like one reality.
Multiple encounters and perspectives and frameworks keep it interesting, as does reality itself keep us interested. But why leap to the conclusion that some kind of wall separates one reality from another, when the distinction could be seen as two different ways into the same forrest?
I think Wittgenstein and Aristotle and Heraclitus and Empedocles, and Hegel and Kant, and Nietzsche, were having one conversation about one thing. They are all trying to say the same thing. I ask between Witt and Aristotle, why do you each say it so differently?
If change is all there is and is absolute, whatever we say about the many things changing before our many eyes will be burned up and lost to the change. So if reality is whatever we say about changing things, there are so many realities there may as well be none (and you may as well hold that what we encounter instead are multiple realities.) But if that really is the case, if as Heraclitus says, all is change, I find the concept multiple realities to be an equivocation on the word reality and that what is really meant and distinguished here is that the one reality is change, always changing.
It really is a shame.
I think it is all because religion aligns with him and today academics refuse to align with religion, Aristotle is simply not understood.
The man was a badass. He should be as revered in the history of science as he was by religion. Francis Bacon picked up the baton after Aristotle started the race. All of those before Aristotle were running qualifying heats, but Aristotle organized all of it into science.
Quite the contrary, I'm quite interested on a number of fronts. First, I'm interested to see if such views can avoid essentially democratizing truth or, more to the point, reducing it towards something like "might (physical or political) makes right."
I'm also interested in such views' rise in popularity as a historical phenomena. When the positivists began attacking metaphysics, I hardly think post-modern pluralism was the goal they had in mind.
Nor is this a view of truth that would be embraced by classical liberal theorists, nor by most influential 20th century liberals. Rawls, Popper, or Berlin, for instance, cannot embrace the sort of "aletheiatic pluralism" often advocated for on TPF and other places without radically undermining their own claims; yet these voices are often called upon go support liberalism and pluralism.
Hence, I do wonder if it is a sort of progression from the 1970s that has gone underappreciated, i.e., that "modern liberalism" has been abandoned for "post-modern liberalism" without people paying much attention. That's certainly the claim of some theorists, and that the dangers herein only began to become apparent to many when the political right also adopted the post-modern stance, leading to all sorts of concerns about a "post-truth" world. So, with the Fuenteses of the world we advance from "my body, my choice," to "your body, my choice," and from "my truth, my choice," to "your truth, my choice." But, if the (language) community decides truth and justice, then he who asserts his rule over the community [I]does[/I] make such decisions, and does so [I] justly[/I].
Of course, ideas like "we decide what is true" are likely to be much more appealing when one feels that one is part of the empowered majority, and that "history" is on one's side, which is certainly how progressive vanguard intellectuals tended to see themselves. I do suspect that the bloom will continue to fall off the rose in this respect, particularly as the forces of reaction have finally begun raising siege works around the Ivory Tower in a gambit to enforce [I]their[/I] truth. Notably, as this has happened, appeals to Madame Reason, and Truth (capital!) from those quarters have suddenly grown much louder than they have been in decades.
I'm not sure what this example is supposed to demonstrate. Surely one can explain how both heat water. Is the idea that truth is just getting the result you want?
How does this play out for the assertion of a distinct "Aryan physics" as set against a degenerate "Jewish physics?" Or a "socialist genetics" as set against "capitalist genetics?"
Right, if all realities (plural) intersect and are accessible to us, then they are, in some way, one reality. Whereas, if we are each locked in our own reality, the result is solipsism.
Now, for a reality versus appearance distinction to make sense, to have any real content, there has to be something other than appearance. If we face nothing other than a pleroma of appearances, then it would seem that appearance must simply be reality. But if multiform appearances are reality, then I don't see how this doesn't lead to the Protagorean conclusion that whatever we think is true, is.
There are many problems here, not least that, as Plato has Socrates point out in the Theatetus, this makes it impossible to be wrong, which makes philosophy worthless.
If all things are mutable and subject to change then the proposition: "all things are mutable' is itself subject to
becoming false.
Note that Heraclitus himself avoids this with an appeal to the Logos.
Yes, good point.
Yes, this is why I pointed out:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Luckily for we philosophers, reality pushes back against such worthless debate.
I guess we're on the same page except I don't see "the reality associated with our own existence" as small or lonely. I think it's half of everything. The world is half out there and half in here. This is one of the primary insights I've gotten from my participation in philosophy. I recognize that many or most people don't see it that way.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes, agreed, we have knowledge. Is some of it absolute? To me "absolute" means without uncertainly at least in this context. I don't know anything without uncertainty and I suspect you don't either.
Quoting Fire Ologist
There is no wall between different aspects of reality, but there is a wall between different aspects of how we think about that reality. Physics and my family are both parts of reality, but I don't generally use the same words to describe them.
I tend to think what matters most is that the enterprise is self-correcting, and it achieves that by being plural. The replication crisis is a great example of the scientific community's capacity to discover and address its own shortcomings.
Quoting Leontiskos
I was trying not to say that, in fact, because any such list, with the intent of creating a scale of "scientificity", would be tendentious. Maybe it's silly, but it seems to me in some ways physics is easier than biology, which is easier than sociology. There are all sorts of issues of complexity and scale and accessibility (comparative ability to observe and measure). The story of physics itself moves from easy-to-make observations and measurements and relatively simple theories to very-hard-to-make observations and theories that are so complex their interpretation is open to debate.
Roughly, I'm trying to say that I think it's a mistake to identify science with the methods that worked for the low-hanging fruit.
Quoting Leontiskos
That's quite interesting. Mathematics is particularly troublesome, but I want to defend the view that there are approaches to the study of atoms and mountains and lungs and whale pods and nation states that are all recognizably scientific and scientific because of some genuine commonality, despite the differences which are unavoidable given the differences among these phenomena. That commonality might be more "family resemblance" than "necessary and sufficient conditions," but I lean strongly toward the mechanism of communal self-correction being required. I guess we could talk a lot more about all this.
I'm going to hold off talking about pedagogy, but I'm glad you brought it up, because I think "learning" (as a concept at least) should be far more central to philosophy. This is my 30,000-foot view of science, and why I mentioned the importance of specifiable plans for further investigation above: science is a strategy for learning. That's the core of it, in my view, and everything else serves that, and anything that contributes to or refines or improves the process is welcome.
Except he got it completely wrong on women. I always wonder if these misogynist ancient philosophers ever actually talked to women.
Quoting T Clark
So I dont think we are saying much differently here about reality. I agree that the world as presented in my mind is constructed by my mind using the world out there and my mind in here as its raw materials to make the construction presented in me. Since Kant we see this clearly, but Platos cavemen make a similar point.
I was talking about what we might know absolutely and certainly. The only bit I claim to know directly, meaning where the out there meets the in here, is my own existence, my own thinking.
So to be more precise, the vast, vast majority of reality can only be known indirectly (half out there and half in here), but I can know that I exist directly and absolutely (out there IS in here at once). I am a part of reality (like the out there), and I can know this (in here is now out there). Descartes actually said something. I am is absolute knowledge, to me. Further, I now directly can conclude certain absolute knowledge also is real, because I know I exist certainly and absolutely. So I am and certain knowledge is are two absolute truths about reality, known by my own direct access to the objects now known, namely, my existence, and my knowledge of this as knowledge.
So there is some absolute knowledge for the knowing, but, as a good scientist, I find that it ends up only being knowledge about me that I can know directly. The fact that I can only know the world indirectly is a third absolute truth, but it is again, a truth about me and my limitation up against a world out there, and provides no color to the world, other than whatever color I am might have (hard to pin down the color of my mind - also changes a lot!).
Quoting T Clark
Just because what I say can be critiqued to the point of meaninglessness, the critique then would reclaim the real existence of meaning in the universe. So if we are to claim any knowledge at all, regardless of the degree of certainty we believe it may have, we must have set something absolute before us to distinguish this knowledge from the thing it certainly or uncertainly knows. We cant make a move without fixing something absolutely. You cant say you know nothing with certainty and mean what you say. Then the only thing you know absolutely is that you know nothing. That may be the extent of knowledge, making something known out of nothing, but then there you have something certainly; I know nothing becomes absolute knowledge. But besides this, thanks to Descartes, Socrates was wrong; he should have said he knew something after all - he certainly existed while he wondered if there was anything he could know.
