Epistemological pluralism
dkomo
its clearest statement by such Christian mystics as St. Bonaventure
and Hugh of St. Victor: every human being has the eye of flesh, the
eye of mind, and the eye of contemplation."
"Indeed, Plotinus -- arguably the greatest philosopher-mystic the
world has ever known -- usually gave the Great Chain [of Being] twelve
levels: matter, life, sensation, perception, impulse, images,
concepts, logical faculty, creative reason, world soul, nous, and the
One."
"The point is that, any way we slice the great pie -- three levels,
five levels, twelve levels or more -- men and women have available to
them *at least* the three basic eyes of knowing: the eye of flesh
(empiricism), the eye of mind (rationalism), and the eye of
contemplation (mysticism), each of which is quite important and quite
valid when dealing with its own level, but gravely confused if it
attempts to see into other domains. This is the heart of
epistemological pluralism, and, as far as it goes, it is indeed quite
valid."
"Modernity recognizes only the eye of reason yoked to the eye of flesh
-- in Whitehead's phrase, the dominant world-view of modernity is
*scientific materialism*, and whether that science be the holistic
science of systems theory or the subatomic physics of quantum events,
science is the eye of reason linked to evidence offered by the
empirical senses. In no case is the eye of contemplation or the eye
of Spirit required...or even allowed."
"The real difficulty, then, is not showing how empiricism, rationalism
and mysticism can all fit together in the Great Chain of Being; it is
not showing how they can all be harmoniously integrated in a great
spectrum of consciousness; it is not demonstrating that such a
synthesis is coherent and complete. For *that*, in a sense, is the
easy part. The hard part is that modernity *does not accept the
higher levels themselves* (the transmental, transrational,
transpersonal, and contemplative modes), and thus it sees *no need*
whatsoever for the integration. Why try to integrate science and
Santa Claus?"
Ken Wilber, _The Marriage of Sense and Soul_, p. 18-20
Comments?
P.S. Nowhere in the book does Wilber advocate a Creator God nor an
Intelligent Designer. He quite clearly doesn't believe in one. The
merged point of view is: religion as a mode of perception and being
(the Eastern view) merged with rationality and empiricism (the Western
view).
John Wilkins
> "The traditional view of epistemological pluralism was given perhaps
> its clearest statement by such Christian mystics as St. Bonaventure
> and Hugh of St. Victor: every human being has the eye of flesh, the
> eye of mind, and the eye of contemplation."
>
> "Indeed, Plotinus -- arguably the greatest philosopher-mystic the
> world has ever known -- usually gave the Great Chain [of Being] twelve
> levels: matter, life, sensation, perception, impulse, images,
> concepts, logical faculty, creative reason, world soul, nous, and the
> One."
Relying on Aristotle's De Anima for the first five...
>
> "The point is that, any way we slice the great pie -- three levels,
> five levels, twelve levels or more -- men and women have available to
> them *at least* the three basic eyes of knowing: the eye of flesh
> (empiricism), the eye of mind (rationalism), and the eye of
> contemplation (mysticism), each of which is quite important and quite
> valid when dealing with its own level, but gravely confused if it
> attempts to see into other domains. This is the heart of
> epistemological pluralism, and, as far as it goes, it is indeed quite
> valid."
>
> "Modernity recognizes only the eye of reason yoked to the eye of flesh
> -- in Whitehead's phrase, the dominant world-view of modernity is
> *scientific materialism*, and whether that science be the holistic
> science of systems theory or the subatomic physics of quantum events,
> science is the eye of reason linked to evidence offered by the
> empirical senses. In no case is the eye of contemplation or the eye
> of Spirit required...or even allowed."
"Modernity" is a fiction. Plenty of moderns think that knowledge of the
world comes via empirical evidence and moral and spiritual knowledge
comes via reflection, contemplation, meditation and ecstatic states. And
Whitehead was discussing things as they stood before the First World
War. Things have changed, and even then it was not the entire truth.
>
> "The real difficulty, then, is not showing how empiricism, rationalism
> and mysticism can all fit together in the Great Chain of Being; it is
> not showing how they can all be harmoniously integrated in a great
> spectrum of consciousness; it is not demonstrating that such a
> synthesis is coherent and complete. For *that*, in a sense, is the
> easy part. The hard part is that modernity *does not accept the
> higher levels themselves* (the transmental, transrational,
> transpersonal, and contemplative modes), and thus it sees *no need*
> whatsoever for the integration. Why try to integrate science and
> Santa Claus?"
A good many people bemoan the demise of the Great Chain. But if they
want it, then they can find it where it was first created - in prior
values and "intuitions", not in science.
>
>
> Ken Wilber, _The Marriage of Sense and Soul_, p. 18-20
>
>
> Comments?
>
>
> --dk...@cris.com
>
>
> P.S. Nowhere in the book does Wilber advocate a Creator God nor an
> Intelligent Designer. He quite clearly doesn't believe in one. The
> merged point of view is: religion as a mode of perception and being
> (the Eastern view) merged with rationality and empiricism (the Western
> view).
Another overdrawn and meaningless distinction. The first materialists
lived in the Indus valley...
--
John Wilkins
john...@wilkins.id.au http://www.wilkins.id.au
"Men mark it when they hit, but do not mark it when they miss"
- Francis Bacon
dkomo
Like the moderns that post to t.o.? I have yet to read any post here
out of thousands that has advocated seeking an integrated knowledge of
the world -- using all three "eyes". There are plenty of hard science
types here and plenty of skeptics, fundies, loons and nitwits -- each
with a parochial view of the world. There is lots of denigration of
philosophy and mysticism too -- dismissed as fuzzy and useless
thinking. Where are these Renaissance men of which you speak? Name a
few such who are modern intellectuals.
> And
> Whitehead was discussing things as they stood before the First World
> War. Things have changed, and even then it was not the entire truth.
> >
Yeah, things have gotten worse. Today there are the armed camps of
science, New Age believers, and religious fundamentalists, and the
vast silent majority who don't care about any of it.
> > "The real difficulty, then, is not showing how empiricism, rationalism
> > and mysticism can all fit together in the Great Chain of Being; it is
> > not showing how they can all be harmoniously integrated in a great
> > spectrum of consciousness; it is not demonstrating that such a
> > synthesis is coherent and complete. For *that*, in a sense, is the
> > easy part. The hard part is that modernity *does not accept the
> > higher levels themselves* (the transmental, transrational,
> > transpersonal, and contemplative modes), and thus it sees *no need*
> > whatsoever for the integration. Why try to integrate science and
> > Santa Claus?"
>
> A good many people bemoan the demise of the Great Chain. But if they
> want it, then they can find it where it was first created - in prior
> values and "intuitions", not in science.
> >
> >
> > Ken Wilber, _The Marriage of Sense and Soul_, p. 18-20
> >
> >
> > Comments?
> >
> >
> > --dk...@cris.com
> >
> >
> > P.S. Nowhere in the book does Wilber advocate a Creator God nor an
> > Intelligent Designer. He quite clearly doesn't believe in one. The
> > merged point of view is: religion as a mode of perception and being
> > (the Eastern view) merged with rationality and empiricism (the Western
> > view).
>
> Another overdrawn and meaningless distinction. The first materialists
> lived in the Indus valley...
It's not a meaningless distinction to point out that 99% of religious
discussions here are about a God who is something Other, something
outside of and apart from nature, a kind of cosmic operations
director. These discussions are endless and they are always about
belief systems. I find it amusing that people seem to be completely
unaware that there is an entirely different way to approach religion
-- as "perception and being (the Eastern view)."
Craig Franck
> "Modernity recognizes only the eye of reason yoked to the eye of flesh
> -- in Whitehead's phrase, the dominant world-view of modernity is
> *scientific materialism*, and whether that science be the holistic
> science of systems theory or the subatomic physics of quantum events,
> science is the eye of reason linked to evidence offered by the
> empirical senses. In no case is the eye of contemplation or the eye
> of Spirit required...or even allowed."
> Ken Wilber, _The Marriage of Sense and Soul_, p. 18-20
Of course, this view is only held by a minority, but it is in fact the
dominant trend, that which is unique to our time.
I know at least half a dozen pagans, an astrologer, and a nurse who
thinks Shirley MacLaine's thinking is way too mainstream, so the hard-
headed materialists are definitely in the minority. Most post-Christian
Europeans have simply traded in Christianity for some other set of
wacky ideas or cultural biases.
But when it comes to those who count, the idea that in the past, and
even today, the vast majority of people are simply projecting their
psyches onto reality and reading them back off is what distinguishes
those who are "aware," and those who are sleepwalking. The last
reputable gasp came in the 17th century when a line was drawn around
the subjective reality of the mind and what was "out there" in the
"real world." Other "modes of perception" are just amplifying the noise
and generating artifacts that don't correspond to anything in reality.
Those with some sense of the other ways of knowing realize this is
the most interesting stuff. A study of reality should be a study of what it
is to be human, not how the world works at a totally objective level.
Most anyone will admit that clearly leaves the best things out, even if
they see it as a necessary indulgence to get through life.
> P.S. Nowhere in the book does Wilber advocate a Creator God nor an
> Intelligent Designer. He quite clearly doesn't believe in one. The
> merged point of view is: religion as a mode of perception and being
> (the Eastern view) merged with rationality and empiricism (the Western
> view).
Wilber is seriously confused when it comes to evolution. "A Brief History
of Everything" has him coming off almost as a creationist with his beliefs
on how evolution works. He sees the biological world around us as
evidence that matter is spiritual which unpacks its creativity in the form of
living things. One man's statistical fallout is another man's divine directedness.
That's a fine Bergsonesque belief -- I myself subscribe to a form of process
philosophy -- but he falls into the statistical trap that reality is so improbable
that something spiritual must be going on, or we wouldn't be here. I just
see it as a valid option.
I do admit his books like "No Boundaries" are a fine alchemy of mind, spirit,
and nature. It's just his ideas on evolution are more than a bit silly.
--
Craig Franck
craig....@verizon.net
Cortland, NY
John Wilkins
Well any of the orthodox Christians here, like Stan Friesen, Mike
Siemens, Wes Elsberry, would all have to allow that revelation and
mystical introspection are legitimate sources of information and
knowledge. And all here would allow that reason is a source of knowing
things you didn't know before you reasoned.
Don't treat t.o as somehow a random sample of thinking. The world is not
composed solely of creationists and hard empiricists. And it never was.
>
> > And
> > Whitehead was discussing things as they stood before the First World
> > War. Things have changed, and even then it was not the entire truth.
> > >
>
> Yeah, things have gotten worse. Today there are the armed camps of
> science, New Age believers, and religious fundamentalists, and the
> vast silent majority who don't care about any of it.
Do you think things were ever that different? Only the names and details
change, and in some places, not even that.
And I find it amusing that people don't know that this has been a
persistent tradition of the West since at least Roman times.
Stanley Friesen
>dkomo <dkomo...@cris.com> wrote:
>> Like the moderns that post to t.o.? I have yet to read any post here
>> out of thousands that has advocated seeking an integrated knowledge of
>> the world -- using all three "eyes". There are plenty of hard science
>> types here and plenty of skeptics, fundies, loons and nitwits -- each
>> with a parochial view of the world. There is lots of denigration of
>> philosophy and mysticism too -- dismissed as fuzzy and useless
>> thinking. Where are these Renaissance men of which you speak? Name a
>> few such who are modern intellectuals.
>
>Well any of the orthodox Christians here, like Stan Friesen, Mike
>Siemens, Wes Elsberry, would all have to allow that revelation and
>mystical introspection are legitimate sources of information and
>knowledge.
Thank-you.
You saved me the trouble of tooting my own horn :-)
>>
>> Yeah, things have gotten worse. Today there are the armed camps of
>> science, New Age believers, and religious fundamentalists, and the
>> vast silent majority who don't care about any of it.
>
>Do you think things were ever that different? Only the names and details
>change, and in some places, not even that.
Well, what *does* change is the political clout of the different groups.
Right now Fundamentalists are frighteningly powerful.
The peace of God be with you.
Stanley Friesen
Craig Franck
> dkomo wrote:
>
> > John Wilkins wrote:
> > > "Modernity" is a fiction. Plenty of moderns think that knowledge of the
> > > world comes via empirical evidence and moral and spiritual knowledge
> > > comes via reflection, contemplation, meditation and ecstatic states.
> >
> > Like the moderns that post to t.o.? I have yet to read any post here
> > out of thousands that has advocated seeking an integrated knowledge of
> > the world -- using all three "eyes". There are plenty of hard science
> > types here and plenty of skeptics, fundies, loons and nitwits -- each
> > with a parochial view of the world. There is lots of denigration of
> > philosophy and mysticism too -- dismissed as fuzzy and useless
> > thinking. Where are these Renaissance men of which you speak? Name a
> > few such who are modern intellectuals.
>
> Well any of the orthodox Christians here, like Stan Friesen, Mike
> Siemens, Wes Elsberry, would all have to allow that revelation and
> mystical introspection are legitimate sources of information and
> knowledge. And all here would allow that reason is a source of knowing
> things you didn't know before you reasoned.
The quote from Ken Wilber doesn't really do justice to the major
thesis of the book. I think a better articulation of what he was trying to
say is contained in Morris Berman's "The Reenchantment of the World,"
but even that essence can't be captured in a single chapter, much less a
quote.
Both Wilber and Berman are psychological thinkers. Your statement
above is just avoiding the issue. According to Berman, Isaac Newton
himself fell victim to what Wilber was talking about. The world before
he was born and after he died was fundamentally altered due to his
contributions to science. He was as religious a person as you could
be until his last breath -- he supposedly died a virgin because the
double duty of the sexual organs repulsed him -- but in the end, he had
a mechanistic view of the world that all the belief in God couldn't erase.
The world was a mechanical one in which God may or may not exist. It
was no longer shot through with magic. It's a hard thing to try and get
across, but Stan Friesen can't be a Christian in the sense the Church
Fathers were anymore than I can be an animist the way people were
30,000 years ago. My experience of the world and myself has been
altered at an unconscious level. So you are correct; but only on the
surface.
> > > And
> > > Whitehead was discussing things as they stood before the First World
> > > War. Things have changed, and even then it was not the entire truth.