But knowing thyself is a small lonely science, (maybe until you admit this self, which is real in the world, is a mixture, requiring interaction with the out there as it forms in here during its self-reflection/thinking/perception. This would all grow as absolutely certain knowledge then. Now we are following Hegel.)
Quoting T Clark
This all describes one reality (as far as I can tell). You agreed with Tom who said there are multiple realities, based on multiple perspectives and frameworks.
But here you say There is no wall between different aspects of reality. That points to only one reality.
Above you said The world is half out there and half in here. That is one whole reality as well.
Here you say Physics and my family are both parts of reality
Thats parts of one reality.
One world.
Being always means the same being.
(I think a clarification between reality and being and world and may the subjective experience may be helpful here, but that would require we start this conversation over, and I think we are making points without such clarifications. And I would rather not write a book here on TPF. But maybe we have to )
So is that what you see as the core of science?
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
But do you think it is true? It seems a basic fact that cannot be brushed aside in favor of a theory that would prefer it otherwise, hence my question to you:
Quoting Leontiskos
I think we have to actually grapple with the now-common belief that that the natural sciences are more scientific than the social sciences. Indeed, I don't see how it is possible to construe what you said about box-checking without admitting the interpretation I gave. Our colloquial understanding of "science" does seem to prefer the natural sciences to the social sciences.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And I'm wondering if there is an argument for that sort of claim. What makes it a mistake? Because the contrary position is pretty easy to represent:
Consider the fact that a very common objection to science-pluralism is that it would be unable to distinguish true science from pseudoscience (and the proponents of science-pluralism really do struggle with this objection). A pseudoscience is basically just a "science" which produces uncertain and unreliable "knowledge."
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Okay. Yes, I think this would be worth talking more about, namely the essence of science.
Note that I am not saying that the things we call "sciences" have nothing in common. That would be a strange thesis. I am basically saying that science is a genus; the various sciences are species within that genus; and that there are differences between the various species which bear on their "scientificity." The claim that some sciences are paradigmatic is more conservative, whereas the claim that some sciences are more scientific than others is more daring. But if I wanted to defend the second thesis I would begin by noting that sciences are more scientific than pseudosciences, despite the fact that we never quite know where to draw the line. The deeper point here is that if the science-pluralist cannot consider the idea that there might be a hierarchy of sciences (or multiple hierarchies depending on our criteria), then it's not clear to me that their thesis has risen to the level of philosophy.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Okay good, and I agree. I think that if we considered pedagogy, development, and parenting more often we would have more serious discussions.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Okay, wonderful. I like that better than your notion of self-correction. For Aquinas science is, "an organized body of knowledge following in a demonstrative manner from certain premises which are either immediately known to be true or which are proved in another science" (paraphrase).
Do you think there are non-scientific strategies for learning? For an Aristotelian science has to do with discursive/inferential knowledge, and so it would encompass any true strategy for learning, despite the fact that different sciences have different objects and methods. But obviously our colloquial understanding of science is much narrower than that.
Most everyone got it completely wrong about women. But yes, he should have known better, or talked to a woman. Today we are getting it wrong about women all over again, in many new and fanciful ways.
I also think Darwin would have perplexed Aristotle quite a bit. But not undone him, at all.
Science is also generally thought of as universal knowledge. But in complex systems, it is often the case that what seems like a universal relationship is subject to change after passing various tipping points. We deal in "moving landscapes" in more complex fields. For instance, several "laws of economics," revealed themselves to be merely tendencies which existed within the economic, political, and technological environments that existed in the first half of the 20th century. We discovered that they were not truly universal towards the end of the centurythat sort of thing.
For another example, with biology, we have to consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life, life based on a molecule other than DNA, perhaps even non-carbon-based life. This throws a wrench into claims to universality.
This is a problem, although I think information theoretic approaches shed light on a solution by way of returning to the conception of science primarily in terms of unifying principles that explain (and virtually contain) many particular causes.
But, my particular opinion is that these issues, and the motivation for scientific anti-realism, or pluralism, are driven by a self-reinforcing constellation of philosophical positionsrepresentationalism, positivism, nominalism and key assumptions about philosophical anthropologynominalism being the most relevant. Because of these presuppositions, the problems posed by fallibilism, the possibility of scientific revision, of one theory superceding another, or of paradigm shifts, seem to necessitate anti-realism or pluralism, even up to an abandonment of the principle of non-contradiction (e.g. Latin Averroism or "hermetically sealed magisterium"). Indeed, I don't think people are wrong to think that, given those presuppositions, this is where they will be led, to a choice between nihilism and pluralism (whether the two end up being all that different is another question).
What I find particularly interesting is how this sets up a new dialectical of the "reasonable" and the "unreasonable" as opposed to the old dialectic of the rational and irrational. Rawls conception of the "reasonable" individual might be a good example here. The rational is too bound up in its new straightjacket to be of much use, but the reasonable is allowed to rely on a certain je ne sais pas to delimit the vast expanses left open by nihilism or pluralism.
Yes, very true. :up:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right, and therefore upon encountering non-carbon-based life we might recast our findings as relating to carbon-based life.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That's interesting. I think you may be right in an academic sense. But I would want to lay a lot at the feet of democratic culture. I think most people like pluralism because they like democracy, and truth is always a threat to democracy insofar as we accept the modern notion of liberty as liberty to follow one's passions.
On the other hand is the idea that truth brings with it coercive imposition, which threatens the dignity of each human to choose for themselves. Either way, I tend to view the motive as moral more than speculative, especially for the non-academic masses. ...Of late the forum has been ringing with threads relating to liberalism.
To the hoi polloi, "science" seems mostly to mean "medicine", which is no doubt an interesting story. For my purposes, medicine is a good example because the human body is complicated and difficult to study, and so progress in learning how it works has been noticeably dependent on developing new technologies. And here we're still talking about natural science.
When you turn to the social sciences, there are additional impediments to a scientific approach. The sciences of the past (history and archaeology) face unavoidable limitations on what can be observed. If instead you're studying the present, there can be difficulties with observation ? political science has to rely on polling, which presents enormous challenges, and other sources like voting data, which can be difficult to link with other sources of data, and still other sources like economic surveys. No one in the social sciences ever has nearly as much data as they would like, and what they would like is informed by theorizing that is perforce based on the limited data they can get. It's hard. You can design some pretty clever experiments in fields like psychology and linguistics, but economics and sociology are generally forced to make do with "natural experiments" (and in this they are more like astronomy and cosmology).
In short, I tend to think social scientists are doing the best they can, and if we are right to have less confidence in their results than in the results of physics or chemistry, it's not because their work is less scientific, but a basic issue, first, of statistical power (lack of data), and, second, of the enormous complexity of the phenomena they study.
Quoting Leontiskos
I think honestly the similarities are only skin deep, and the processes of knowledge production in the two approaches differ dramatically.
The pluralism I'm inclined to defend is twofold: one is Goodman's point about the sciences that are not physics getting full faith and credit; the other is the communal self-correction idea. The latter rests upon the simple fact that others are sometimes better positioned to see the flaws in your work than you are. That presents an opportunity: you can systematize and institutionalize scrutiny of your work by others. Two heads are better than one; two hundred or two thousand heads are better than two. There are some practical issues with this, well-known shortcomings in the existing peer-review process, for instance, but the idea is deeply embedded in the practice of science as I understand it, and I think it has proven its worth.
Quoting Leontiskos
Surely. Given the distinction between knowing that and knowing how, it stands to reason there's a difference between learning that and learning how. Acquiring a skill is a kind of learning that might here and there overlap with a scientific approach ? experimenting is what I'm thinking of ? but we would expect plenty of differences too, and the intended "result" is quite different.
I think I'm okay with restricting science to a strategy for learning what can be known, and I also want to say it is something like the distillation of everything we have learned about how to learn what can be known. Science itself is a how, not a what. And that also means that we can learn more about how to learn things, so there's no reason to think the methodology of science is fixed.
We're kind of going in every direction at this point, and I didn't even try to get to the "essence of science".