> > > >
> >
> > Yeah, things have gotten worse. Today there are the armed camps of
> > science, New Age believers, and religious fundamentalists, and the
> > vast silent majority who don't care about any of it.
>
> Do you think things were ever that different? Only the names and details
> change, and in some places, not even that.
Due to an attempt to compensate, lack of religious feelings often causes
people to be more religious. No one existing prior to the 15th century
could grasp our view of the world, much less have it.
It's a hint at the problem that most people today would consider someone
from the 10th century as having a form of mental illness. Your typical
Muslim male acting normally in most M.E. countries today is classifiable
as having a personality disorder by Western standards. Saying "My
husband won't let me go out in public without a male escort" would
probably instigate an intervention of some sort. But an abusively paranoid
male from the US is not the same as a well-adjusted Saudi, even if they
act similarly sometimes.
dkomo
>
> "John Wilkins" wrote
>
> > dkomo wrote:
> >
> > > John Wilkins wrote:
>
> > > > "Modernity" is a fiction. Plenty of moderns think that knowledge of the
> > > > world comes via empirical evidence and moral and spiritual knowledge
> > > > comes via reflection, contemplation, meditation and ecstatic states.
> > >
> > > Like the moderns that post to t.o.? I have yet to read any post here
> > > out of thousands that has advocated seeking an integrated knowledge of
> > > the world -- using all three "eyes". There are plenty of hard science
> > > types here and plenty of skeptics, fundies, loons and nitwits -- each
> > > with a parochial view of the world. There is lots of denigration of
> > > philosophy and mysticism too -- dismissed as fuzzy and useless
> > > thinking. Where are these Renaissance men of which you speak? Name a
> > > few such who are modern intellectuals.
> >
> > Well any of the orthodox Christians here, like Stan Friesen, Mike
> > Siemens, Wes Elsberry, would all have to allow that revelation and
> > mystical introspection are legitimate sources of information and
> > knowledge. And all here would allow that reason is a source of knowing
> > things you didn't know before you reasoned.
>
> The quote from Ken Wilber doesn't really do justice to the major
> thesis of the book.
Perhaps a better summary is provided in Wilber's opening paragraph in
Chapter 1:
"There is arguably no more important and pressing topic than the
relation of science and religion in the modern world. Science is
clearly one of the most profound methods that humans have yet devised
for discovering *truth*, while religion remains the single greatest
force for generating *meaning*. Truth and meaning, science and
religion; but we still cannot figure out how to get the two of them
together in a fashion that *both* find acceptable."
I also like this paragraph:
"The disgust is mutual, because modern science gleefully denies
virtually all of the basic tenets of religion in general. According
to the typical view of modern science, religion is not much more than
a holdover from the childhood of humanity, with about as much reality
as, say, Santa Claus. Whether the religious claims are more literal
(Moses parted the Red Sea) or more mystical (religion involves direct
spiritual experience), modern science denies them all, simply because
there is no credible empirical evidence for any of them."
And this one:
"So here is the utterly bizarre structure of today's world: a
scientific framework that is global in its reach and omnipresent in
its information and communication networks, forms a meaningless
skeleton within which hundreds of subglobal, premodern religions
create value and meaning for billions: and they each -- scinece and
religion --tend to deny significance, even reality, to the other.
This is a massive and violent schism and rupture in the internal
organs of today's global culture, and this is exactly why many social
analysts believe that if some sort of reconciliation between science
and religion is not forthcoming, the future of humanity is, at best,
precarious."
Nivlem
dkomo wrote:
I dunno guys. Your quotes from this Ken Wilbur fellow strike me as
utterly fatuous. Another New-Age dickhead spewing out lofty phrases
empty of actual information, fooling the rubes, and making a tidy
living. He isn't a thinker, unless your idea of a philosopher would
include Norman Vincent Peale. I'll have to pass on buying Wilbur's tracts.
Craig Franck
> I dunno guys. Your quotes from this Ken Wilbur fellow strike me as
> utterly fatuous. Another New-Age dickhead spewing out lofty phrases
> empty of actual information, fooling the rubes, and making a tidy
> living. He isn't a thinker, unless your idea of a philosopher would
> include Norman Vincent Peale. I'll have to pass on buying Wilbur's tracts.
Which completely proves his point. Your cultural conditioning has
rendered you incapable of grasping ideas that have functioned for
99.9% of human existence.
"Science is clearly one of the most profound methods that humans
have yet devised for discovering *truth*, while religion remains the
single greatest force for generating *meaning*."
Science deals with facts, religion deals with values such as personal
significance, ethics, and importance. What does fact X mean to me?
Science rarely has an answer to this question. Religion has got plenty.
"According to the typical view of modern science, religion is not
much more than a holdover from the childhood of humanity, with
about as much reality as, say, Santa Claus."
Your apparent inability to grasp the meaning of this rather simple
sentence demonstrates a profound disconnect with the current state of
affairs. This is typical of modern society. Science wins by making the
other side of the argument seem incomprehensible or meaningless.
"So here is the utterly bizarre structure of today's world: a
scientific framework that is global in its reach and omnipresent in
its information and communication networks, "
Mass media: the Internet, TV, movies, 24 hour news stations.
"forms a meaningless
skeleton within which hundreds of subglobal, premodern religions
create value and meaning for billions:"
Religious values and meanings.
"and they each -- scinece and
religion --tend to deny significance, even reality, to the other."
The parents of a kid living in rural China to whom the plot of an episode
of "Friends" would be totally incomprehensible watches as that show
contributes more to their children's life goals then they do; the resurrection
of Christ "sounds like an X-file"; not only are my parents idiots, but I
can prove they are by quoting parts of the FAQ at www.talkorigins.org,
i.e, an extreme form of culture shock, devaluation of previously held beliefs,
and a general war between the present and past. Kill Bill Volume II vs. Kill
Jesus. One has meaning, the other is senseless violence designed to entertain
rather than enlighten. (Replace entirety with whatever cultural artifacts seem
significant to you and take the view of a cultural anthropologist.)
Dan Luke
> Science deals with facts, religion deals with values such as
> personal significance, ethics, and importance. What does
> fact X mean to me? Science rarely has an answer to this
> question. Religion has got plenty.
I must ask: "so what?"
Why is any particular religious answer useful? What criteria can one use
to select an answer one can trust to be helpful in advancing his
understanding of existence?
--
Dan
(remove pants to reply by email)
catshark
<craig....@verizon.net> wrote:
[...]
> "According to the typical view of modern science, religion is not
> much more than a holdover from the childhood of humanity, with
> about as much reality as, say, Santa Claus."
>
>Your apparent inability to grasp the meaning of this rather simple
>sentence demonstrates a profound disconnect with the current state of
>affairs. This is typical of modern society. Science wins by making the
>other side of the argument seem incomprehensible or meaningless.
Where is "the typical view of modern science" to be found? Reification
does not bode well for the rest of the author's premises.
As for your separate comment about "modern society", I don't know where you
live, but here in the U.S., the side that "wins by making the other side of
the argument seem incomprehensible or meaningless" ain't science.
---------------
J. Pieret
---------------
In the name of the bee
And of the butterfly
And of the breeze, amen
- Emily Dickinson -
The Million and Wunth Monkey
and typed for a million years. Finally, one of them, ""Dan Luke"
<c17...@pantsbellsouth.net>", wrote this - but did it understand what
it had written?
Reason and intuitions.
Craig Franck
> "Craig Franck" wrote:
> > Science deals with facts, religion deals with values such as
> > personal significance, ethics, and importance. What does
> > fact X mean to me? Science rarely has an answer to this
> > question. Religion has got plenty.
>
> I must ask: "so what?"
Because most people wish their lives to be meaningful to them.
> Why is any particular religious answer useful?
It depends on the answer. Some have to do with basic psychological
health, some have to do with society in general. In my opinion, religion
"works" to the extent it helps people address certain problems that
permeate the human condition.
> What criteria can one use
> to select an answer one can trust to be helpful in advancing his
> understanding of existence?
I personally use the work of Abraham Maslow WRT human needs and
motivation, and Karen Horney's ideas on human growth and neurosis, but
any system which addressed the same aspects of human living could be
useful. Some are more religious than others, some not religious at all.
Some, as above, are rationalistic in the same sense science is, it's just the
problem domain doesn't lend itself to scientific analysis as generally
conceived.
Nivlem
Craig Franck wrote:
>"Nivlem" wrote
>
>
>
>>I dunno guys. Your quotes from this Ken Wilbur fellow strike me as
>>utterly fatuous. Another New-Age dickhead spewing out lofty phrases
>>empty of actual information, fooling the rubes, and making a tidy
>>living. He isn't a thinker, unless your idea of a philosopher would
>>include Norman Vincent Peale. I'll have to pass on buying Wilbur's tracts.
>>
>>
>
>Which completely proves his point. Your cultural conditioning has
>rendered you incapable of grasping ideas that have functioned for
>99.9% of human existence.
>
I grasp them. Unfortunately, I grasp them too well. When you understand
the underpinnings of a religious belief, it always looks quite silly.
What I cannot grasp is the mindset of those who want to be fooled. Here
in America, most cultural conditioning would in fact push you toward
belief. "In God We Trust" on the coinage, Promise Keepers rallys,
"Touched by an Angel" on the tube for several years., etc., etc. Not to
mention the various sorts of hippy mysticism my own community is awash in.
>
> "Science is clearly one of the most profound methods that humans
> have yet devised for discovering *truth*, while religion remains the
> single greatest force for generating *meaning*."
>
>Science deals with facts, religion deals with values such as personal
>significance, ethics, and importance. What does fact X mean to me?
>Science rarely has an answer to this question. Religion has got plenty.
>
And most answers generated by religion are irrational and utterly
invalid, or can be arrived at via methods other than religion.
Religiosity remains the hobgoblin of second-rate intellects and the
miseducated, I'm afraid..
>
> "According to the typical view of modern science, religion is not
> much more than a holdover from the childhood of humanity, with
> about as much reality as, say, Santa Claus."
>
>Your apparent inability to grasp the meaning of this rather simple
>sentence demonstrates a profound disconnect with the current state of
>affairs. This is typical of modern society. Science wins by making the
>other side of the argument seem incomprehensible or meaningless.
>
Which it is. I understood the above Wilbur quote, and agree with it,
which he does not. Elsewhere, Wilbur is quoted on evolution. That quote
makes clear that he has no understanding of science, or wants to play to
the crowd that hath no understanding. I can't decide which is worse.
>
> "So here is the utterly bizarre structure of today's world: a
> scientific framework that is global in its reach and omnipresent in
> its information and communication networks, "
>
>Mass media: the Internet, TV, movies, 24 hour news stations.
>
Nothing particularly bizarre about it. You can take a TV to Pakistan.
You cannot change the fact that a Pakistani is illiterate and still
believes the world is flat with near such ease. There will always be
people who can't, or don't want to adapt their worldview to the state of
present knowledge. The numbers of such people need to be greatly reduced
by the most strenuous efforts to educate them, if human life is to
survive on this planet. Nuclear weapons are very dangerous things in the
hands of moderns, much less religious fanatics who essentially are
living in the world of 1300 AD. Wilbur just said a whole bunch of
nothing there.
>
> "forms a meaningless
> skeleton within which hundreds of subglobal, premodern religions
> create value and meaning for billions:"
>
>Religious values and meanings.
>
>
Religious nonsense.
> "and they each -- scinece and
> religion --tend to deny significance, even reality, to the other."
>
>The parents of a kid living in rural China to whom the plot of an episode
>of "Friends" would be totally incomprehensible watches as that show
>contributes more to their children's life goals then they do; the resurrection
>of Christ "sounds like an X-file"; not only are my parents idiots, but I
>can prove they are by quoting parts of the FAQ at www.talkorigins.org,
>i.e, an extreme form of culture shock, devaluation of previously held beliefs,
>and a general war between the present and past. Kill Bill Volume II vs. Kill
>Jesus. One has meaning, the other is senseless violence designed to entertain
>rather than enlighten. (Replace entirety with whatever cultural artifacts seem
>significant to you and take the view of a cultural anthropologist.)
>
Well, if you're making a reference to "The Passion of Christ" here, it's
theologically shaky, more violent than need be, and largely about making
money. I don't think a comparison to Kill Bill is at all inapt.
>
>
>
dkomo
>
> "Craig Franck" wrote:
> > Science deals with facts, religion deals with values such as
> > personal significance, ethics, and importance. What does
> > fact X mean to me? Science rarely has an answer to this
> > question. Religion has got plenty.
>
> I must ask: "so what?"
>
If you were half blind all your life and were given the opportunity to
suddenly see with both eyes, would you say "so what?"
> Why is any particular religious answer useful? What criteria can one use
> to select an answer one can trust to be helpful in advancing his
> understanding of existence?
>
I don't like using the word religion because it has so many pejorative
connotations. "Spiritual" is a bit closer to what Wilber is really
talking about, but that word too has negative connotations. However,
since I quoted Wilber and the term religion was used extensively,
let's stick with it, but keep in mind that we're not talking about
particular supernatural belief systems but modes of perception, or as
Wilber would say, the eye of contemplation (mysticism).
Wilber has extensively addressed the question you're asking -- which
is, how do we verify trancendental states of consciousness and the
insights gained therein?
He says:
"But can it be verified?"
"To escape from scientism or exclusive empiricism is simply to realize
that empiric knowledge is not the only form of knowledge; there exists
beyond it mental-rational knowledge and contemplative-spiritual
knowledge. But if that is so, then can these "higher" forms of
knowledge be verified? If there is no empirical proof, what is left?"
"This seems to be a problem because we do not see that all valid
knowledge is essentially similar in structure, and thus can be
similarly verified (or rejected). That is, all valid knowledge -- in
whatever realm -- consists of three basic components, which we will
call injunction, illumination, and confirmation...In essence we will
simply suggest that all *valid knowledge* -- in whatever realm --
consists most fundamentally of these basic components:
1. An instrumental or injunctive strand. This is a set of
instructions, simple or complex, internal or external. All have the
form: 'If you want to know this, do this.'
2. An illuminative or apprehensive strand. This is an illuminative
seeing by the particular eye of knowledge [the eye of flesh
(empiricism), the eye of mind (rationalism), and the eye of
contemplation (mysticism)] evoked by the injunctive strand. Besides
being self-illuminative, it leads to the possibility of:
3. A communal strand. This is the actual sharing of the illuminative
seeing with others who are using the same eye. If the shared vision
is agreed upon by others, this constitutes a communal or consensual
proof of *true seeing*."
"Knowledge in the transcendent realm is gained in precisely the same
way: it has an injunction, an illumination, and a confirmation. In
Zen: zazen, satori, and imprimatur. There is no Zen without *all
three strands*; there is, in fact, no real esoteric or transcendent
knowledge without all three."
Ken Wilber, _Eye to Eye: The Quest for a New Paradigm_,
p. 29 - 31
In the next chapter "The Problem of Proof" in this book, Wilber goes
into a lot more detail about verification within the many different
types of "sciences". He has a breathtakenly comprehensive view
regarding legitimate areas of human inquiry:
"That being so, then we could legitimately speak, not only of the
science of sensibilia -- physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy,
geology -- but also the science of intelligibilia -- linguistics,
mathematics, experimental phenomenology, introspective and
interpersonal psychology, historic-hermeneutics, logic, interpretive
sociology, communicative philosophy -- and the science of
trasncendelia -- openly experimental and contemplative disciplines,
such as Zen, Vedanta, Vajrayana, mystical Christianity and Judaism,
and so on."
dkomo
Agreed. But we really haven't been talking about religion in the
vernacular sense in the Wilber quotes, although the word religion has
appeared quite a lot. You've failed to make the connection that we're
not advocating supernatural belief systems. If I did, I would appear
pretty ridiculous since I've stated on other occasions that I'm a
strong atheist. I don't believe in creator gods or intelligent
designers.
> >
> > "According to the typical view of modern science, religion is not
> > much more than a holdover from the childhood of humanity, with
> > about as much reality as, say, Santa Claus."
> >
> >Your apparent inability to grasp the meaning of this rather simple
> >sentence demonstrates a profound disconnect with the current state of
> >affairs. This is typical of modern society. Science wins by making the
> >other side of the argument seem incomprehensible or meaningless.
> >
>
> Which it is. I understood the above Wilbur quote, and agree with it,
> which he does not. Elsewhere, Wilbur is quoted on evolution. That quote
> makes clear that he has no understanding of science, or wants to play to
> the crowd that hath no understanding. I can't decide which is worse.
>
Actually, Wilber has a degree in chemistry if I'm not mistaken, but I
agree he sort of misses the boat on evolution. But I think that has
nothing to do with the ideas he's presenting about the three eyes of
knowledge.
I think you need to take your own blinders off. Extreme skepticism
can be as blind and misleading as anything else. You're so
anti-religion and anti-New Age that you miss a lot of stuff that
appears promising.
Gary Bohn
"dkomo" <dkomo...@cris.com> wrote in message
news:4070F72F...@cris.com...
Could you please tell me what New Age stuff looks promising?
--
Conservatism is not about tradition and morality, hasn't been for many
decades...It is about the putative biological and spiritual superiority of
the wealthy.
Greg Bear
Gary Bohn
Craig Franck
> Craig Franck wrote:
>
> >"Nivlem" wrote
> >
> >>I dunno guys. Your quotes from this Ken Wilbur fellow strike me as
> >>utterly fatuous. Another New-Age dickhead spewing out lofty phrases
> >>empty of actual information, fooling the rubes, and making a tidy
> >>living. He isn't a thinker, unless your idea of a philosopher would
> >>include Norman Vincent Peale. I'll have to pass on buying Wilbur's tracts.
> >
> >Which completely proves his point. Your cultural conditioning has
> >rendered you incapable of grasping ideas that have functioned for
> >99.9% of human existence.
>
> I grasp them. Unfortunately, I grasp them too well. When you understand
> the underpinnings of a religious belief, it always looks quite silly.
I don't agree. Read James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience." What
I think you object to is the cartoonish parody that much of organized
religion in the West has had to offer. The thesis of the book is there is a
subset of experiences one could regard as religious, and they are interpreted
in the context of the culture in which they occur: silly culture, silly religion.
> What I cannot grasp is the mindset of those who want to be fooled. Here
> in America, most cultural conditioning would in fact push you toward
> belief. "In God We Trust" on the coinage, Promise Keepers rallys,
> "Touched by an Angel" on the tube for several years., etc., etc. Not to
> mention the various sorts of hippy mysticism my own community is awash in.
I don't get much of the Jesus stuff myself. As a philosophy of life,
I suppose it's fine, but the messianic demigod component strikes me
as beyond absurd.
> >
> > "Science is clearly one of the most profound methods that humans
> > have yet devised for discovering *truth*, while religion remains the
> > single greatest force for generating *meaning*."
> >
> >Science deals with facts, religion deals with values such as personal
> >significance, ethics, and importance. What does fact X mean to me?
> >Science rarely has an answer to this question. Religion has got plenty.
> >
>
> And most answers generated by religion are irrational and utterly
> invalid, or can be arrived at via methods other than religion.
> Religiosity remains the hobgoblin of second-rate intellects and the
> miseducated, I'm afraid..
I'm sorry you feel that way. I hope you check out William James'
book I mentioned above.
> >
> > "According to the typical view of modern science, religion is not
> > much more than a holdover from the childhood of humanity, with
> > about as much reality as, say, Santa Claus."
> >
> >Your apparent inability to grasp the meaning of this rather simple
> >sentence demonstrates a profound disconnect with the current state of
> >affairs. This is typical of modern society. Science wins by making the
> >other side of the argument seem incomprehensible or meaningless.
> >
>
> Which it is. I understood the above Wilbur quote, and agree with it,
> which he does not. Elsewhere, Wilbur is quoted on evolution. That quote
> makes clear that he has no understanding of science, or wants to play to
> the crowd that hath no understanding. I can't decide which is worse.
I admit he's totally confused about evolution.
> >
> > "forms a meaningless
> > skeleton within which hundreds of subglobal, premodern religions
> > create value and meaning for billions:"
> >
> >Religious values and meanings.
> >
>
> Religious nonsense.
The idea that a Deity actually cares about what us humans do may be
nonsense, but most religious values do reflect society's general outlook
to one degree or another.
The Million and Wunth Monkey
<craig....@verizon.net>", wrote this - but did it understand what
it had written?
Strange combination, recommending William James on the one hand and
dismissing the idea that deity might care about us on the other. After
all, _The Varieties of Religious Experience_ became a bit of a fad in
the '60's when everyone was exploring "the world within their own
heads". The subjective is hugely important: not merely as a
philosophical curiosity; the fact that we feel consciously makes our
minds significant (there are probably other features that do so too!)
It really does matter if I inflict needless suffering on you. The
moral imperative springs into action telling me not to do it. You can
throw the lot out of course, finally denying that experiences are real
at all. But if you go by any of the subjective evidence, what goes on
in our minds really does matter. It would make sense for a deity to be
more concerned with the the mental condition of a sparrow than with
sitting around all day admiring its handiwork in the shape of complex
(yawn!) slowly churning wisps of congealed space-time. Galaxies
impress *us* because they're bigger than us. And they're pretty cool
things too. But a god is likely to *care* a lot more about minds, not
things.
Dan Luke
"The Million and Wunth Monkey" wrote:
> But a god is likely to *care* a lot more about minds, not
> things.
I can think of absolutely no reason to believe a god is likely to care
more about one thing than another.
Derek Potter
<c17...@pantsbellsouth.net>", wrote this - but did it understand what
it had written?
>
>"The Million and Wunth Monkey" wrote:
>> But a god is likely to *care* a lot more about minds, not
>> things.
>
>I can think of absolutely no reason to believe a god is likely to care
>more about one thing than another.
Are you informing us that you have a mental defect preventing you from
thinking certain things or are you just introducing the Argument from
Incredulity? Or maybe you think your opinions deserve to be accepted
without giving a reason? That's the Argument from Authority with a
subtle twist - you aren't an authority.
darth_versive
>
> "The disgust is mutual, because modern science gleefully denies
> virtually all of the basic tenets of religion in general. According
> to the typical view of modern science, religion is not much more than
> a holdover from the childhood of humanity, with about as much reality
> as, say, Santa Claus. Whether the religious claims are more literal
> (Moses parted the Red Sea) or more mystical (religion involves direct
> spiritual experience), modern science denies them all, simply because
> there is no credible empirical evidence for any of them."
Science is metaphysically neutral. Therefore, it doesn't "gleefully
deny" the basic tenets of *any* religion. Such an activity is beyond
its scope.
Perhaps Wilber was wrongfully using the term "science" when he should
instead have used the term "metaphysical naturalism." Many scientists
are, after all, religious themselves.
> And this one:
>
> "So here is the utterly bizarre structure of today's world: a
> scientific framework that is global in its reach and omnipresent in
> its information and communication networks, forms a meaningless
> skeleton within which hundreds of subglobal, premodern religions
> create value and meaning for billions: and they each -- scinece and
> religion --tend to deny significance, even reality, to the other.
> This is a massive and violent schism and rupture in the internal
> organs of today's global culture, and this is exactly why many social
> analysts believe that if some sort of reconciliation between science
> and religion is not forthcoming, the future of humanity is, at best,
> precarious."
Metaphysical naturalism, unlike science, *does* deal with issues of
meaning. Perhaps Wilber doesn't understand metaphysical naturalism as
a philosophical system, or he just doesn't understand what science is,
and the difference between them. Or maybe he just likes creating
dichotomies where none really exist, for the sake of stimulating
controversy. Or maybe he's just pandering to popular misconceptions
about the nature of science. Whatever the case, his categorizing of
things in this manner does seem to sell books. (But then again, the
Bible sells very well too, so this is no testimony to the value of his
ideas.)
DV
dkomo
>
> dkomo <dkomo...@cris.com> wrote in message
>
> > I also like this paragraph:
> >
> > "The disgust is mutual, because modern science gleefully denies
> > virtually all of the basic tenets of religion in general. According
> > to the typical view of modern science, religion is not much more than
> > a holdover from the childhood of humanity, with about as much reality
> > as, say, Santa Claus. Whether the religious claims are more literal
> > (Moses parted the Red Sea) or more mystical (religion involves direct
> > spiritual experience), modern science denies them all, simply because
> > there is no credible empirical evidence for any of them."
>
> Science is metaphysically neutral.
No it's not. The key statement Wilber makes is "...modern science
denies them all, simply because there is no credible empirical
evidence for any of them."
The scientific position is if there's no physical evidence for the
claim for the existence of God, there's no reason to suppose there is
one.
I know that people will say, well, but you haven't *disproven* that
God exists, so you must allow for the possibility.
Bollocks to that. The counter argument to that is the pink unicorn
example. Throw in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny for good measure.
And while you're at it, throw in Hobbits, Elves and Dwarves. And
Satan. And Sauron. And Archangels. And so on.
Science is not metaphysically neutral when it comes to empirical
evidence for claims.
> Therefore, it doesn't "gleefully
> deny" the basic tenets of *any* religion. Such an activity is beyond
> its scope.
>
Good grief. You're being too literal. Wilber is using metaphors to
enliven his arguments. How can science be "gleeful?" It isn't even
alive. But the people that value science are alive. What are their
attitudes toward orthodox religion? Educated moderns generally snicker
at religion. Do you deny it?
Craig Franck
> Science is metaphysically neutral.
This has repeatedly been demonstrated to be false. Science assumes
representational realism. I agree this might be the default, common sense
assumption about reality, but it is not metaphysically neutral any more
than Euclidean space is geometrically neutral.
> Therefore, it doesn't "gleefully
> deny" the basic tenets of *any* religion. Such an activity is beyond
> its scope.
Ken Wilber and similar writers can be difficult to get the first few times
through. What he means is the attitude "If you wish to do X, stop
thinking religiously" flies in the face of much previous thinking. It totally
disrupts the union of man, nature, and God.
And it's not just religion. Science moving from Aristotelism to Baconism
represented an equally profound shift in thinking.
> Perhaps Wilber was wrongfully using the term "science" when he should
> instead have used the term "metaphysical naturalism." Many scientists
> are, after all, religious themselves.
That would be clearer to many people who populate T.O.
> Metaphysical naturalism, unlike science, *does* deal with issues of
> meaning. Perhaps Wilber doesn't understand metaphysical naturalism as
> a philosophical system, or he just doesn't understand what science is,
> and the difference between them. Or maybe he just likes creating
> dichotomies where none really exist, for the sake of stimulating
> controversy. Or maybe he's just pandering to popular misconceptions
> about the nature of science.
I don't think that is a fair characterization. I think what it means is
people have become so alienated to archaic tradition that they can't
see what Wilber is talking about. "Folk reality" is strongly
anthropomorphic. What he is suggesting is a return to that without
all the childlike projection.
Derek Potter
<dkomo...@cris.com>", wrote this - but did it understand what it
had written?
>darth_versive wrote:
>>
>> dkomo <dkomo...@cris.com> wrote in message
>>
>> > I also like this paragraph:
>> >
>> > "The disgust is mutual, because modern science gleefully denies
>> > virtually all of the basic tenets of religion in general. According
>> > to the typical view of modern science, religion is not much more than
>> > a holdover from the childhood of humanity, with about as much reality
>> > as, say, Santa Claus. Whether the religious claims are more literal
>> > (Moses parted the Red Sea) or more mystical (religion involves direct
>> > spiritual experience), modern science denies them all, simply because
>> > there is no credible empirical evidence for any of them."
>>
>> Science is metaphysically neutral.
>
>No it's not. The key statement Wilber makes is "...modern science
>denies them all, simply because there is no credible empirical
>evidence for any of them."
Then this Wilber fellow is wrong.
>The scientific position is if there's no physical evidence for the
>claim for the existence of God, there's no reason to suppose there is
>one.
Incorrect. Science takes no position on things it cannot address.
>I know that people will say, well, but you haven't *disproven* that
>God exists, so you must allow for the possibility.
>
>Bollocks to that. The counter argument to that is the pink unicorn
>example. Throw in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny for good measure.
>And while you're at it, throw in Hobbits, Elves and Dwarves. And
>Satan. And Sauron. And Archangels. And so on.
Strawman. The counter argument is not that you haven't disproved that
God exists, the counter argument is there is perfectly good evidence
of a non-empirical nature.
"Bollocks to that" is a fine argument, but it doesn't properly address
the question of assessing other types of evidence.