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
My understanding of metaphysics grows directly out of my reading and contemplation of the works of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu and related works. My understanding of epistemology grows out of 30 years as an engineer where my primary job was to know things, know how I know things, and know how certain I am about the things I know. To call these "post-modern" is a stretch. Or is it? Is pragmatism related to post-modernism? "Do what works" could be seen as a pretty pluralistic position.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
My take on a pragmatic approach is that the fundamental issue is not truth, but rather what action should I take next. That doesn't mean truth isn't important, but I see it as one tool among others that help address the primary goal. Within that more limited scope, I think all the normal questions we ask and issues we address about truth are still relevant. In that context, I think rigorous standards for truth are important. Again, I think this discussion probably belongs in a different thread.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It's intended to demonstrate that methods are not true or false, they are effective or not.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'll restate my acknowledgement that my "all metaphysics is epistemology" remark was quick, off-the-cuff speculation. I wonder, but I don't know, whether it is worth following up on.
As for mixing politics with truth, i.e. you question about Aryan vs. Jewish physics, it's pragmatism again - what works. Even if conflicting political approaches to metaphysics and epistemology maintain high standards for establishment of truth, it is often decisions about what questions to ask that demonstrate where political differences lie. That's an issue I've been thinking about starting a thread about for a while.
I meant to say earlier, I quite like this idea.
Okay, this looks like a great overview. It seems like you are building on what you said earlier, namely that the natural sciences are easier and the social sciences are harder. Specifically, we might say that they differ with respect to the difficulty required to achieve an equal level of certitude and reliability. You say that the difference is accounted for by the fact that social scientists lack data in comparison with natural scientists, and that they study more complex phenomena than natural scientists. You also imply that the social sciences which study the present are studying moving targets, which is harder. All of that makes good sense, even if it is not incontrovertible.
Would you say that the natural scientists are also doing the best they can? Because someone might say that if we expend an equal amount of effort in two different fields, and the first field yields much more knowledge than the second, then the first field must be more scientific than the second (thinking all the while in ceteris paribus terms, of course).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I would not object to the idea that two heads are better than one, but I could very well object to the idea that every "scientific" field should get "full faith and credit." Still, I would have to know more about what you mean by those two claims.
Why might we not have as much faith in "soft" or social sciences? Because the ROI is not as reliable. Why might we not give as much credit to "soft" or social sciences? Because where it is harder to demonstrate correctness, it is easier to fudge results. I really do think the social scientist requires more intellectual virtue than the natural scientist, given the fact that laziness and malpractice will be harder to detect in the social sciences. Peter Boghossian's remarkable experiment comes to mind.
Now someone might say, "If a science is less reliable and certain than mathematics or physics, then it is not reasonable to expect the same level of reliability and certitude from that science. Faith and credit therefore need to be adjusted for the social sciences." This is true, but I would make two points. First, this might in itself be enough to justify a claim that the social sciences are less scientific. Second, this does not invalidate the objections to faith and credit. Both considerations must apparently coexist.
By now it seems obvious that we must ask what we mean by "more scientific" and "less scientific." This is a particular problem in our age because "scientific" has become an honorific, and we tend to see discrimination in allocating honors as undemocratic. So what do we mean by "more scientific" and "less scientific," or just "scientific" in general? As a foil: the extreme pluralist might say that every discipline is equally scientific and we are not allowed to question anyone's scientificity. That looks like a dead end where "scientific" comes to mean nothing at all. And if we are to admit that "scientific" means something, then we run the risk of acknowledging that some things are more scientific than other things.
My instinct on this front is to link science with knowledge and to say that where there is more knowledgequantitatively or qualitatively, potentially or actuallythere will be more science. Or that where there is more potential for knowledge there is more potential for science (or else that where there is potential for knowledge there is a scientific domain simpliciter). This is also etymologically apt given that scientia was the highest or strongest form of knowledge. Of course this approach requires holding several different criteria in balance.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This would be one ready way of exploring what is meant by "more/less scientific," at least if we agree that pseudoscience is less scientific. I myself don't think it is that easy, and your earlier point that some disciplines will uncontroversially check all of the "science" boxes whereas other disciplines will not seems to jibe with the fact that what counts as a pseudoscience will vary a bit from person to person.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
So to be clear, are you saying that science has to do with knowing-that, and non-scientific strategies for learning have to do with knowing-how? Even though there is some minor overlap?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
"Thus, a science is primarily the habit of soul, a speculative virtue of the intellect... Secondarily, a science is expressed in words and written down in text books" (Paraphrase of Aquinas).
Yes, I think we are in agreement.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Sure, although I've always thought Descartes' formulation is so limited as to be almost useless. It doesn't really tell me anything interesting. I understand you disagree with that.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I don't understand this, but I'll probably disagree with it once I figure it out.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I strongly disagree with this. I don't think you can know out there without knowing in here. I've been contemplating the idea that philosophy only deals with in here while science deals with out there. Let's not go into that here.
Quoting Fire Ologist
You're right. I was careless with my language and I misunderstood you criticism of what I said. I took @Tom Storm's "What we encounter instead are multiple realities, each intelligible through particular conceptual frameworks or perspectives," as meaning the same thing as my "there is a wall between different aspects of how we think about that reality." Perhaps that's not what he meant. Tom?
I think you're right about how many, perhaps most, people see this. I think it's because the epistemology of physics is different, has to be different, than psychology as it was historically practiced. Psychology has depended more on statistical truths, introspection, and observation rather than measurement. That's changed to a significant extent. The fact that people don't recognize cognitive science as part of psychology are falling for the fallacy your quote above expresses. This doesn't mean that old style psychology isn't still valuable, worth studying, and real science.
There are people, some here on the forum, who believe that geology is not a real science for some of the same reasons they don't think psychology is.
This is well expressed, and I agree with what you've written. I think another reason for the problem is that the observational sciences always deal with complex, interactive, even chaotic systems. In physics you can pare away all the extraneous stuff and deal with very fundamental elements.
I like it too, it's catchy. I'll think about it more but I'm not confident it will be a fruitful path to follow.
I would say that once we understand the meaning and also etymology of "method," we find that the idea doesn't make much sense in light of thousands of years of linguistic development. It would be a bit like saying, "There are really no fish; there's only fishing." If there's nothing to see then there's no need to look.
When I was talking about method, I meant something consistent with this definition: Method - a systematic procedure, technique, or mode of inquiry employed by or proper to a particular discipline or art.
I'd say people quite often want to learn things that can be known, and when they reflect on how they're going about doing that, you have the beginnings of science. Recognizing that the first method that occurs to you, the natural or intuitive approach, might fail or produce unreliable results, and that taking some care up front, not just jumping in to slurp up facts as if they were just laying around, easily accessible to the laziest procedure, but planning an approach to learn what you want to know, that I would think of as the scientific impulse.
That can happen anywhere anytime.
For example, Ornette Coleman once said (I think this was in the liner notes to one of his early albums), it's when I found I could make mistakes that I knew I was onto something. We're talking here about how to play, and how to write, but it is also possible to have knowledge about what you play and what you write. Even if we, rightly, resist the philosopher's instinct to reduce knowing how to knowing that, we ought also resist excluding knowing that from knowing how.
Further example, John Coltrane was a student of music theory. There are stories of him and Eric Dolphy with books spread out all over the living-room floor around them, discussing and analysing modes and scales for hours. Intense interest in knowing that. There's also a story that a young music student came to visit Trane once to interview him, and brought along a transcription she had made of one his solos. She asked him to play it, and after trying a couple times, he handed it back to her and said, "It's too hard." Knowing how is still its own thing, howsoever informed by knowing that.
I guess all I'm saying is that "know" is a verb, so we're always talking about a how, whether it's knowing that or knowing how. Those are different things people do, but I think we know they are, and have to be, braided together continually. In science, the intent is to get the hows right so that you can produce thats reliably; in jazz, the intent is to take the thats you can get your hands on to improve your ability to how.
Just an aside: That's a great story, which I'd never heard before. I wish I could have been there; I would have asked him, "Do you mean too hard to play, or too hard to sight-read?" They're both forms of knowing-how.
Yeah I think there's a trick to that story, that it does mean it's too hard to sight-read.
But then I also think about the difficulty of notating jazz correctly. And I think about Jimi Hendrix, who seems to add some tiny bend or flutter to almost every damn note -- how do you notate all those micro-decisions? And so it is with any great musician, there are all those millisecond decisions that go into the performance, all those tiny variations that distinguish a good performance from a great one.
Now, should we say there is no hope of a scientific approach to great musicianship? I actually don't think so. I think the point is that vastly more data is needed than you might at first think, certainly more than you would think if you looked even at a complex score, which is great simplification of what a musician actually does.
Any of that make sense to you?
Right, it's always a compromise. So is any notation, but jazz especially.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I'd want to say that those tiny moments of musicality shouldn't be notated, even if they could be. This is the place where the musician can express something beyond the control of the composer.
Something has to be left un-notated for true musicality to emerge.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Boy does it ever. I do a lot of composing and recording, and this touches on a really tense issue right now, not just for me but for all musicians who avail themselves of digital technology. It would need a separate, not-very-philosophical thread to go into it in detail, but basically: What happens when software approaches the same abilities that humans have, in terms of performance and expressive nuance? With "vastly more data," can we get ProTools (industry-standard recording program) + various samples of instruments + intensive post-production editing tools = "great musicianship"? We are getting very close to this, not via better scores and notation -- that's 20th century, man! -- but via this whole new digital approach to coding and re-playing information.
As a 20th century guy, I find this worrisome and downright offensive. But I can't deny what my ears are telling me. Even more disturbing as a practical matter, if I've recorded a bass part that is "too hard" for me to play well, even with a lot of practice, do I give up and bring in a better player? Nope. I play it the best I can and then fix it, with post-editing. And by "fix it" I don't just mean correct wrong notes or timing -- that's the least of it. I can add "musicianly" nuances and phrasings, subtly adjust pitch and rhythm and groove, and generally massage the thing till it really sounds human-made, including little "mistakes". Human-made by a great musician? That goal is getting closer and closer. I'm deeply uncomfortable about what this is doing to my musicianship, and everyone else's who does this, but technology dictates artistic practice, and we're not going back from this, it's too valuable. (and fun)
PS -- The "vastly more data" as of right now would still include much better sound samples for many important instruments (this is data about timbre, one of the least well-notated aspects of traditional musical practice) -- and of course vocals are in another category altogether. But can that be far off?
People have always been pragmatic, engaged in bracketing, put more fundamental questions aside to focus on more pressing concerns, etc. I think the shift I am referring to is much more distinct, i.e. the claim that truth itself is "pragmatism all the way down." That "true = what gets me what I currently want."
This is quite distinct from recognizing the benefits of pragmatic approaches to problem-solving. Plato, for instance, has a tremendous respect for techne, as does Aristotle. However, they do not think techne (arts for achieving ends) exhausts the human capacity for knowledge. That might be one way to frame the question ontological truth: "does episteme, sophia, and gnosis exist?" And, if sophia (wisdom, theoria) doesn't exist, what exactly is the philosopher, the lover of wisdom?
A question that rears its head when we define truth in terms of usefulness is: "but is anything truly useful?" Obviously, we very often do things that we think are to our benefit, or are a path to some end we seek, but they actually aren't, or we discover that the ends we pursue aren't truly choiceworthy. There are obvious examples, like Newton drinking mercury for his health, and less obvious examples where it seems more crucial to have a clear distinction between what is believed to be useful and what is truly best.
A lot of what is said by advocates of the pragmatic theory of truth is a helpful medicine for people who have grown overly committed to a calcified, doctrinal view of metaphysics. Nonetheless, on versions where there is some truth about what is actually useful, the new theory seems to actually not be that different from earlier theories, whereas otherwise, the result will tend towards a thoroughgoing relativism. There is a pretty big gulf between C.S. Peirce and Rorty for instance.
Like other great thinkers of the Axial Age, these thinkers are skeptical of doctrines and the capacity of language to convey truth. But I do think this is quite a bit different from something along the lines of: "there is no Tao," and so "by Tao, we just mean what is in accordance with what we think works." I do not understand from these thinkers that there is truly no way to be more or less in line with naturethat wu wei can be consistent with whatever we currently think is beneficial.
Ok, but are they truly effective or ineffective? I think the ontological question is going to worm its way back in with more complex cases.
Indeed, but without a clear notion of truth, I don't get how one questions this sort of political influence. Yet I think it's obvious that it can be more or less pernicious. The point is, of course, not that we can step outside of political or historical influence, but that we can make judgements based on something that is not politics and history "all the way down." Otherwise, it becomes difficult to articulate what is wrong with an "Aryan physics."
If we claim it "isn't useful," we will just be faced with the question about the truth of usefulness. Surely, it was useful for the Nazis. Fiction presents us with a good extreme here. In 1984, it is useful, both for the Party, and for the citizens, to affirm "Big Brother is always right." It's so useful in fact, that the story closes on Winston having been tortured into loving Big Brother. Yet, just because society can be set up such that it is eminently useful to affirm:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Or that "Oceania has always been allied with Eurasia and at war with Eastasia," even though the reverse was true just minutes earlierdoes the fact that denying these will result in double-plus ungood consequences make them so?
Yes, good. That could sum up my thread, "Argument as Transparency."
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, there is a very old Aristotelian tradition which holds that speculative and practical knowledge are intricately intertwined.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, very good. Science is the reliable procedure for producing thats.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You could say that we know how to play Coltrane's solos simply in virtue of recording and replaying them. But of course humans can also reproduce them. Asian musicians seem to be very good at that sort of reproduction. Jazz musicians might be characteristically bad at that kind of reproduction.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
The difference of artifice does come into play, here. Think about a new musician who learns "blue notes" (such as a ?5 or a ?3 in a major key). Or else think about the cultural transition to blues when those forms of dissonance became popular. In such cases the "theory" that is being studied is in many ways a theory of cultural appreciation, and this applies to jazz a fortiori.
Quoting J
I'd say the trick is played when we dissociate the music from the source. For example, before recordings you could only ever listen to music live, and at that time there was no possibility of dissociating the music from the source. The source and the music were inseparable, and the source was relatively well-understood. There is a qualitative philosophical difference between sound-patterns produced by humans and sound-patterns produced by machines, and we might just want to call the first music and the second sound-patterns. Of course at the end of the day the machine is produced by a human who wants it to produce music, and so the gulf will never be complete. And none of this means that you will always be able to tell the difference with your "eyes closed."
But disciplines and arts have ends; goals. There are no methods without ends and goals.
Agreed. Given that, I guess I dont see what you were trying to say in your previous post when you wrote once we understand the meaning and also etymology of "method," we find that the idea doesn't make much sense.
Well, a method without a goal would be like fishing without fish. Or , "no true ontological positions, only methodological ones," seems to posit methods without goals or ends. Unless we want to say that science has an end which has nothing to do with determining what is "ontologically" true?
Agreed. I suppose I shouldn't have put it this way because I was thinking of the musicologist not the musician, someone who is analysing a performance rather than creating one.
I'm of two minds in this talk of "having enough data" I keep using, here in talking about music or above talking about the social sciences.
There's a great forgotten book called The Road to Xanadu by John Livingston Lowes (iirc) in which he traces every image, very nearly every phrase and every word, in two poems of Coleridge (Xanadu and Ancient Mariner) to sources in Coleridge's library. It's not an "explanation" of the poems; I believe the point Lowes made (and I may misremember) was that in a way knowing all this only deepens the mystery of Coleridge's creativity in taking all this material to create these things. It's not like you could train an LLM on Coleridge's library and then say, "Write me an astonishing poem," and out they would pop.
(Coleridge being a particularly ripe case, as Eliot described him, a man visited by the muse for a while, and when she left, he was a haunted man. Coleridge himself didn't understand what had happened.)
So, part of me does want to say that there can never be enough data to explain, much less predict, human action, and certainly not unlikely human action like creativity. The "human sciences" would then be marked either by arrogance or folly, as you like. I could be old school, I'm old enough.
But I'm not convinced. That attitude strikes me unavoidably as a rearguard action, defending human nobility against a godless and disenchanting science, that sort of thing.
Instead, I think it's simply a fact that the data needed, and the theory needed, are evidently beyond us, and so we must make do and aim a bit lower in our expectations, or at least be more circumspect in our claims. When it comes to scientifically informed debates over social policy, for instance, we sometimes know enough to do better, but still less than we think we do and so some caution is advisable.
We know a lot of what was swirling around in Coleridge's head, but not all of it, and we know something about how his brain worked, because it worked like ours, but the specific historical process that took those inputs and yielded those outputs is unrecoverable.
So it is with any musical performance. I'm inclined to say that one of the reasons the musician played this note this way is because of that time she wiped out on her bike when she was 8. That might be a big enough factor to make it into her biography ? if, say, she broke a finger that healed in a way relevant to her playing. It might be a kind of emotional turning point for her, if it nudged her attitude toward risk a certain way. It might be an infinitesimal factor, no more or less relevant than the peanut-butter sandwich she ate that day, but all of which went into making her the person who produced that performance.