On the other hand it *does* illustrate a common fallacy: "I won't
accept anything other than empirical evidence, therefore nothing else
exists."
>Science is not metaphysically neutral when it comes to empirical
>evidence for claims.
That would depend on whether the claim predicts empirical evidence. If
it doesn't it cannot be investigated by science.
>> Therefore, it doesn't "gleefully
>> deny" the basic tenets of *any* religion. Such an activity is beyond
>> its scope.
>>
>
>Good grief. You're being too literal. Wilber is using metaphors to
>enliven his arguments. How can science be "gleeful?" It isn't even
>alive. But the people that value science are alive. What are their
>attitudes toward orthodox religion?
Physicists - a large proportion of theists, biologists - considerably
smaller. Guess why.
>Educated moderns generally snicker at religion. Do you deny it?
On the whole it's just ill-informed bigots who snicker. I would agree
that modern education produces a lot of ill-informed bigots.
Derek Potter
<craig....@verizon.net>", wrote this - but did it understand what
it had written?
>"darth_versive" wrote
>
>> Science is metaphysically neutral.
>
>This has repeatedly been demonstrated to be false. Science assumes
>representational realism. I agree this might be the default, common sense
>assumption about reality, but it is not metaphysically neutral any more
>than Euclidean space is geometrically neutral.
OK, Euclidean geometry was believed to have redundancy until
Reimann(?) showed that all the axioms were necessary after all. Thus,
other, equally valid geometries were discovered. You analogy would
therefore suggest that by looking closely at science one might
discover other, equally valid, modes of insight currently excluded
from science.
But would the result be "Euclid" or "geometry"? :)
I believe the statement "Science is metaphysically neutral" was
intended to refer to science's being unable to comment one way or
another on metaphysical matters, having restricted itself to a single
methodology. To discover whether spiritual insight is valid using
science would be like trying to study GR using Euclid. You can't even
start. I think that's what "metaphysically neutral" meant, not that
science doesn't have a methodology which can be cast as a metaphysical
proposition ("the world exists and can be modelled") but that it
doesn't have the tools to make further metaphysical pronouncements.
< snip lots about Wilber :) >
John Wilkins
> "darth_versive" wrote
>
> > Science is metaphysically neutral.
>
> This has repeatedly been demonstrated to be false. Science assumes
> representational realism. I agree this might be the default, common sense
> assumption about reality, but it is not metaphysically neutral any more
> than Euclidean space is geometrically neutral.
Is this true, though? Putnam and van Fraassen have denied that science
must be realist about its assumptions and ontologies. While Hacking and
the New Experimentalists agree science is representational, the
representations are instrumental and pragmatist. For any metaphysical
stance, I can find a philosopher of science to support it. From this I
conclude either that all philosophers of science speak bullshit, or that
science is metaphysically neutral, and we know (I have proved it in a
margin) that philosophersof science do not speak bullshit. Not entirely.
>
> > Therefore, it doesn't "gleefully
> > deny" the basic tenets of *any* religion. Such an activity is beyond
> > its scope.
>
> Ken Wilber and similar writers can be difficult to get the first few times
> through. What he means is the attitude "If you wish to do X, stop
> thinking religiously" flies in the face of much previous thinking. It totally
> disrupts the union of man, nature, and God.
>
> And it's not just religion. Science moving from Aristotelism to Baconism
> represented an equally profound shift in thinking.
Well, arguably the Baconism was Roger's not Francis's, and more
arguably, Bacon's ideas did not affect actual science all that much (but
Locke's did*) - he was honoured more by citation than compliance.
Moreover, the profound shift was from use of authority to use of
experimental evidence and observation. There was good observation in the
middle ages (one of the emperors was a keen ornithologist, for example).
I tend to think that the shift was more in line with educational reforms
than philosophical, but what *did* cause a change in worldview was the
shaking up of things with the republication of Hermetic and neo-Platonic
literature by Cusa under the Medicis; this gave people license to think
things that were not previously considered live options under the
Aristotelian scholasticism.
Nevertheless, a more probable influence on experimentalism was alchemy.
This was entirely hands-on - there was no actual theory to conform to
(alchemical symbolism is extremely fluid, and can accommodate almost
anything). So I reject the usual historical scheme that Bacon changed
much. He was a figurehead, that's all. He gave it a name, but he was
well within the debates of his day - see, for example, this wonderful
and interesting book:
Slaughter, Mary M. 1982. Universal languages and scientific taxonomy in
the seventeenth century. Cambridge UK; New York: Cambridge University
Press.
>
> > Perhaps Wilber was wrongfully using the term "science" when he should
> > instead have used the term "metaphysical naturalism." Many scientists
> > are, after all, religious themselves.
>
> That would be clearer to many people who populate T.O.
>
> > Metaphysical naturalism, unlike science, *does* deal with issues of
> > meaning. Perhaps Wilber doesn't understand metaphysical naturalism as
> > a philosophical system, or he just doesn't understand what science is,
> > and the difference between them. Or maybe he just likes creating
> > dichotomies where none really exist, for the sake of stimulating
> > controversy. Or maybe he's just pandering to popular misconceptions
> > about the nature of science.
>
> I don't think that is a fair characterization. I think what it means is
> people have become so alienated to archaic tradition that they can't
> see what Wilber is talking about. "Folk reality" is strongly
> anthropomorphic. What he is suggesting is a return to that without
> all the childlike projection.
What he is talking about, from what has been said here, is simply
Wilfred Sellars's "manifest image":
"The manifest image of man-in-the-world can be characterized [as]... the
framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as
man-in-the-world", p6
And it is, from my PoV, simply a fiction (something Sellars effectively
admits, although he thinks it is a useful fiction, rather like the
social contract). We never had such a "folk reality" - it has always
been overlaid by cultural variants. Folk psychology is the nearest we
can get to a default view, and it is not a series of propositions by a
number of standard tendencies. Every time someone talks about a "naive
metaphysics" or "perennial philosophy" they are simply yearning for a
return to some [idealised] earlier set of cultural beliefs. And there is
no single set of such beliefs. There is no "eastern wisdom" or "wisdom
of the ancients" or "wisdom of the natives" or whatever; there are just
an ensemble of many different cultural beliefs that can only be rammed
together in a fictional construction.
We have a number of tendencies, as I said - they include the tendency to
be essentialistic, to anthropomorphise unintentional reality, to
overestimate risks in some cases and underestimate them in others. But
there is simply no default metaphysics.
Sellars, Wilfred. 1962. Philosophy and the scientific image of man. In
Frontiers of science and philosophy, edited by R. Colodny. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press.
* This is a pune, or play on words. Locke's idea of ideas influenced the
rise of empiricism and idealism both, and ultimately the positivists.
Stanley Friesen
>
>The scientific position is if there's no physical evidence for the
>claim for the existence of God, there's no reason to suppose there is
>one.
*Within* *science* this is true. It lays no such restriction on
personal beliefs.
>
>I know that people will say, well, but you haven't *disproven* that
>God exists, so you must allow for the possibility.
>
>Bollocks to that. The counter argument to that is the pink unicorn
>example. Throw in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny for good measure.
>And while you're at it, throw in Hobbits, Elves and Dwarves. And
>Satan. And Sauron. And Archangels. And so on.
>
>Science is not metaphysically neutral when it comes to empirical
>evidence for claims.
True - which is why the *wise* religious person makes no claim about
*empirical* evidence. In the absence of an objective claim, science has
no statement to make.
Michael Siemon
john...@wilkins.id.au (John Wilkins) wrote:
> Craig Franck <craig....@verizon.net> wrote:
....
> > And it's not just religion. Science moving from Aristotelism to Baconism
> > represented an equally profound shift in thinking.
>
> Well, arguably the Baconism was Roger's not Francis's, and more
> arguably, Bacon's ideas did not affect actual science all that much (but
> Locke's did*) - he was honoured more by citation than compliance.
What John said.
"Baconism" is bullshit. The only productive scientist I've ever heard
of who was consciously "Baconian" was Boyle -- not a great assemblage
of testimony, eh? Whewell gave Bacon a boost by nodding in Bacon's
direction (_Novum Oragnum Renovatum_) and billing his theory of
consilience as an "updated" Baconism -- but I don't think that is an
accurate statement of the history. Bacon didn't understand enough
about theory to have a _clue_ about any aspect of it, let alone as
sophisticated a notion as consilience (or much of anything else, IMO).
Bacon's _Essays_ are clean, even brilliant, English prose, and worthy
of study and imitation for that -- but they are basically superficial
blather, at their base; and that is true of his "philosophy of science"
as well.
Dan Luke
> >I can think of absolutely no reason to believe a god is likely to
care
> >more about one thing than another.
>
> Are you informing us that you have a mental defect preventing
> you from thinking certain things or are you just introducing the
> Argument from Incredulity?
Have you got any more gloomy choices to offer me?
> Or maybe you think your opinions deserve to be accepted
> without giving a reason?
What opinion? I have no opinion about what a god might think - that's
the point, you see.
> That's the Argument from Authority with a
> subtle twist - you aren't an authority.
I guess one would have to be a god to be an authority, hmm?
Derek Potter
and typed for a million years. Finally, one of them, ""Dan Luke"
<c17...@pantsbellsouth.net>", wrote this - but did it understand what
it had written?
>"Derek Potter" wrote:
>> >I can think of absolutely no reason to believe a god is likely to
>care
>> >more about one thing than another.
>>
>> Are you informing us that you have a mental defect preventing
>> you from thinking certain things or are you just introducing the
>> Argument from Incredulity?
>
>Have you got any more gloomy choices to offer me?
I could certainly enumerate a few more but the ones I've suggested are
the least unkind that I could think of.
>> Or maybe you think your opinions deserve to be accepted
>> without giving a reason?
>
>What opinion? I have no opinion about what a god might think - that's
>the point, you see.
Well, no I don't see. Mainly because you haven't said why you have no
opinions.
Bear in mind that Igave some reasons why a god might care more about
us than about a galaxy. You snipped them and said you could think of
no reasons.
>> That's the Argument from Authority with a
>> subtle twist - you aren't an authority.
>
>I guess one would have to be a god to be an authority, hmm?
Before we go on, please define "god" so I can understand why you'd
have to be one to know one. Oh, and *do* make it something that most
people would agree describes a god or we'll be in Humpty-Dumpty land.
dkomo
Actually, I'm agreeing with Wilber that there is perfectly good
evidence of an *empirical* but non-objective, and non-scientific
nature. Remember the three eyes? There appears to be a large amount
of quite interesting evidence about the fundamental nature of the
universe which can be obtained through the eye of
contemplation/mysticism. And this evidence is *verifiable* according
to the schema Wilber has put forth.
You should read his book, _Eye to Eye_. I think you'll agree with
much of it. The argument we're having here in this thread is about
the limits of what science can know regarding Reality, and whether
science is arrogantly denying the validity of other types of
knowledge.
Unfortunately, as interesting as this has gotten, I'm leaving for a
holiday early tomorrow morning and will be gone for a week and a half.
catshark
wrote:
You just said that this "other type" of knowledge is non-scientific.
Obviously, then, it has to be rejected *within* science. That isn't
arrogance. And I know of no movement by scientists at large to go outside
of science and attack religion or other metaphysical systems.
I think what you are complaining of is the fact that science is recognized
by many people as a more successful "truth" seeking methodology than
systems such as Wilbur's. The solution is for such metaphysical systems to
succeed in showing those people that their evidence about the fundamental
nature of the universe is as or more reliable than science's.
>
>Unfortunately, as interesting as this has gotten, I'm leaving for a
>holiday early tomorrow morning and will be gone for a week and a half.
Have a good time.
[...]
Derek Potter
<cats...@yahoo.com>", wrote this - but did it understand what it had
written?
>You just said that this "other type" of knowledge is non-scientific.
>Obviously, then, it has to be rejected *within* science. That isn't
>arrogance. And I know of no movement by scientists at large to go outside
>of science and attack religion or other metaphysical systems.
Polymer Chemists Against Mysticism.
Dan Luke
"Derek Potter" wrote:
[snip]
> >What opinion? I have no opinion about what a god might think -
that's
> >the point, you see.
>
> Well, no I don't see. Mainly because you haven't said why you have no
> opinions.
>
> Bear in mind that Igave some reasons why a god might care more about
> us than about a galaxy. You snipped them and said you could think of
> no reasons.
Very well, let's un-snip and look for your reasons:
[ The subjective is hugely important: not merely as a philosophical
[ curiosity; the fact that we feel consciously makes our minds
[ significant
You don't give any reason why this should be so to "a god."
[ (there are probably other features that do so too!)
Groovy!
[ It really does matter if I inflict needless suffering on you.
Maybe to you and me; why to "a god?"
[ The moral imperative springs into action telling me not to do it.
[ You can throw the lot out of course, finally denying that
[ experiences are real at all. But if you go by any of the subjective
[ evidence, what goes on in our minds really does matter.
You haven't given any reason why "what goes on in our minds really does
matter" more than anything else to a god.
[ It would make sense for a deity to be more concerned with
[ the the mental condition of a sparrow than with sitting
[ around all day admiring its handiwork in the shape of complex
[ (yawn!) slowly churning wisps of congealed space-time.
Why?
[ Galaxies impress *us* because they're bigger than us.
[ And they're pretty cool things too. But a god is likely to *care*
[ a lot more about minds, not things.
Which brings me back to my frank puzzlement as to why this should be so.
> >> That's the Argument from Authority with a
> >> subtle twist - you aren't an authority.
> >
> >I guess one would have to be a god to be an authority, hmm?
>
> Before we go on, please define "god" so I can understand why you'd
> have to be one to know one. Oh, and *do* make it something that most
> people would agree describes a god or we'll be in Humpty-Dumpty land.
In the first place, you brought up a god without defining it. In the
second place, I am nearly as ignorant about what the majority of six and
a half billion people would agree describes a god as I am about what a
god thinks, so such a definition is beyond me. You are the one making
claims to know what this god is like, not me. It seems you are trying
to close the circle of your argument: a god cares about our minds
because a god is a thing that cares about our minds.
Derek Potter
and typed for a million years. Finally, one of them, ""Dan Luke"
<c17...@pantsbellsouth.net>", wrote this - but did it understand what
it had written?