We're talking really about what God knows about her. When God hears that performance, does he smile slightly and connect it to that skid on her bike? God has all the data, so how does he understand the world and the people in it?
It looks like that's the standard for science I have been indirectly endorsing, or if not "standard" then "ideal". Which is a little odd, certainly, but maybe that's fine. In practice, science is entirely a matter of making do, and being very clever about what you can learn and how despite not being gods. I guess.
Therefore Bayes.
I don't think that's true. You've inferred something I didn't imply.
But does that consign the human sciences to arrogance or folly? Hermeneutics suggests that the job of the human sciences is not to explain but to interpret and understand.
I think you're right that we could never have enough data to explain human actions, even assuming those actions were deterministic enough to be explained. But more often than not, that isn't the right kind of explanation anyway. What we want to know isn't whether Lisa ate the peanut butter sandwich, but why Lisa chose to play what she played. And now we need an interpretation in order for the question to make sense -- in order for it not to be about collisions of atoms and neurons. "What she played" has to be given meaning, not just physical description.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Right, and I'm positing that even God understands the world through interpretation, not (only) causality.
The data question I was raising about digital recording is a different one, of course. We can connect it to your question about knowing-that and knowing-how, though. My collection of digitized data that I use to produce a piece of music is a great big "knowing-that." It really is "all the data," at least arguably. Where does the knowing-how enter? From me -- but the thing I know how to do is to record the music, not perform it. There's still a techne, but it has shifted a great deal. Hence my worry that the old-fashioned performance techne gets atrophied.
I have three problems with this 1) As I see it, "what do I do next" is the fundamental question. 2) Again, pragmatism for me isn't about truth. 3) I said "the fundamental issue is not truth, but rather what action should I take next" not "true = what gets me what I currently want."
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Something else I didn't say.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
My pragmatism and my attraction to Taoism come from the same place. The writings of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu are absolutely pragmatic. They don't talk about truth much. It's not a fundamental aspect of their doctrine. "Wu wei" and "Te," are central concepts. This from Ziporyn's translation of the Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi).
That's how wu wei works - you hearken to yourself then act without acting. There is no truth acting as a middleman.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, saying something is effective requires we specify what it is effective in doing and what the standards of effectiveness are. Will acting in accordance with our intrinsic virtuosities automatically lead to acting effectively? Good question, by which I mean I don't have an answer. Yet.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I didn't say we should define truth in terms of usefulness. I don't remember bringing usefulness into this discussion at all. I said truth is a tool we use to help us decide how we should act.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think you and I can probably bash out a mutually satisfactory notion of truth. My thoughts in that regard are not all that unconventional. It's just that I don't think truth is a fundamental question.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think the idea of truth can interfere with addressing the differences between ideologies. As I noted, what questions are asked is at least as important as the truth of the answers arrived at.
Which is fine, I've just been avoiding committing to some major difference between the natural sciences and the human or social sciences, because I've been trying to clarify ? or insist upon or defend or something ? that there is some genuine continuity, that the political scientist is as much a scientist as the physicist. I'd like that point to come out similar to saying that a biologist is just as much a scientist as a physicist, which most people will agree to without a moment's thought, but I think it's obvious there are ways in which biology had a much harder time making progress than physics. We got the theory of evolution before genetics. We had the number of human chromosomes wrong ? even once we had a number ? until 1956.
To your point, part of my point earlier was not to assume that what makes physics science was everything about physics, some of that may only apply to physics, or may only apply to the natural sciences. So I'd be open to saying even the expected results differ, that we want explanations from the natural sciences but interpretations from the human sciences. That may be. Where I've been hoping to link them is in the process enacted to produce whatever kind of knowledge they produce, all that business about careful procedures and communal self-correction. It wouldn't bother me if there were sciences about different things that produced different sorts of results, so long as they were producing those results using a process that would be recognizably science to a scientist in any field. That's awfully idealized, I know, but I think about even what a sociologist could tell a chemist about the care with which he collected his data and the statistical analysis he performed on it, and the chemist would recognize a brother scientist at work, even allowing for the great differences in their fields.
Right, but what do you mean by "there are no true ontological positions?" Maybe I have misunderstood. My assumption was that this meant there simply is no truth (or falsehood) as to positions about what really exists. For example, historical anti-realism. The position: "the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776" would be a position about what exist(s/ed), right? If there is no truth about this (an ontological position) but only measures vis-a-vis whether or not the methods we are pursuing are getting us the results we want, that seems to me to imply something like historical anti-realism, and a whole bunch of other anti-realisms.
But these sorts of anti-realisms bring up a host of issues. For instance, what is "justice" when facts (ontological positions) about the past (including murders, assaults, etc.) don't exist (cannot be true or false), but we are instead only interested in methods that produce the outcomes we seek? I feel like these are impossible to disentangle. Our desire for justice is bound up in questions of truth.
Maybe that's not how you meant it though?
I'll be honest, I don't think I can fathom a psychology where this question isn't going to virtually always be massively informed by what someone thinks is true. I'm not sure how a method itself can be true, except analogously, by resulting in true judgements. Whereas, if "true method" just means "effective," then that starts to look to me a lot like "true = producing what I currently desire." Why? Because doesn't "effective" here just mean "producing the result we currently desire?"
Where am I going off the rails here?
See above. I may have misunderstood. The idea that "true methods" are those that get the results we want suggested to me that "true" here means "doing what we want," i.e. "useful towards some end."
Right, I just think it's something that follows from the denial of any truth/falsity for ontological positions. What exactly is episteme in if there are no true ontological positions?
I think you're absolutely right to do this. A good interpretation requires all the same care as a good explanation. Arguably the community that produces the "communal self-correction" may not be as universal for a given human science, certainly not for an art. But we still want "something like the truth," just as we do from science. The big difference, for me, lies in the explanandum. The science of acoustics gives causal accounts of sounds. The human science of musicology gives interpretations of musical events -- which are already being understood as more than sounds.
What about literary theory? That's a bit like musicology I suppose.
There is an idea, and I'm not really sure how much I agree with it, that the humanities (which classically, would not tend to include philosophy) deals with "humanistic knowledge."
Humanistic knowledge, on these accounts, comes from our reflections on art, literature, and the human experience. It is an immediate knowledge of the human condition, including our emotional, social, intellectual, and sensory lives as we experience them. Of course, some literature addresses or even attempts to dramatize philosophy. This means that work in the humanities sometimes points towards universal and necessary truths (i.e. in theory, the type of truths that demarcate science). Epic poetry is a great example here, or the works of Dostoevsky, or Borges, etc.
One of my favorite strange books is William Blochs The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel. The book details the mathematics of Borgess story. Bloch goes through many fields of mathematics to investigate the necessary principles at work in fathoming such a library. Borges, by contrast, shows how human experience interacts with these principles, e.g. the desperation of librarians as they search for a book that will contain their life story and vindicate all their acts, or the way meaning becomes divorced from language if there is no intentionality behind it.
The elements Borges brings to his engagement with the mathematical construct of the library involve a sort of connatural knowledge, an intuitive humanistic knowing that is not reducible to analysis and concepts. He doesn't need to bring in mathematical knowledge to explore the topic. Such knowledge is profound, but pre-conceptual. The story is partly a look at our emotional reaction to the (practically) infinite.
That's the idea at least. It makes some sense to me. Some elements of literary theory strike me as more scientific (although they are sometimes ill-advised in this). But work on literature proper seems fairly distinct to me. Actually, I think the drive to make the humanities more "scientific" has tended to be bad for the humanities, leading to obscurantism at times and unhelpful approaches. I think the liberal arts in particular have a no less important, but quite different role to play (in some ways, a more essential role for a functioning republic).
I have some objections though.
I think you've supported thesis 2 better than thesis 1.
"Materialism", as I understand it, is not intuitive at all. I'm hesitant to guess anymore, but if I had to guess I'd say that "Dualism" is the "default" position of most people, if pressed; but mostly philosophy isn't interesting enough for people to define their categories that cleanly.
The reason it is not intuitive is because of all the problems you listed with it. It needs to be defended in some sense.
And I take umbrage with the notion of "default" in philosophy -- I think the default depends on one's environment they grew up in. So if you grew up in a spiritualist household then spirituality would be the "default", and so on for any other ontology.