>
Actually I was replying to Craig who said "The idea that a Deity..."
>In the
>second place, I am nearly as ignorant about what the majority of six and
>a half billion people would agree describes a god as I am about what a
>god thinks, so such a definition is beyond me. You are the one making
>claims to know what this god is like, not me. It seems you are trying
>to close the circle of your argument: a god cares about our minds
>because a god is a thing that cares about our minds.
Strawman.
Your quibble seems to be that what matters to us may not matter to a
god. It comes down to whether you think all values are relative. You
obviously do. You could have said so and then we'd have all known that
you were just airing your personal philosophy.
darth_versive
<snip>
> I believe the statement "Science is metaphysically neutral" was
> intended to refer to science's being unable to comment one way or
> another on metaphysical matters, having restricted itself to a single
> methodology. To discover whether spiritual insight is valid using
> science would be like trying to study GR using Euclid. You can't even
> start. I think that's what "metaphysically neutral" meant, not that
> science doesn't have a methodology which can be cast as a metaphysical
> proposition ("the world exists and can be modelled") but that it
> doesn't have the tools to make further metaphysical pronouncements.
Yes. Propositions such as "the world exists and can be modelled" are
part of the network of assumptions and principles that make up
scientific method, IMO, and they could, arguably, be considered to be
metaphysical propositions. On the the other hand, some (more
philosophically inclined) scientists might argue that scientific
method merely demands that scientists operate *as if* the world exists
and can be modelled, etc., while conceding that, perhaps, the world is
really an illusion, or that we are all brains in a vat, or the
appearance of natural order that we see around us is really just the
manifestation of the arbitrary will of some supernatural entity, etc.
That is, they might argue that one can't absolutely prove even these
basic methodological assumptions, and that all that is required is
that they be used as working assumptions in order to do science.
Either way, I agree that the further metaphysical pronouncements which
you allude to are beyond the scope of science (such as whether matter
and energy are all that exist, whether a transcendent spiritual realm
exists, etc.). Simply because, as you say, science doesn't have the
tools to answer such questions definitively.
DV
catshark
wrote:
Dang. Forgot them. And Biologists Against Transcendent Systems . . .
---------------
J. Pieret
---------------
Nunc Id Vides, Nunc Ne Vides
- Unseen University Motto -
Derek Potter
and typed for a million years. Finally, one of them,
understand what it had written?
Cue the AI optimists* who will say "Not yet. But look (a) at how far
science has come in a few hundred years (b) at this little box of
silicon chips which has learned to say 'Momma'. Therefore science will
adapt and expand and one day it will understand everything."
*I expect there's a more technical word for it but who wants to be an
expert in classifying other people's crap?
Sorry, it's been a hard week already and it's only Wednesday.
Craig Franck
>"Craig Franck" wrote
> >"darth_versive" wrote
> >
> >> Science is metaphysically neutral.
> >
> >This has repeatedly been demonstrated to be false. Science assumes
> >representational realism. I agree this might be the default, common sense
> >assumption about reality, but it is not metaphysically neutral any more
> >than Euclidean space is geometrically neutral.
> I believe the statement "Science is metaphysically neutral" was
> intended to refer to science's being unable to comment one way or
> another on metaphysical matters, having restricted itself to a single
> methodology.
I believe that is how it is often meant. But its assumption of
representational realism -- we perceive an external, mind-independent
world through representations in our brains -- puts it on the side of
realism, even with the reservation that science is only probabilistic
about the claims it makes. (It is true that many philosophers would
say it's a domain violation to use science to back up philosophical
arguments.)
> To discover whether spiritual insight is valid using
> science would be like trying to study GR using Euclid. You can't even
> start. I think that's what "metaphysically neutral" meant, not that
> science doesn't have a methodology which can be cast as a metaphysical
> proposition ("the world exists and can be modeled") but that it
> doesn't have the tools to make further metaphysical pronouncements.
That is a reasonable way of looking at things. Writers like Wilber
and Morris Berman emphasis the other way of looking at it since they
believe any view of reality is in large part a form of interpretation.
Mathematicians get into arguments about whether they deal with
realities or abstractions: the number 4 should be as real as electrons;
some agree, but say that's because both are abstractions, others again
agree, but only because both are as real as rocks and snowflakes.
Science works so well because it has struck on the most successful
method to date to generate knowledge about the world. But it is a
distortion of human reality. Vivisectionist claims that animals were
simply automatons shows what sort of profound breaks with reality
an overly scientific outlook can produce. It is an admittedly radical
view, but most people today could be considered ecologically
equivalent to those vivisectionists: science, capitalism, and Christianity
combine to warp our thinking. Don Feder is on the record as saying
God put all that oil up in Alaska for us to use, and it's un-Christian to
talk about preserving nature for natures sake.
It's tempting to say that is precisely why science should stay neutral
and stick to its paradigm rather than integrate with all other human
knowledge, but I feel (as does Wilber) that that causes a kind of
schizophrenic attitude toward life. Doping up large number of children
to get them to behave is an example of why science needs to be
informed by the rest of human knowledge: pills do not make kids
behave.
Derek Potter
and typed for a million years. Finally, one of them, ""Craig Franck"
<craig....@verizon.net>", wrote this - but did it understand what
it had written?
Dividing tnumbers into realities and abstractions is a distinction
without a difference, aka false dichotomy or trichotomy i.e. hair
splitting :)
>Science works so well because it has struck on the most successful
>method to date to generate knowledge about the world. But it is a
>distortion of human reality. Vivisectionist claims that animals were
>simply automatons shows what sort of profound breaks with reality
>an overly scientific outlook can produce. It is an admittedly radical
>view, but most people today could be considered ecologically
>equivalent to those vivisectionists: science, capitalism, and Christianity
>combine to warp our thinking. Don Feder is on the record as saying
>God put all that oil up in Alaska for us to use, and it's un-Christian to
>talk about preserving nature for natures sake.
No true scientist would say that science indicates that dogs feel no
pain. No true Christian would contradict the Biblical view that God
made a world that is good. And no true Scotsman would put sugar on his
porridge.
>It's tempting to say that is precisely why science should stay neutral
>and stick to its paradigm rather than integrate with all other human
>knowledge, but I feel (as does Wilber) that that causes a kind of
>schizophrenic attitude toward life. Doping up large number of children
>to get them to behave is an example of why science needs to be
>informed by the rest of human knowledge: pills do not make kids
>behave.
But science does not instruct you to do it. The reasoning seems to be
"Science gives us washing machines which can be programmed, therefore
kids are machines to be programmed." That is not a problem with
science it is the appliance of science.
Cheers!
Craig Franck
> Craig Franck <craig....@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > "darth_versive" wrote
> >
> > > Science is metaphysically neutral.
> >
> > This has repeatedly been demonstrated to be false. Science assumes
> > representational realism. I agree this might be the default, common sense
> > assumption about reality, but it is not metaphysically neutral any more
> > than Euclidean space is geometrically neutral.
>
> Is this true, though? Putnam and van Fraassen have denied that science
> must be realist about its assumptions and ontologies. While Hacking and
> the New Experimentalists agree science is representational, the
> representations are instrumental and pragmatist. For any metaphysical
> stance, I can find a philosopher of science to support it. From this I
> conclude either that all philosophers of science speak bullshit, or that
> science is metaphysically neutral, and we know (I have proved it in a
> margin) that philosophersof science do not speak bullshit. Not entirely.
This article addresses some of those issues:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/
While you could make an argument (as some have) that it is not
necessary for there to be a mind-and-theory independent world for
science as we conceive of it to exist, it is odd that so much of the
success of science has centered on subtracting the human component.
It's as if you spent a career proving there was no such thing as ghosts,
and then realized things would also be consistent if in fact all there were
was in fact ghosts, and no living people. I can't argue with that.
Behaviorists banished the mind from psychology. Matter, as a substance
conceived of prior to the 20th century, clearly does not exist.
However, the metaphysical bias of science is revealed in the "invent a
hypothesis" part of the scientific method. Science to a large part exists
in peer reviewed journals, and hypothesis based non-realist
metaphysical assumptions generally don't make it.
But you are correct that you don't have to assume scientific realism. Just
rearrange 99.99% of human knowledge and any view, however initially
absurd, might be able to stand. And I agree science is merely probabilistic,
so tomorrow everything could completely change. It's just unlikely.
But, as the Stanford article points out, there is an overlay of science and
philosophy. I would argue the founders of modern science only came up
with it based on their personal biases. Most Chinese philosophers laughed
when they heard about Newton's theory of gravity. Nature has laws?
Hardly.
[...]
> > And it's not just religion. Science moving from Aristotelism to Baconism
> > represented an equally profound shift in thinking.
>
> Well, arguably the Baconism was Roger's not Francis's, and more
> arguably, Bacon's ideas did not affect actual science all that much (but
> Locke's did*) - he was honoured more by citation than compliance.
That I'll concede. I was thinking of anything that moved away from
Aristotle. Nature does not have a goal or purpose. Saying an egg
manifests its chicken nature is not a real explanation, etc.
> We have a number of tendencies, as I said - they include the tendency to
> be essentialistic, to anthropomorphise unintentional reality, to
> overestimate risks in some cases and underestimate them in others. But
> there is simply no default metaphysics.
That's an understandable way of looking at it, but reality has a coherence
to it that most people agree on. The phrase "inadequate reality testing"
has scientific currency, and it most people can spot it. I see a default
metaphysics.
John Wilkins
I am not saying that science cannot be realist, and I happen to think
that in one sense it actually does rely on realism, contra van Fraassen,
but what I *am* saying is that this is not something either logically
forced by the scientific activity itself, or something one cannot do
science without. Instrumentalism, pragmatism, internal realism,
scientific idealism (a former lecturer of mine, Brian Ellis, is a
scientific idealist, and this was a common view in the late 19thC) have
al been "derived" from science or applied to it by philosophers of
science. Think Kant's noumena and phenomena, and *he* was basing his
ideas on Newton.
The idea of natural law is a good example. It derives from the Thomist
medieval debates over the idea of law being a feature of God's creation,
and of there being natural rights that do not depend on revelation for
their authority. It this a necessary part of scientific law? I think not
- once they have the idea of regularities that nothing "natural" can
"disobey", scientists abandoned the notion that this ties into
prescriptive rights. Newton did not say that falling bodies *ought* to
transcribe parabolic paths, he said that, ceteris paribus, they *do*.
>
> [...]
>
> > > And it's not just religion. Science moving from Aristotelism to Baconism
> > > represented an equally profound shift in thinking.
> >
> > Well, arguably the Baconism was Roger's not Francis's, and more
> > arguably, Bacon's ideas did not affect actual science all that much (but
> > Locke's did*) - he was honoured more by citation than compliance.
>
> That I'll concede. I was thinking of anything that moved away from
> Aristotle. Nature does not have a goal or purpose. Saying an egg
> manifests its chicken nature is not a real explanation, etc.
Well perhaps not as you state it there, but to say that an egg is
epigenetically informed to produce a chicken is an advance on "like
produces like". In fact it is my opinion that without teleology we could
never have developed science to the point that we could abandon it.
>
> > We have a number of tendencies, as I said - they include the tendency to
> > be essentialistic, to anthropomorphise unintentional reality, to
> > overestimate risks in some cases and underestimate them in others. But
> > there is simply no default metaphysics.
>
> That's an understandable way of looking at it, but reality has a coherence
> to it that most people agree on. The phrase "inadequate reality testing"
> has scientific currency, and it most people can spot it. I see a default
> metaphysics.
If so, then dogs have metaphysics.
Craig Franck
> I am not saying that science cannot be realist, and I happen to think
> that in one sense it actually does rely on realism, contra van Fraassen,
> but what I *am* saying is that this is not something either logically
> forced by the scientific activity itself, or something one cannot do
> science without.
I think it comes down to whether you think science would work
without induction, and whether induction is such an important
characteristic of realism that it wouldn't be realism without it.
It might be a mistake, but for me, scientific realism is a consistency
independent of the scientist: The fact that different people can do the
same experiment at different times and get the same results. The
facts are independent of the minds that think them.
If alchemy worked, there couldn't be realism since the mental state
of the person merged to some degree with the process. Berman
actually thinks the magic of archaic tradition did work to a degree, but
doesn't now because it required something on the part of the individual
that we now lack. (I'll admit it is more than a bit fanciful, but if it were
true, it would be a non-realist reality we inhabit.)
> Craig Franck wrote:
> > That's an understandable way of looking at it, but reality has a coherence
> > to it that most people agree on. The phrase "inadequate reality testing"
> > has scientific currency, and it most people can spot it. I see a default
> > metaphysics.
>
> If so, then dogs have metaphysics.
I'd stress the ability to articulate. Animals seem to assume Euclidian
space, but they aren't geometrists.
John Wilkins
> "John Wilkins" wrote
>
> > I am not saying that science cannot be realist, and I happen to think
> > that in one sense it actually does rely on realism, contra van Fraassen,
> > but what I *am* saying is that this is not something either logically
> > forced by the scientific activity itself, or something one cannot do
> > science without.
>
> I think it comes down to whether you think science would work
> without induction, and whether induction is such an important
> characteristic of realism that it wouldn't be realism without it.
Yes to the former, no to the latter. Realism may rely on induction most
of the time, but it is not established inductively, and induction does
not rely on realism.
>
> It might be a mistake, but for me, scientific realism is a consistency
> independent of the scientist: The fact that different people can do the
> same experiment at different times and get the same results. The
> facts are independent of the minds that think them.
Which is something that idealism also explains, as does social
construction (something I do not put forward as a good characterisation
of what is unique to science), linguistic communities (Wittgensteinian
theories of meaning), and so on. Instrumentalism is quite dissociated
from realims, and it has a long history. Pragmatism simply ignores
questions of realistic metaphysics so long as it continues to work. And
so on...
>
> If alchemy worked, there couldn't be realism since the mental state
> of the person merged to some degree with the process. Berman
> actually thinks the magic of archaic tradition did work to a degree, but
> doesn't now because it required something on the part of the individual
> that we now lack. (I'll admit it is more than a bit fanciful, but if it were
> true, it would be a non-realist reality we inhabit.)
I can imagine an indefinite number of cases where realism does not
apply. I am uninterested in nearly all of them. The only ones I am
interested in are those that have in the history of science been
expounded. That is enough to show that science need not be realist in
the philosophical sense.