:up:
I don't think materialism as a whole is intuitive. However, the main intuition, that "what is most real is what is common to what I can see and touch" does have a certain deep appeal. I suppose it also has to do with what can be verified. What can be sensed can be verified, and what can be sensed with several senses (the common sensibles) is most secure.
But I tend to agree with you. There is this fairly common narrative where materialism was just humming along swimmingly in the 19th and early 20th century and then-BOOM-all the sudden quantum nonsense and other problems crop up, ruining it all, and this is why we need pragmatism, idealism, [insert your prefered ism here]. Maybe the narrative even as some truth to it. But materialism always had many problems (not just consciousness, but even the goal-directedness of plants, gravity, magnets, electricity, mathematics itself, etc.) and you can certainly find people who pointed these out throughout its entire history, Berkely probably being the funniest:
I think I've misled you. That statement is not central to my argument. I'm not even sure it makes sense. It's just what came to mind when I was responding to Tom Storm. It's speculative and I guess outrageous, but I think it's worth looking into. I don't expect most people, and certainly not you, to agree. I don't mean that as criticism. You and I have very different approaches to philosophy. I like and respect yours, but it is alien to how I think.
I would have thought that scientific materialism is the default for the secular mainstream, even for those not familiar with the term, and who wouldnt necessarily have thought it through. But the mainstream account of lifes origins, planetary formation, and so on, generally assumes that all of the underlying factors can be understood in physical or naturalistic terms (even given there is an allowance for a spectrum of belief.) In discussions on this and other fora, Ive found many people assume that living beings can be understood in molecular or physical terms even if they havent given a lot of thought to it. (Also should be noted that there's confusion between scientific materialism and social materialism, as inordinate attachment to money and material possessions.)
And at the academic level, at least here in Australia, the scientific account of the origins of the Universe and living beings is presumptively materialist. Being a liberal culture, it is of course true that individual beliefs across the spectrum are expected. Belief in the soul, for instance, while not having any basis in science, is understood as being an individual prerogative, a belief one is entitled to hold. But it would generally be assumed that this has no basis in science.
(I might see if I can get one of the bots to find some polling data on the question.)
//In my view, something about Western culture forces this dilemma, or choice, on you. The religious account is anchored to the Biblical account, while the scientific worldview is explicitly defined in opposition to or the exclusion of it. That is writ large in the 'culture wars' over evolution and creation especially in America.//
I've stated it explicitly several times in this thread. I don't think my understanding of truth is all that different from mainstream ones. It's a question of scope. I just don't think truth is fundamental. It is not the most important question philosophy asks. As I've said, it is a tool we use to help figure out what action we should take next.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
An example. You brought up wu wei, what some translate as acting without acting, without intention. As I understand it, wu wei results directly not from "hearkening to others, but rather hearkening to oneself, nothing more." That means action grows spontaneously from our intrinsic virtuosities, our true nature without the intervention of conscious thought.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
No, it means producing the most appropriate action however that is defined. Not what I want, but what is best.
Gemini churned through tens of websites and research reports to produce this report (google docs format, 6,322 words). I was mistaken in believing that a majority of persons in liberal democratic societies fully accept scientific materialism although it is increasing in popularity in proportion to the decline in religious affiliation. There are many complexities and nuances, not least due to the fact that many who profess no religion still believe that there are questions science cannot answer. Part of the conclusion:
(I will leave that report online for future reference.)
Yes, but with an intriguing difference. We know what the "uninterpreted bones" of musical sounds are -- the paraphernalia of acoustics, which is a science and can be mastered without any reference to music. What would be the equivalent for literature? It's tempting to say, "the 'uninterpreted' marks on paper" (scribbles, as @Harry Hindu often says), but is that right? The information we get from acoustics is immediately applicable, and essential, to most of what we want to say about musical events. That's not the case for "scribbles" and literature though. Nothing about the physical composition and shapes of (what we learn to recognize as) letters seems even slightly relevant to the interpretation of literature. It's as if the "bones" of literature begin with interpreted objects -- letters, words, sentences.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If materialism is, as you assert, a popular and intuitively attractive view, then I don't find your characterizations of it plausible.
Did you read the third sentence?
Quoting Leontiskos
I might want to say that, Im not really sure. Im not sure when you say it you mean the same thing I do when I say it. Whatever, I guess Im lost. I dont see how this relates to the question you and I are discussing.
But look at this argument:
I have been trying to raise the elephant in the room: Does "scientific" mean anything at all? (Or else "more scientific" and "less scientific"?) Does "pseudoscientific" mean anything at all? Is there any strategy for learning that is not scientific?
I think you've given those questions short shrift, to say the least. In fact you've mostly just ignored them.
Note too that the descriptions of science you have given seem to contradict your claim that there are non-scientific ways of knowing. For example I asked:
Quoting Leontiskos
You responded:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And then a few sentences later, you effectively contradict your, "Surely," and seem to say that science is a(ny) strategy for learning what can be known (and therefore there are no non-scientific strategies for learning):
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
If you think this account is mistaken I would challenge you to begin with my question, "Do you think there are non-scientific strategies for learning?," and try to find a clear answer in your responses.* Namely, a clear example or description of non-scientific strategies for learning.
This manner of confusion is indicative of the sort of pro-pluralism I find on TPF. Someone really wants pluralism among the sciences, but then it turns out that they have enormous trouble giving a meaningful definition of science. What I find is that the pluralist has a tendency to make the words they use meaningless. My thesis here is that pluralism will begin to fail insofar as 'science' begins to mean anything substantial at all.
* That same question was asked again towards the end of . Both questions did not seem to receive a clear answer. Else, if a non-scientific strategy for learning is one which is non-reflective or non-critical, then apparently there are some sciences which are less scientific than others. It looks to be uncontroversially false that each science is equally capable of recognizing its own mistakes.
"Scientific" means something like this - Following a formal set of procedures to study phenomena. Those procedures, vastly simplified here, should include the following:
Of course this is a cartoon and it's only my first swing, so please don't try to nitpick it apart. It's the overall approach I'm interested in describing.
I think this is the beginning of a beautiful enmity.
Okay, that's a good start. It seems to me that, given your substantial notion of science, pluralism among the sciences will not hold.
I could give an alternative argument for this view. Do we agree that sciences can progress (and possibly regress)? For example, do we agree that the field of molecular physics fulfilled your criteria better in the 20th century than in the 19th century? If so, then it seems that molecular physics was more scientific in the 20th century than in the 19th century, and therefore scientific pluralism does not hold between 19th and 20th century molecular physics. We simply cannot say that both were equally scientific.
The next step isn't so hard. It's just the idea that that difference between 19th and 20th century molecular physics is also possible between different contemporaneous sciences, and in all likelihood inevitable. Scientificity ebbs and flows within fields and between fields. How could it be otherwise?
Quoting Leontiskos
Then you are already two steps behind!
I don't agree.
Quoting Leontiskos
No. We know more now than we did then. We have better technologies for investigation. I don't know enough about the practice of of molecular biology in the 19th century to know if the level of rigor met all the standards I've laid out.
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't buy this. Psychology is less precise than physics. That's inevitable. As I've stated elsewhere in this thread, this has been partly ameliorated by adding more "hard" science to the study of psychology, e.g. cognitive science.
Quoting Leontiskos
Let's go back to this for a second. You've identified more scientific, less scientific, and pseudoscientific. You don't seem to have left any room for badly performed science. Is that less scientific or only lower quality. Haute cuisine is good cooking while my macaroni and cheese made with Velveeta is bad cooking, but they're both cooking.
Here is a silly example. Suppose someone is a dog speed pluralist. All dogs are capable of running at the same top speed.
In response we could point to the same dog at a young age, a prime age, and an old age, noting differences in speed. We might point to differences in speed within the same litter or breed. We might point to differences between breeds (size, breeding purpose, etc.). We could easily infer that given the way that speed varies over an individual dog's life and between dogs of the same breed, therefore speed will also vary between breeds.
This is obvious, but I want to say that scientificity is not a great deal less obvious. There is a generation of people that really like egalitarianism, and they project it everywhere. Yet the simple fact of the matter is that almost nothing in nature or in life is equal. Therefore sweeping generalizations of equality are almost always wrong, such as, "All the sciences are equally scientific."