>
> > Craig Franck wrote:
>
> > > That's an understandable way of looking at it, but reality has a coherence
> > > to it that most people agree on. The phrase "inadequate reality testing"
> > > has scientific currency, and it most people can spot it. I see a default
> > > metaphysics.
> >
> > If so, then dogs have metaphysics.
>
> I'd stress the ability to articulate. Animals seem to assume Euclidian
> space, but they aren't geometrists.
So it's metaphysics if we could, but don't articulate it, but it's not
metaphysics if it is exactly the same thing, but we can't articulate it?
This means that having a metaphysics means expressing claims about
reality?
Craig Franck
> Craig Franck <craig....@verizon.net> wrote:
> > It might be a mistake, but for me, scientific realism is a consistency
> > independent of the scientist: The fact that different people can do the
> > same experiment at different times and get the same results. The
> > facts are independent of the minds that think them.
>
> Which is something that idealism also explains, as does social
> construction (something I do not put forward as a good characterisation
> of what is unique to science), linguistic communities (Wittgensteinian
> theories of meaning), and so on. Instrumentalism is quite dissociated
> from realims, and it has a long history. Pragmatism simply ignores
> questions of realistic metaphysics so long as it continues to work. And
> so on...
That's true. But I was thinking of a distinction between what could be
considered "as-if-isms: I'm going to pretend as if all that exists is mental,
or my mind is all that exists, or reality is linguistic and how the universe
must like from a scientific perspective for reality to be as it appears.
Idealism and pragmatism, from this POV, are only possible because the
nature of the world could most closely be characterized as scientifically
realist. So if I'm a solipsist and wander into the library and read the
collected works of William Shakespeare, it must be true that I somehow
produced them myself or deluded myself into thinking I spent several
weeks reading when in fact it was all a dream. It's only because reality is
so stable that I can play such games; if it wasn't, I wouldn't be here in the
first place.
So what I'm saying is either other forms of metaphysics are just intellectual
games, or any other characterization that can support the world around us
must be realism by some other name. Realism is about coherent reality,
not how that reality is achieved.
My view of things is that of process philosophy. Reality is a process of
events. Call them physical, mental, or something else all together. It doesn't
matter if it's the same functionality in the end. (This assumes, of course, that
the world is indeed basically as it appears to us.)
A much broader argument is that the anthropic principle requires you exist
in a universe that science could function. But the notion that intelligent life
requires a universe somewhat like we inhabit seems more a lack of imagination
than insight. So I'm just sticking to our particular case with the caveat that
all scientific knowledge is probabilistic.
> > I'd stress the ability to articulate. Animals seem to assume Euclidian
> > space, but they aren't geometrists.
>
> So it's metaphysics if we could, but don't articulate it, but it's not
> metaphysics if it is exactly the same thing, but we can't articulate it?
> This means that having a metaphysics means expressing claims about
> reality?
Your right in that the assumptions don't have to be articulated to be
assumptions. I just wouldn't consider experiencing the world in a certain
way enough to have a metaphysics. You must in some sense reflect on
yourself and environment. So metaphysics is at least a second-order
thought process. A dog acts as if he makes a self/other distinction without
thinking about it; whether this should be called metaphysics or not is
semantics.
John Wilkins
Realism has a technical, and a generic sense. In this case, a scientific
realist is committed to the existence of the entities postulated by the
best, or some ideal best, scientific theories. Hence, one is described
as a realist WRT electrons, or species, or gravity waves. That is the
technical notion. The general sense is that the scientist is expected to
act as if the world is real. But this is equivalent to Hume's postulate
that reality is uniform... in effect it amounts to saying that phenomena
will appear in ordered arrays. The existence of a substrate to the
phenomena is neither required by the scientific process nor, as it
happens, something that much exercises most scientists with whom I have
discussed the matter.
You seem to be saying that the scientist must assume the substrate. I am
denying this - all they need, qua *scientist*, is to assume the
phenomena. What they also need personally, is a matter of metaphysical
commitment, to be sure, but you can program computers to apply, within
limits, the scientific method, and I am quite certain they have no
metaphysics (if you say they do, they I say that we aren't talking about
the same conceptual items).
>
> So what I'm saying is either other forms of metaphysics are just
> intellectual games, or any other characterization that can support the
> world around us must be realism by some other name. Realism is about
> coherent reality, not how that reality is achieved.
>
> My view of things is that of process philosophy. Reality is a process of
> events. Call them physical, mental, or something else all together. It
> doesn't matter if it's the same functionality in the end. (This assumes,
> of course, that the world is indeed basically as it appears to us.)
By we know the world is *not* how it appears to us (through science). We
know this because we can measure and infer unobservables that undercut
the default view. And we are not discussing your view of things (I have
a metaphysical position too), but rather what *science* is committed to.
And it is a very poor metaphysics indeed. At best, it includes an
assumption that measurements convey information. At worst, there is
nothing except a commitment to empirical data and the basic principles
of logic and maths.
>
> A much broader argument is that the anthropic principle requires you exist
> in a universe that science could function. But the notion that intelligent
> life requires a universe somewhat like we inhabit seems more a lack of
> imagination than insight. So I'm just sticking to our particular case with
> the caveat that all scientific knowledge is probabilistic.
I have little respect for anthropic arguments. They suffer the ultimate
in selection bias - we see it, so it had to be? Oh, come on.
Yes, scientific knowledge is probabilistic. It is also fallibilistic or
deafesible. This is not a metaphysical position.
>
> > > I'd stress the ability to articulate. Animals seem to assume Euclidian
> > > space, but they aren't geometrists.
> >
> > So it's metaphysics if we could, but don't articulate it, but it's not
> > metaphysics if it is exactly the same thing, but we can't articulate it?
> > This means that having a metaphysics means expressing claims about
> > reality?
>
> Your right in that the assumptions don't have to be articulated to be
> assumptions. I just wouldn't consider experiencing the world in a certain
> way enough to have a metaphysics. You must in some sense reflect on
> yourself and environment. So metaphysics is at least a second-order
> thought process. A dog acts as if he makes a self/other distinction without
> thinking about it; whether this should be called metaphysics or not is
> semantics.
No, it is rather mroe than that. But at this point I am unable to
clearly discern what you mean by a metaphysical belief. It seems that so
far as rocks are able to undergo change, and that change is in any
manner reflexive, rocks have metaphysics. That is the classical argument
for panpsychism.
catshark
Wilkins) wrote:
[...]
>
>Realism has a technical, and a generic sense. In this case, a scientific
>realist is committed to the existence of the entities postulated by the
>best, or some ideal best, scientific theories. Hence, one is described
>as a realist WRT electrons, or species, or gravity waves. That is the
>technical notion. The general sense is that the scientist is expected to
>act as if the world is real. But this is equivalent to Hume's postulate
>that reality is uniform... in effect it amounts to saying that phenomena
>will appear in ordered arrays. The existence of a substrate to the
>phenomena is neither required by the scientific process nor, as it
>happens, something that much exercises most scientists with whom I have
>discussed the matter.
Ah, this may explain the problem I've been having. I just finished reading
that article about scientific realism by Richard Boyd that Craig mentioned:
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/>
and his initial description of Realism seemed to match what Chalmers'
called the "common view of science". Chalmers has the empiricists and
positivists trying to formalize the common view but Boyd has empiricists
challenging Realism. I really wish you philosophers could come up with a
nice set of consistent labels for everything. Maybe some brand-new Ph.D.
suddenly with a lot of time on his hands after finishing his thingy could
write a book about the history of the philosophy of science that not only
sorted out all the different schools of thought but all the labels used ...
I also picked up a used copy of Boyd, Gasper and Trout _Philosophy of
Science_ for a little light reading after I finish _Sex and Death_ and
_Science as a Process_. You have been a *very* bad influence ...
Derek Potter
and typed for a million years. Finally, one of them,
understand what it had written?
<snip good stuff>
>By we know the world is *not* how it appears to us (through science). We
>know this because we can measure and infer unobservables that undercut
>the default view. And we are not discussing your view of things (I have
>a metaphysical position too), but rather what *science* is committed to.
>And it is a very poor metaphysics indeed. At best, it includes an
>assumption that measurements convey information. At worst, there is
>nothing except a commitment to empirical data and the basic principles
>of logic and maths.
>>
>> A much broader argument is that the anthropic principle requires you exist
>> in a universe that science could function. But the notion that intelligent
>> life requires a universe somewhat like we inhabit seems more a lack of
>> imagination than insight. So I'm just sticking to our particular case with
>> the caveat that all scientific knowledge is probabilistic.
>I have little respect for anthropic arguments. They suffer the ultimate
>in selection bias - we see it, so it had to be? Oh, come on.
The Vast Universe - Sparce Life hypothesis is a solution to Fermi's
Paradox. It is anthropic but does not make statements such as "we see
it, so it had to be". On the contrary it asserts that it need not have
been but the Universe has had countless opportunites to cover all
possibilities. It is falsifiable in the Popperian sense: cosmologists
eventually prove the universe to be quite limited in extent.
Another one of Derek Potter's sockpuppets
>On Wed, 7 Apr 2004 13:36:27 +0000 (UTC), Derek Potter <m...@privacy.net>
>wrote:
>
>>In talk.origins a million monkeys sat down with a million typewriters
>>and typed for a million years. Finally, one of them, "catshark
>><cats...@yahoo.com>", wrote this - but did it understand what it had
>>written?
>>
>>
>>>You just said that this "other type" of knowledge is non-scientific.
>>>Obviously, then, it has to be rejected *within* science. That isn't
>>>arrogance. And I know of no movement by scientists at large to go outside
>>>of science and attack religion or other metaphysical systems.
>>
>>Polymer Chemists Against Mysticism.
>
>Dang. Forgot them. And Biologists Against Transcendent Systems . . .
BATS. Cool.
Derek Potter
>No, it is rather mroe than that. But at this point I am unable to
>clearly discern what you mean by a metaphysical belief. It seems that so
>far as rocks are able to undergo change, and that change is in any
>manner reflexive, rocks have metaphysics. That is the classical argument
>for panpsychism.
Fred Hoyle - more famous for his little green than his wonderfully
successful work on stellar nucleosynthesis -thinks that all
information is conscious, even the single bit (on/off) transmitted by
a thermostat. I have to admit that my own incredulity kicks in at this
point since not only cannot I imagine what it's like to be a
thermostat, I can't even make sense of the idea of a single bit system
having experiences.
It strikes me as supremely ironic that panpsychism is the direct
result of attempting to remove subjectivity from one's semantic
framework. Instead of having mentality associated with brains - a
mystery but one that accords with common-sense - we now have mind
every-darn-where, with precisely zero explanation of what the revised
paradigm actually means.
Craig Franck
> You seem to be saying that the scientist must assume the substrate. I am
> denying this - all they need, qua *scientist*, is to assume the
> phenomena. What they also need personally, is a matter of metaphysical
> commitment, to be sure, but you can program computers to apply, within
> limits, the scientific method, and I am quite certain they have no
> metaphysics (if you say they do, they I say that we aren't talking about
> the same conceptual items).
That's what I'm saying. The metaphysics drives the invent a hypothesis
part of the scientific method, and the substrate keeps track of the state
of the world.
I do agree that if you wish to remain totally unprejudiced about any
phenomena, you are metaphysically neutral. I threw a rock at a window,
and the glass shattered. Don't ask if one had to do with the other. The
moment you start to speculate, you need a framework to generate ideas.
Let's say I'm a phenomenologist There's the phenomena of consciousness
experience. Now I have a psychotic episode. What just happened?
a) I had a psychotic episode. That's all I know.
b) I was host to a bad spirit.
c) Do to some organic defect in my brain, I have a chemical imbalance. Time
to adjust the dosage of my meds.
d) I may have been host to a spirit, but spirits don't show up on CAT
scans. Go see a doctor anyway and see if he can help.
C and d are clearly scientific. They assume consciousness is a complex
organic process occurring in the brain. C is something a metaphysical
naturalist would come up with. D comes from a methodological naturalist.
A is sound from a philosophical POV. B is a form of folk psychology.
So each has a slant to the way an explanation is generated.
To address the idea of a substrate, one thing that is odd about QM is it
appears to manifest a form of information processing. Event b seems to
know what happened during event a; if all there is is phenomena, what's
processing the information? The double slit experiment should be a series
of unrelated events, but they all seem to know about each other. (I agree
that the notion that something must be doing this is metaphysical. But for
a scientist to get rid of this notion seems to invite a view that things are
just magically related for no reason.)
> No, it is rather mroe than that. But at this point I am unable to
> clearly discern what you mean by a metaphysical belief. It seems that so
> far as rocks are able to undergo change, and that change is in any
> manner reflexive, rocks have metaphysics. That is the classical argument
> for panpsychism.
My idea of a metaphysical belief is a belief that is not empirically verifiable,
but it drives your thinking about the physical world, which in turns drive
your interpretation of events.
Also, some ideas are more metaphysical than others, so it's sometimes hard
to tell what's strictly metaphysical and what empirical. Temporal order has
elements of both, for example.
Derek Potter
>To address the idea of a substrate, one thing that is odd about QM is it
>appears to manifest a form of information processing. Event b seems to
>know what happened during event a; if all there is is phenomena, what's
>processing the information? The double slit experiment should be a series
>of unrelated events, but they all seem to know about each other. (I agree
>that the notion that something must be doing this is metaphysical. But for
>a scientist to get rid of this notion seems to invite a view that things are
>just magically related for no reason.)
Causality is one thing that science doesn't give up too readily. QM
"simply" (har-har) removed the *local* paradigm that had held sway
since Newton (or arguably since men started to think). It did not
remove causality. Specifically, it introduces two counter intuitive
facts of nature - nobody knows why these things happen. The first is
randomness. A random event still has a cause, it's just that the
particular outcome is not forced. The other is the non-local nature of
quantum events. The double slit isn't really about two events
communicating, its about two slits communicating - one composite
object acting as a whole on one small particle. On the other hand, the
EPR experiments first performed by Aspect at al do show a mysterious
communication between events. Which "simply" means that entangled
particles are NOT two separate particles, they are a single quantum
object, which again interacts with the detectors as a whole. Thus the
matter you are talking about is really whether the shift from
classical, local theories to quantum non-local theories is a
metaphysical shift. My view is, "of course it's not", but there is no
doubt that some people think that anything which upsets their everyday
ideas must be metaphysical.