As to , I see this as a moral confusion more than anything else. "If we don't say that all the sciences are equally scientific, then we are being immoral," or, "If truth exists then some people will be wrong, and it is to make others wrong." What is needed is a way in which to be intellectually honest without being immoral.
(, I will come back to this post of yours)
Phenomena --> Physical concepts
Which expresses the translation of first-personal observations into third-personal physical concepts in relation to a particular individual, via ostensive definitions that connect that particular individual's observations to their mental state.
from synthesis
Physical concepts --> Phenomena
Which expresses the hypothetical possibility of 'inverting' third-personal physics back into first-personal phenomena - an epistemically impossible project that the logical positivists initially investigated and quickly abandoned.
I think Materialism is a metaphysical ideology that came about due to mainstream society overlooking synthesis and intepreting science and the scientific method, which only concern analysis, as being epistemically complete. Consequently, the impossibility of inverting physics back to first-person reality, was assumed to be due to metaphysical impossibility rather than being down to semantic choices and epistemic impossibility, leading society towards a misplaced sense of nihilism by which first-person phenomena are considered to be theoretically reducible to an impersonal physical description, but not vice-versa.
Are you saying that scientificity is as easy to define and measure as speed? Isnt that really the question on the table here? You and I disagree. I think scientificity is a very, very great deal less obvious.
I brought this up too. Old school materialism has intuitive appeal, I guess. Post QM materialism is utterly bizarre and counterintuitive.
Are you saying that materialists deny this? Can you point to anyone, at any time in history, who held this position?
What do you think is olds-school materialism, and what is post-QM materialism? Again, examples of exponents of these views would help.
*Old-school materialism is basically the billiard ball view of the universesolid particles bouncing around in space, totally mindless, following fixed laws. Think Newtonian physics, where if you knew the position and velocity of every particle, you could predict everything. That kind of worldview felt intuitive: physical stuff acting on other physical stuff.
Post-quantum-mechanics materialism is way weirder. Now were talking about things like particles being excitations in underlying quantum fieldsnot little balls, but ripples in a weird, abstract ocean. Plus you get phenomena like entanglement and superposition, where cause-and-effect gets fuzzy and locality breaks down.
People trying to stay materialist after QM usually just shift the definitionlike, sure, its not solid matter anymore, but its still physical because its in a field. But lets be real, its a huge departure from the old view. The matter of today is more math-like than object-like. So yeah, I get why people still call it materialism, but its not the straightforward, common-sense materialism it used to be.
*Ai wrote some of this
I don't see how it's a caricature. That's the view of the world that unites the Ionian materialists. As mentioned in the post, different thinkers did have their own "x factors" to add to the view (e.g. Anaxagoras' Nous). Corpuscular mechanism, and the idea of primary qualities, was also quite popular, although again, some models included different additional factors or forces (yet some didn't).
Even in later periods, someone like Bertrand Russell, who was well-versed in the science of his day, could write:
It's, at the very least, the view of "how science says the world is," I grew up with, and one I've heard repeated back to me many times over the years.
Plus, a lot of popular philosophical problems are framed in these terms. For instance, the "Problem of the Many," tends to assume that it's fair to say things just are nothing but "clouds of particles." That's precisely why the problem emerges.
So apparently you find his characterization unattractive. Do you have some reason why you think it is unattractive?
Russell's hyperbolic rhetoric doesn't help much. "How science says the world is" is a little better, but still leaves much to be desired.
I am not asking for a concise definition, but at least some sense of what you are talking about. Otherwise, the whole project seems unserious, more of a vague rant than analysis.
Excellent. :up:
I think when @Count Timothy von Icarus talks about "smallism," he is basically talking about the idea that reducing wholes to parts is a legitimate move, but synthesizing parts into wholes is not. Or else that only the former is explanatorily or epistemically useful.
Does anyone? Would any materialists nowadays own up to such a characterization?
"Physicalism" is a very common contemporary view that is usually recognized to be a form of materialism. It seems to me that all sorts of people believe this stuff. See for example Baden's thread, "The Empty Suitcase: Physicalism vs Methodological Naturalism."
Both ancient and early-modern. Contemporary physicalism/materialism is sometimes very much an inheritor of this type of thinking though.
"Corpuscular/atomistic mechanism" might be more specific, but maybe too specific. You could consider Hobbes, Descartes (on the extended substance side of being), Gassendi, Boyle, Newton, Locke, etc.
Right, and even that term is fraught and uncertain, as the article that you referenced shows. I have a hunch, though I cannot back it up with a literature review, that among philosophers, discussions of such general topics as "materialism" or "physicalism" are less common today than they were, say, in Russell's time (other than an occasional windy essay with a title like "Why I am not a Materialist.") Part of this is, no doubt, an increased specialization and fragmentation of philosophical discourse. But perhaps another explanation is precisely in the difficulty of identifying, not an ideological camp, but a genuine "type of thinking." There may well be a type here, but it may be more a type of temperament and a way of seeing than a position that can be clearly articulated.
All right, thank you for the clarification.
So, do you think that this implication has never occurred to any materialists, or that there have never been any materialists to begin with? Because I refuse to believe that anyone could actually hold such a view.
We were talking about intuitive appeal. The physics changed from becoming something a child could essentially grasp to something nobody, 100 years after QM, can understand or even agree on.
Actually, I'm not sure that it is even possible to a materialist to abandon the idea of intelligibility. Certainly, it has been downplayed. So, I am probably wrong here.
Well, probably Democritus who held that the most fundamental things were atoms and the void. Everything else was reducible to those (either via emergence or supervenience). I'm not sure, however, how he explained the interactions of the atoms. Did the atoms follow some 'laws'? If they did, how these laws can be explained in terms of the model he proposed?
Hume denied causation. Yes, he was probably more of a skeptic rather than a materialist but his influence is certainly immense.
More recently, some physicists accept the idea of 'superdeterminism' which, more or less says that while quantum mechanics makes wrong predictions, the universe behaves 'as if' QM makes correct predictions.
Anyway, my point was that materialism doesn't have IMO convincing ways to explain intelligibility, at least if it is based on a reductionist paradigm. After all, intelligibility implies that our intellect grasps some actual property of the material world. Since, however, what is grasped by the intellect are 'forms'/'concepts', this would imply that 'forms' are, indeed, an essential aspect of the material reality. I am not sure how this is consistent with a purely materialistic outlook.
So, perhaps I was wrong in my claim you quoted but, nevertheless, I think that my point stands.
Yes, I get your point. Although the intuitiveness of Newtonian physics shouldn't be overestimated either. It only seems commonsense because the basics have been drilled into us from an early age. But it is well known among educators and psychologists that our naive intuitions about motion (aka "folk physics") are not in line with Galileo and Newton. No wonder it took so long for these modern concepts to become widely accepted.
Well, what would any of us be talking about absent intelligibility? If there is an object of discussion, it is perforce intelligible. As for what accounts for the intelligibility of the world, I am not convinced that there are substantive disagreements between, say, realists and nominalists - disagreements that are more than just different ways of speaking / ways of seeing.
Materialist philosophy of mind would probably account for that in terms of the well-adapted brain's ability to anticipate and model the environment. Impressive indeed, he will say, but ultimately just neurochemistry. D M Armstrong, who was Professor of the department where I studied philosophy, was a firm advocate for universals, which he identified with scientific laws. But his major book was Materialist Philosophy of Mind, which is firmly based on the identity of mental contents and neural structures. There are universalsbut they are nothing over and apart from the physical form they take. They are repeatable properties instantiated in space and time. You and I wouldnt accept that, but its a hard argument to refute.
I believe that some would say that even if the world isn't intelligible it would still make sense to 'talk about' it and builing models about it if they were useful.
But, again, I think that such a denial of intelligibility is incompatible with 'materialism' in any acceptable sense of the term. It's mostly found in skpetical philosophies like Pyrrhonism or even Kantianism (at least in reference to the 'things-in-themselves') and so on.
Quoting SophistiCat
I believe, instead, that the difference is much more than that. Realists assert that 'forms' are not just constructs of our minds which have at best practical utility but are in some ways independent from us. If it is so, then, it means that even the 'material' world has a structure that is analogous to the structure of our intellect, which is able to 'grasp' these forms. Nominalists deny this and assert that the forms are just convenient constructs that are useful to us. The problem is IMO that nominalism isn't able to explain why they are useful. In fact, if nominalism were true, any conceptual model simply can't grasp the structure of the material world, which remains forever inaccessible. But nominalism, in fact, seems to ironically lead us to a denial even of materialism, due to the fact that it denies intelligibility.
If, however, some kind of realism is affirmed, then, as I said before it seems that the material world has a structure analogous to the one of the intellect. Is this acceptable under a materialist ontology? I am not sure. At least, if the materialist ontology is reductionistic.
The materialist would say that an understanding of how brainsw work fills this gap.
Interesting. But note that in his model, the material world has a structure analogous to the intellect. Is this ok for a materialist? I guess that at a certain point it also depends on how much one goes with the search for explanations, so to speak. It is rather odd for me that, say, a purely 'material' world would 'follow' laws. Where do these 'laws' come from? Are they 'material'? It doesn't seem so. In fact, laws do not seem to satisfy the criteria to be considered 'material'. They are not causal. They are not detectable. And so on.
And, also, if 'forms' and 'laws' are fundamental aspects of the material world then reductionism is false. After all, forms and laws seem properties of wholes rather than the 'smallest' objects.
The brain is also a material object. So saying that the brain works in a certain way doesn't explain why the material world has such a structure. In fact, even the very attempt to understand 'how the brain works' assumes intelligibility of the material world or the brain in this specific case.
So, I don't think that understanding how the brain works gives an explanation here. It might however give us a confirmation that 'everything fits' once the intelligibility is however assumed.
But even in a panpsychist universe, the brain would have exactly the same role and would completely explain intelligibility in either a materialist or a panpsychist universe. It seems that once you start talking about our understanding of brains, the fundamental metaphysics is irrelevant to intelligibility. The intellect and the material world have analogous structures because a brain is a model of structure that exists in the material world.
Ok, but the panpsychist postis that the 'mental' is a fundamental aspect of reality. So it's no surprise to me that the 'material' and the 'mental' share some properties if panpsychism (in some form) were true.
Rather, the materialist asserts that the 'material' is fundamental and everything else is derived from the material. But if one accepts intelligibility is something essential to the 'material' then I believe that it is reasonable to ask how is that possible. As I said in my posts I have my reservations in asserting that what makes the world intelligible ('forms', 'laws'...) is 'material' in any acceptable sense of the word 'material'.
Of course, one can adopt 'nominalism'. The price is, however, that nominalism makes the world inaccessible to conceptual knowledge. And I am not sure that materialism actually is compatible with nominalism. After all, materialist generally acknowledge that there are intelligible structures, laws etc in reality.
So are you suggesting that what science understands about brains could never be true under idealism? How would you explain what we observe about brains and human cognition / behavior in that case?
I agree with you, of course, but I've had some discussions with an advocate of Armstrong's materialist theory of mind, and he's pretty formidable. I don't think his style of materialism is much favoured any more, but it's instructive how far it can be taken.
So you don't think science ever progresses or regresses on the criteria you laid out? You don't think there can be progression or regression in the matter of, "quality control and assurance," for instance?
Quoting T Clark
They're both cooking: some better, some worse. Two things can both be science, some better, some worse. "Badly performed science," would presumably be less scientific. As @Srap Tasmaner noted, the method and the conclusions are interconnected.
Quoting T Clark
Does "scientific" mean something? If it does, then it looks like we have to admit that some things are more scientific and other things are less scientific. If a criterion such as, "quality control and assurance," is not uniform throughout every scientific discipline and age, then the strong science-pluralism that is being promoted within this thread looks to fail.
Well, in some ontological forms idealism, in a sense, no. If the whole reality is exclusively 'minds' + 'mental contents' then there is no 'brain' as a 'material object' outside minds. In another sense, however, yes: the models are still good for predictions and for practical usefulness.
But not even all ontological idealists deny the existence of something non-mental.
Regarding the epistemic idealists, I would say that the answer would be that the scientific models are correct at the level of phenomena, not at the level of the things-in-themselves.
Ok. Yes, I would prefer that kind of materialism rather than others. But IMO such a materialism is hard to differentiate to either a panpsychism of sorts or something equal or close to hylomorphism.
But the point is that the scientific study of brains doesn't care about fundamental metaphysics. We just study and describe patterns of what we observe in reality regardless of some fundamental metaphysical description.
The point is that if one is able to explain our intelligibility of the world in terms of brains, it is open to anyone regardless of their metaphysical preference. Providing one can make a good argument that brains are sufficient to explain intelligibility, then it seems less compelling imo to just assert that any specific metaphysical picture precludes intelligibility unless one can give some concrete argument other than incredulity.
Quoting boundless
This is meaningless imo. To say something is incorrect means that we get things wrong about it and make predictions that do not come true. But to my understanding of these viewpoints, one could in principle exhaust the correct in-principle-observable facts and still not penetrate the noumena. But then if no one can access it, then in what sense do these things actually have any influence on events in the universe? In what sense is there anything at all to learn about them?
The other alternative is that you are simply saying we have (alot) more to learn about the brain and may have got some stuff wrong, which isn't a particularly radical or troubling claim.
D M Armstrong is strictly materialist - thoughts are the output of brains, and brains are purely physical. Mental states are nothing but brain states. The only point I was trying to get across, is that when you encounter someone who is well-versed in this attitude, they're surprisingly difficult to debate with. It seems to me (and probably to you) that once you see through it, 'the scales fall from your eyes' so to speak. But for the committed materialist, the shortcomings that you and I might see are not at all obvious.
In any case, I think the very best arguments against Armstrong's form of materialism is the fact that propositional content can be encoded in an endless variety of languages, symbolic forms, and material media. The same proposition can be written out in different languages, encoded as binary or morse code, carved in stone or written on paper - and yet still retain the same meaning. So it's not feasible to say that the content of an idea must be identical to a particular state of physical matter, such as a brain state, as the meaning and the form it takes can so easily be separated.
I see Armstrong's style of materialism as a direct descendant of scholastic philosophy, but with science assigned the role formerly attributed to God, and scientific laws equivalent to the Aristotelian universals.
Ok. Methodological naturalism doens't imply a metaphysical commitment of any kind. But if one is agnostic about metaphysics, let's be agnostic.
Quoting Apustimelogist
We prabably are talking past each other about intelligibility because we have different criteria to judge something as 'intelligible'. For me, intelligibility means that our concepts can, in principle, mirror perfectly some properties of the external world as in classical metaphysics.
If one doesn't assume that there is a correspondence between the structure of our thoughts and the structure of material reality, then, we can't really understand material reality. We might be able to predict, to make good models but we can't have real understanding in my opinion.
If there is correspondence, however, this would mean, for me, that the material is not so opposed to the 'mental' as it is commonly assumed to be. Neither that the mental can be derived from something that is purely non-mental. Unless a credible explanation can be given about the emergence of intentionality, consciousness, laes of intellect/reason from what is devoid of these things is given, I see no reason to think that these things are not fundamental.
Quoting Apustimelogist
You seem to have a pragmatic approach to truth. I respect that. Just a curiosity, though: do you think that, say, the ancient geocentrists did have 'knowledge' of the world as they were able to make correct predictions?
Regarding the noumena... well, it is a quite complex issue. I see it more as an antinomy of reason, if you like. That is, we can't go 'out' of our perspective or, at least, be sure that our knowledge is independent from it.
These days, I am more drawn to something like hylomorphism or platonism however. That is, forms are real and are really in some way instantiated in the material world. This to me implies that the material world has, ironically, a mental aspect that allows us to be able to understand via conceptual knowledge. So, I do think that our conceptual reasoning gives us a real understanding of the material world... because in a sense the material world is not so different from the mental.
Yes, I agree.
Quoting Wayfarer
Right! Also, that material data doesn't intrinsically have meaning. And that if one assumes that, in fact, forms are really a property of the material, then, the material has some intrinsic intelligible content, which would imply that it's not material in the sense that one might want it to be.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yep! But note that scientific laws, in fact, can be considered universals, in fact. But if they are taken to be real, then, one must IMO abandon reductionism.
For instance, consider the conservation of the total momentum of a two-particle system in newtonian mechanics. If it is considered something real, it is clearly a property of the whole system. You can't derive it from the properties of the parts. The variation of the momentum of each particle is 'constrained' by this law that is about the whole system. I am not sure how a reductionist picture of the material world can accomodate this.
For a reductionist it is much more convenient to adopt a nominalist view of the law, that is a denial that is in some sense real but just an useful construct.