John Wilkins
The problem arises, I think, from a common mistake of scientists and
even philosophers (particularly of the pomo persuasion): to think that
what is true of the model or representation is true of the things so
modelled or represented.
Of course there is information in a model. Of course there is some
subjectivity in any expression of a theory or law. These things exist in
brains, which are by definition, as well as experience, subjective and
information-processing. The error is like thinking that because the
words used to describe a scene have meaning, the scene has meaning.
Hoyle, Wheeler, and the other physicists who insist that the world is
"composed" of "bits" make this error. I'm sure someone has named it
formally, but I call it the Ontological Fallacy. Whitehead called it the
Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.
Things don't have consciousness because we do when we describe or engage
them.
John Wilkins
> "John Wilkins" wrote
>
> > You seem to be saying that the scientist must assume the substrate. I am
> > denying this - all they need, qua *scientist*, is to assume the
> > phenomena. What they also need personally, is a matter of metaphysical
> > commitment, to be sure, but you can program computers to apply, within
> > limits, the scientific method, and I am quite certain they have no
> > metaphysics (if you say they do, they I say that we aren't talking about
> > the same conceptual items).
>
> That's what I'm saying. The metaphysics drives the invent a hypothesis
> part of the scientific method, and the substrate keeps track of the state
> of the world.
I deny this is true, historically. It is of course the case that
metaphysical commitments of *some* scientists have driven their
hypothesising - famously Kepler's neo-Platonism. But we are not
discussing individuals. We are discussing what *science*, as a process
that covers many individuals, involves. It is my view that no
metaphysics is required for *science*, despite the range of diverse
metaphysical views that individual scientists have. Surely you can see
my distinction here?
>
> I do agree that if you wish to remain totally unprejudiced about any
> phenomena, you are metaphysically neutral. I threw a rock at a window,
> and the glass shattered. Don't ask if one had to do with the other. The
> moment you start to speculate, you need a framework to generate ideas.
Cause and effect are not, in themselves, metaphysical commitments. As I
said, any dog knows there are consequences of actions. But to be a
metaphysical commitment it must be of the form "causes must precede
effects" or "every effect has a cause" or something similar. A
metaphysical commitment *must* be expressible and moreover must be
*expressed*. Otherwise it is just a disposition, like that of the glass
to crack when struck. The glass in the window does not have a
metaphysics of shatterdom.
>
> Let's say I'm a phenomenologist There's the phenomena of consciousness
> experience. Now I have a psychotic episode. What just happened?
>
> a) I had a psychotic episode. That's all I know.
> b) I was host to a bad spirit.
> c) Do to some organic defect in my brain, I have a chemical imbalance. Time
> to adjust the dosage of my meds.
> d) I may have been host to a spirit, but spirits don't show up on CAT
> scans. Go see a doctor anyway and see if he can help.
>
> C and d are clearly scientific. They assume consciousness is a complex
> organic process occurring in the brain. C is something a metaphysical
> naturalist would come up with. D comes from a methodological naturalist.
> A is sound from a philosophical POV. B is a form of folk psychology.
>
> So each has a slant to the way an explanation is generated.
There are an indefinite number of possible explanations (proof: a spirit
caused it, 2 spirits caused it, 3 spirits caused it... n spirits caused
it, for n -> inf). Science (and indeed any human cognitive operation)
cannot deal with near-infinite ranges of alternatives. Instead it deals
with a limited range of the most promising now in play, inventing new
ones as needed to keep the process going.
Scientific explanation does emphatically not deal with all
metaphysically possible explanations. It simply can't. Metaphysical
sources may play a role in science (although most of the scientists I
know would tell you that novel techniques of measurement and analysis
are much more likely to do that), but science does not imply a
particular metaphysics.
This is what I dislike about the "Tao of Physics" or "Dancing Wu Li
Masters" approach to science. There are no metaphysical implications
here unless you bring metaphysics to the argument independently of
science.
>
> To address the idea of a substrate, one thing that is odd about QM is it
> appears to manifest a form of information processing. Event b seems to
> know what happened during event a; if all there is is phenomena, what's
> processing the information? The double slit experiment should be a series
> of unrelated events, but they all seem to know about each other. (I agree
> that the notion that something must be doing this is metaphysical. But for
> a scientist to get rid of this notion seems to invite a view that things are
> just magically related for no reason.)
Again, what I said above about physicists and the Ontological Fallacy,
applies here. So far as I understand QM (and that is very limited), it
does not mean that QM is information processing. It means that QM is
about phenomena we can perhaps *represent* in terms of information
processing. If that logic helps us conceptualise things, well and good,
but I am guessing that it won't, really.
>
> > No, it is rather mroe than that. But at this point I am unable to
> > clearly discern what you mean by a metaphysical belief. It seems that so
> > far as rocks are able to undergo change, and that change is in any
> > manner reflexive, rocks have metaphysics. That is the classical argument
> > for panpsychism.
>
> My idea of a metaphysical belief is a belief that is not empirically
> verifiable, but it drives your thinking about the physical world, which in
> turns drive your interpretation of events.
>
> Also, some ideas are more metaphysical than others, so it's sometimes hard
> to tell what's strictly metaphysical and what empirical. Temporal order
> has elements of both, for example.
It may seem contrary to the Philosopher's Oath ("I swear I could do with
another beer"), but I actually do not think that ideas motivate us much
at all. Instead we rationalise what we do and why afterwards, and call
these post hoc justifications "reasons". Belief "in" causality, for
example, is just a way of saying, "Why, yes, now that you mention it, I
*do* think that causes preceed all effects" How about that?"
Derek Potter
Hang on. That is the meaning of a "model" isn't it? Let's see where
you're heading...
>Of course there is information in a model. Of course there is some
>subjectivity in any expression of a theory or law. These things exist in
>brains, which are by definition, as well as experience, subjective and
>information-processing.
Yes, the subjective side of objectivity (oxymoron alert!) is assumed
to be containable: objective physical events affect the senses, a
bunch of subjective stuff occurs, objective data and theories emerge.
It's a chimeric paradigm but I don't think it fails when information
is considered. Information is just an abstraction, so we, sitting far
above the paradigm, and observing it in operation, can make an
abstraction on the real world and see it also being made by observers.
From our lofty vantage point we see that information is robust.
>The error is like thinking that because the
>words used to describe a scene have meaning, the scene has meaning.
I think the confusion is more subtle. Physicists are always concocting
theories which seem to explain the world but suggest that under some
circumstances something wierd will happen. Like Dirac's ocean which
predicted the existence of the positron. On the whole, every element
in a good model does correspond to something real, this is how science
makes predictions.
However, models are abstractions. That's fine when you just have one
level of abstraction. However, when you have a theory about theories,
a model of models or just plain information theory, you are
abstracting on an abstraction. Hence your meta-model does not talk
about the real world, its elements do not have to correspond to
something "out there", they only need correspond to abstractions.
Maths has always been like this and when a mathematician says
something exists he is talking about the kind of existence that
abstractions have.
Unfortunately it appears that some people lose track of how many
levels of abstraction they're dealing with and leapfrog from working
with abstractions on abstractions to the underlying physics.
>Hoyle, Wheeler, and the other physicists who insist that the world is
>"composed" of "bits" make this error.
Hoyle has never recovered from the Big Bang. He should have stuck to
science fiction. Or maybe he did and never mentioned it to Wheeler.
>I'm sure someone has named it
>formally, but I call it the Ontological Fallacy. Whitehead called it the
>Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.
Reification? Making abstractions into "things".
>Things don't have consciousness because we do when we describe or engage
>them.
I haven't the faintest idea what that means :)
Matt Silberstein
<m...@privacy.net>:
Not at all. The model is a predictive explanation, it is not the
thing modeled. Models have many aspects that are not true about
the thing modeled, things modeled have aspects that are not true
about the model. The question is always what does the model tell
us about the thing modeled. You have not made any attempt to show
that your model captures anything about reality and are telling
us that constraints on the model are constrains on reality.
[snip]
>>The error is like thinking that because the
>>words used to describe a scene have meaning, the scene has meaning.
>
>I think the confusion is more subtle. Physicists are always concocting
>theories which seem to explain the world but suggest that under some
>circumstances something wierd will happen. Like Dirac's ocean which
>predicted the existence of the positron. On the whole, every element
>in a good model does correspond to something real, this is how science
>makes predictions.
An interesting and not uncommon metaphysics, but not one that is
supportable in any meaningful way. Models are models.
>However, models are abstractions.
Not quite. There is an implication behind the term abstraction
that does not fit models. Yes, we do try to generalize from
observations when we model, but models are concrete entities used
to generate predictions.
[snip]
--
Matt Silberstein
Donate to the C.A.N.D.L.E.S. Museum, burnt down by arsonists who wrote
"Remember Timothy McVeigh" on the wall.
C.A.N.D.L.E.S. stands for Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments
Survivors.
www.candles-museum.com
Craig Franck
> Craig Franck <craig....@verizon.net> wrote:
> > That's what I'm saying. The metaphysics drives the invent a hypothesis
> > part of the scientific method, and the substrate keeps track of the state
> > of the world.
>
> I deny this is true, historically. It is of course the case that
> metaphysical commitments of *some* scientists have driven their
> hypothesising - famously Kepler's neo-Platonism. But we are not
> discussing individuals. We are discussing what *science*, as a process
> that covers many individuals, involves. It is my view that no
> metaphysics is required for *science*, despite the range of diverse
> metaphysical views that individual scientists have. Surely you can see
> my distinction here?
I do, and I think the problem is two fold: I have a broader definition of
metaphysics than many others, and some identical statements can be
metaphysical or not depending on the context.
For example, take permanence and change, and illusion and reality, two
items crucial to any metaphysics. When a scientist talks about conservation
laws, that underlying all change there is something permanent that cannot
be lost or gained; or representative realism, that our perceptual field is a
highly processed version of what is around us that is actually located in
our brain, he is talking about a scientific theory.
Both are also metaphysical doctrines. When a scientist uses illusion to
explain why the moon looks bigger near the horizon, and a metaphysician
laments reality is locked away from our direct experience -- even if they
are talking about the exact same concepts -- the scientist is doing
something different from the philosopher.
That's a reasonable distinction. I don't agree it's necessary and feel it
distorts the situation, but I can grasp the distinction. The reason is,
while it's true a metaphysical theory must be by definition empirically
untestable, and a scientific theory by definition testable, the musing
that goes on to generate the theories are more or less the same. A
screenwriter and a real detective are both trying to generate scenarios;
one just happens to correspond to reality and the other is fiction. I
find it hard to see why the thinking is of a completely different type.
> Scientific explanation does emphatically not deal with all
> metaphysically possible explanations. It simply can't. Metaphysical
> sources may play a role in science (although most of the scientists I
> know would tell you that novel techniques of measurement and analysis
> are much more likely to do that), but science does not imply a
> particular metaphysics.
>
> This is what I dislike about the "Tao of Physics" or "Dancing Wu Li
> Masters" approach to science. There are no metaphysical implications
> here unless you bring metaphysics to the argument independently of
> science.
What I think you fail to take into account is the creative nature of science.
When a person reasons "something must be waving for a wave to exist"
he's spinning yarns; when he tests for ether, he's doing science.
It also fails to account for why science took so long to get off the ground.
Thinking planets *must* move in circular orbits -- to the modern mind a
silly notion -- is just the flip side of saying they can move in any orbit
necessary to plot correct positions. Both are philosophical notions until
one tests them out.
> > To address the idea of a substrate, one thing that is odd about QM is it
> > appears to manifest a form of information processing. Event b seems to
> > know what happened during event a; if all there is is phenomena, what's
> > processing the information? The double slit experiment should be a series
> > of unrelated events, but they all seem to know about each other. (I agree
> > that the notion that something must be doing this is metaphysical. But for
> > a scientist to get rid of this notion seems to invite a view that things are
> > just magically related for no reason.)
>
> Again, what I said above about physicists and the Ontological Fallacy,
> applies here. So far as I understand QM (and that is very limited), it
> does not mean that QM is information processing. It means that QM is
> about phenomena we can perhaps *represent* in terms of information
> processing. If that logic helps us conceptualise things, well and good,
> but I am guessing that it won't, really.
This might be semantical. An object keeps moving unless acted upon
by a force just means reality "remembers" its motion by keeping it the
same unless changed. Anything is possible in imagination, much less in the
"real world." But that's probably just a somewhat odd way of using the
term "remembers."
Derek Potter
And how would you determine whether a metaphysic is supportable in a
meaningful way?
>>However, models are abstractions.
>
>Not quite. There is an implication behind the term abstraction
>that does not fit models. Yes, we do try to generalize from
>observations when we model, but models are concrete entities used
>to generate predictions.
>[snip]
Oh hell, you're just talking about toys.
Matt Silberstein
If someone can use it reasonably consistently and usefully.
>>>However, models are abstractions.
>>
>>Not quite. There is an implication behind the term abstraction
>>that does not fit models. Yes, we do try to generalize from
>>observations when we model, but models are concrete entities used
>>to generate predictions.
>>[snip]
>
>Oh hell, you're just talking about toys.
No, scientific models. f=ma, et. al. is not an abstraction, it is
a concrete predictive entity.
Derek Potter
I would have thought that predicting antimatter was about as
consistent and useful as any metaphysic could be.
>>>>However, models are abstractions.
>>>
>>>Not quite. There is an implication behind the term abstraction
>>>that does not fit models. Yes, we do try to generalize from
>>>observations when we model, but models are concrete entities used
>>>to generate predictions.
>>>[snip]
>>
>>Oh hell, you're just talking about toys.
>
>No, scientific models. f=ma, et. al. is not an abstraction, it is
>a concrete predictive entity.
That's why I called it a toy. Never mind how it works or what it's a
model of, just play with it.
John Wilkins
> "John Wilkins" wrote
>
> > Craig Franck <craig....@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > > That's what I'm saying. The metaphysics drives the invent a hypothesis
> > > part of the scientific method, and the substrate keeps track of the state
> > > of the world.
> >
> > I deny this is true, historically. It is of course the case that
> > metaphysical commitments of *some* scientists have driven their
> > hypothesising - famously Kepler's neo-Platonism. But we are not
> > discussing individuals. We are discussing what *science*, as a process
> > that covers many individuals, involves. It is my view that no
> > metaphysics is required for *science*, despite the range of diverse
> > metaphysical views that individual scientists have. Surely you can see
> > my distinction here?
>
> I do, and I think the problem is two fold: I have a broader definition of
> metaphysics than many others, and some identical statements can be
> metaphysical or not depending on the context.
I tend to be more conservative; but then I am in the analytic tradition.
>
> For example, take permanence and change, and illusion and reality, two
> items crucial to any metaphysics. When a scientist talks about conservation
> laws, that underlying all change there is something permanent that cannot
> be lost or gained; or representative realism, that our perceptual field is a
> highly processed version of what is around us that is actually located in
> our brain, he is talking about a scientific theory.
>
> Both are also metaphysical doctrines.
But not in the hands of the theoretician. And they do not rely upon
metaphysical commitments to be explanatory here. If there is a permanent
thing (in this case, the explanatory universalisation, or "law") that
underlies the change, this licenses no metaphysical conclusion, not of
realism, or idealism, or anything. It may be that explanation is being
treated entirely as an operational convenience, as Bridgeman thought.
> When a scientist uses illusion to
> explain why the moon looks bigger near the horizon, and a metaphysician
> laments reality is locked away from our direct experience -- even if they
> are talking about the exact same concepts -- the scientist is doing
> something different from the philosopher.
Yes.
>
> That's a reasonable distinction. I don't agree it's necessary and feel it
> distorts the situation, but I can grasp the distinction. The reason is,
> while it's true a metaphysical theory must be by definition empirically
> untestable, and a scientific theory by definition testable, the musing
> that goes on to generate the theories are more or less the same. A
> screenwriter and a real detective are both trying to generate scenarios;
> one just happens to correspond to reality and the other is fiction. I
> find it hard to see why the thinking is of a completely different type.
It is the same thing when an artist sculpts David out of marble and a
tradesman makes a mantelpiece. But conceptually, they are quite
different activities. I think that it is a vapid truism that we are
"doing the same thing" - of course we are - the tool used is the same
tool. But that doesn't make the output the same thing at all.
>
> > Scientific explanation does emphatically not deal with all
> > metaphysically possible explanations. It simply can't. Metaphysical
> > sources may play a role in science (although most of the scientists I
> > know would tell you that novel techniques of measurement and analysis
> > are much more likely to do that), but science does not imply a
> > particular metaphysics.
> >
> > This is what I dislike about the "Tao of Physics" or "Dancing Wu Li
> > Masters" approach to science. There are no metaphysical implications
> > here unless you bring metaphysics to the argument independently of
> > science.
>
> What I think you fail to take into account is the creative nature of science.
> When a person reasons "something must be waving for a wave to exist"
> he's spinning yarns; when he tests for ether, he's doing science.
No, I don't discount creativity. I just think creativity is, in the end,
a process of winnowing out the unworkable from the workable,, and the
unsupported from the supported, even before we get to intersubjective
testing. There's nothing magic about creativity, contra Koestler.
>
> It also fails to account for why science took so long to get off the ground.
> Thinking planets *must* move in circular orbits -- to the modern mind a
> silly notion -- is just the flip side of saying they can move in any orbit
> necessary to plot correct positions. Both are philosophical notions until
> one tests them out.
The philosophical notion here, if any, is that there are regularities.
Whether they must be circular or not is irrelevant and depends on the
prior state of background knowledge. Science requires that there are
"natures" (phusoi), which is to say, regularities. That is the conditio
sine qua non. But apart from that "philosophical" position, the contrary
of which is paranoid schizophrenia, there is no metaphysics.
>
> > > To address the idea of a substrate, one thing that is odd about QM is
> > > it appears to manifest a form of information processing. Event b seems
> > > to know what happened during event a; if all there is is phenomena,
> > > what's processing the information? The double slit experiment should
> > > be a series of unrelated events, but they all seem to know about each
> > > other. (I agree that the notion that something must be doing this is
> > > metaphysical. But for a scientist to get rid of this notion seems to
> > > invite a view that things are just magically related for no reason.)
> >
> > Again, what I said above about physicists and the Ontological Fallacy,
> > applies here. So far as I understand QM (and that is very limited), it
> > does not mean that QM is information processing. It means that QM is
> > about phenomena we can perhaps *represent* in terms of information
> > processing. If that logic helps us conceptualise things, well and good,
> > but I am guessing that it won't, really.
>
> This might be semantical. An object keeps moving unless acted upon
> by a force just means reality "remembers" its motion by keeping it the
> same unless changed. Anything is possible in imagination, much less in the
> "real world." But that's probably just a somewhat odd way of using the
> term "remembers."
Much of this debate hinges on the odd uses of terms. I think your use of
"metaphysics" is odd. It gets less odd if one says "information is
preserved" instead of "the object remembers its motion". This puts it
squarely on what we can know from observation, rather than some magical
panpsychism.
Derek Potter
>> > Again, what I said above about physicists and the Ontological Fallacy,
>> > applies here. So far as I understand QM (and that is very limited), it
>> > does not mean that QM is information processing. It means that QM is
>> > about phenomena we can perhaps *represent* in terms of information
>> > processing. If that logic helps us conceptualise things, well and good,
>> > but I am guessing that it won't, really.
>>
>> This might be semantical. An object keeps moving unless acted upon
>> by a force just means reality "remembers" its motion by keeping it the
>> same unless changed. Anything is possible in imagination, much less in the
>> "real world." But that's probably just a somewhat odd way of using the
>> term "remembers."
>
>Much of this debate hinges on the odd uses of terms. I think your use of
>"metaphysics" is odd. It gets less odd if one says "information is
>preserved" instead of "the object remembers its motion". This puts it
>squarely on what we can know from observation, rather than some magical
>panpsychism.
At a cost. As you imply in the top paragraph here, information is an
abstraction, we don't observe the information itself. So what do you
mean when you say "information is preserved"? We have no reason to
think it exists at all - except in the Jerry Patterson sense which
insists that abstractions are features *of* objects, not statements
*about* objects. I thought you were opposed to that fallacy :)
R.Schenck
> dkomo <dkomo...@cris.com> wrote:
snip
> >
> > P.S. Nowhere in the book does Wilber advocate a Creator God nor an
> > Intelligent Designer. He quite clearly doesn't believe in one. The
> > merged point of view is: religion as a mode of perception and being
> > (the Eastern view) merged with rationality and empiricism (the Western
> > view).
>
> Another overdrawn and meaningless distinction. The first materialists
> lived in the Indus valley...
nice, Viva Harrapa!
R.Schenck
snip
> Wilfred Sellars's "manifest image":
>
> "The manifest image of man-in-the-world can be characterized [as]... the
> framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as
> man-in-the-world", p6
>
> And it is, from my PoV, simply a fiction (something Sellars effectively
> admits, although he thinks it is a useful fiction, rather like the
> social contract). We never had such a "folk reality" - it has always
> been overlaid by cultural variants. Folk psychology is the nearest we
> can get to a default view, and it is not a series of propositions by a
> number of standard tendencies. Every time someone talks about a "naive
> metaphysics" or "perennial philosophy"
snip
I can't let the phrase 'perennial philosophy' (especially when its in
a post with heremetics and the like) pass without linking to this
page.
you liked it so much the first time so here is the New [is it also
improved?] Enlightenment:
www.hermes-press.com/
it shold be rather obvious that I no more endorse this stuff than the
claptrap on the Thule page, but its interesting none the less.
Besides, anyone who falls for the "Thrice-Great Hermes" trap deserves
mention.
R.Schenck
snip
>perhaps, the world is really an illusion, or that we are all brains
in a vat
snip
Uhoh, looks like we have to terminate brain-in-vat number 559x67LL$
before -it- starts building brains-in-vats
Craig Franck
> Craig Franck <craig....@verizon.net> wrote:
> > For example, take permanence and change, and illusion and reality, two
> > items crucial to any metaphysics. When a scientist talks about conservation
> > laws, that underlying all change there is something permanent that cannot
> > be lost or gained; or representative realism, that our perceptual field is a
> > highly processed version of what is around us that is actually located in
> > our brain, he is talking about a scientific theory.
> >
> > Both are also metaphysical doctrines.
>
> But not in the hands of the theoretician. And they do not rely upon
> metaphysical commitments to be explanatory here. If there is a permanent
> thing (in this case, the explanatory universalisation, or "law") that
> underlies the change, this licenses no metaphysical conclusion, not of
> realism, or idealism, or anything. It may be that explanation is being
> treated entirely as an operational convenience, as Bridgeman thought.
I'll concede that if you take the view that the scientific method is strictly
a technique for generating useful ideas, then you can completely remove
any metaphysical dimension; that's one of the powerful features of
instrumentalism.
A carpenter who drives in screws with a hammer isn't any more wrong than
a scientist who pretends the earth/moon system is only a two-body problem,
when it's really not. As long as the astronauts make it home okay, they were
within the margin of error. A person who talks of metaphysical leanings
towards the universal form of the nail or a bias in favor of simplicity either
doesn't grasp pragmatism, or is adding something extra for reasons of their
own.
> It is the same thing when an artist sculpts David out of marble and a
> tradesman makes a mantelpiece. But conceptually, they are quite
> different activities. I think that it is a vapid truism that we are
> "doing the same thing" - of course we are - the tool used is the same
> tool. But that doesn't make the output the same thing at all.
That's interesting in that identical outputs could be considered
different due to the technique or intent of the individual. One person's
garbage is another's "found art," a HST picture can be used as wallpaper
for your computer.
I can't argue with that position, other than to say if I want to consider
science dealing with strictly philosophical notions and generate science
that works as well as one who is much more conservative, my process
should be as good as theirs; now it's an issue of which is more likely
to generate good results. It's also a question as to whether the minimalist
position WRT to metaphysics has any special place as a meaningful
distinction since there is no difference that doesn't make a difference
to a true pragmatist.
So you are correct no metaphysical outlook is necessary in science. But
do philosophically inclined scientists have some sort of advantage over
those who are not? If they do, that would be an argument in favor of
that POV because it is an advantage. (I remember reading a paper that
took the position that if not believing in pragmatism was an advantage,
then one must pragmatically disregard the notion.)
John Wilkins
I happened on, and bought, the collected works of the Hermetic Corpus.
It reads a little like a series of schizophrenics on acid. However, it
must be recalled that Hermetic influences via Cusa's translations
largely kick started the scientific revolution.
John Wilkins
Nice try. Information is an abstraction, but all abstractions are
inductive generalisations from our (very much physical and concrete)
behavioral and linguistic practices and observations. The information
here is Fisher information - the likelihood that a measurement
accurately reflects the actual state of the observed things or
processes. In short, the observed state of a moving object provides
information about the initial state of that object. Much information is
lost, of course.
Of course, the object en soi is just following the physical nature it
and the world around it has, however we represent it. No consciousness
involved apart from our modes of representation.
Derek Potter
Concatonating your two definitions gives: "The likelihood that a
measurement accurately reflects the actual state of the observed
things ... is preserved" - and this, mark you, is supposed to be an
improvement on the old-fashioned way of stating conservation laws
because it gets rid of "odd" metaphysics. Chaque un a son gout.
My point, which you attempted to avoid by going off into statistics,
is that when someone says the object remembers they do not really mean
that it has a brain and a personality - your jibe about panpsychism is
just a strawman in that respect. However, the scheme that you propose
in its place attempts to remove the metaphysical assumption that the
law is resident within the particle. You succeed in half the problem,
you can generalize your observations into a "law" and put it in a box
labelled "Abstractions, do not feed with metaphysics" and that side of
things is just fine. However you've not dealt with the whole matter
since a law is not merely a summary of past observations, it's a
statement about the universe that makes predictions about future
observations. That seems to require a metaphysics - something to
account for the consistency. Fisher analysis doesn't help. All you
find is that the universe is consistently consistent.
>Of course, the object en soi is just following the physical nature it
>and the world around it has, however we represent it. No consciousness
>involved apart from our modes of representation.
Did I mention consciousness? :)
John Wilkins
> "John Wilkins" wrote
>
> > Craig Franck <craig....@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > > For example, take permanence and change, and illusion and reality, two
> > > items crucial to any metaphysics. When a scientist talks about
> > > conservation laws, that underlying all change there is something
> > > permanent that cannot be lost or gained; or representative realism,
> > > that our perceptual field is a highly processed version of what is
> > > around us that is actually located in our brain, he is talking about a
> > > scientific theory.
> > >
> > > Both are also metaphysical doctrines.
> >
> > But not in the hands of the theoretician. And they do not rely upon
> > metaphysical commitments to be explanatory here. If there is a permanent
> > thing (in this case, the explanatory universalisation, or "law") that
> > underlies the change, this licenses no metaphysical conclusion, not of
> > realism, or idealism, or anything. It may be that explanation is being
> > treated entirely as an operational convenience, as Bridgeman thought.
>
> I'll concede that if you take the view that the scientific method is strictly
> a technique for generating useful ideas, then you can completely remove
> any metaphysical dimension; that's one of the powerful features of
> instrumentalism.
So you thereby grant me my conclusion. If science can be done without a
metaphysical dimension to it, through instrumentalism or operationalism,
then it is, in itself, metaphysically neutral.
>
> A carpenter who drives in screws with a hammer isn't any more wrong than
> a scientist who pretends the earth/moon system is only a two-body problem,
> when it's really not. As long as the astronauts make it home okay, they were
> within the margin of error. A person who talks of metaphysical leanings
> towards the universal form of the nail or a bias in favor of simplicity either
> doesn't grasp pragmatism, or is adding something extra for reasons of their
> own.
There is a whiff of petitio brimstone in that paragraph...
>
> > It is the same thing when an artist sculpts David out of marble and a
> > tradesman makes a mantelpiece. But conceptually, they are quite
> > different activities. I think that it is a vapid truism that we are
> > "doing the same thing" - of course we are - the tool used is the same
> > tool. But that doesn't make the output the same thing at all.
>
> That's interesting in that identical outputs could be considered
> different due to the technique or intent of the individual. One person's
> garbage is another's "found art," a HST picture can be used as wallpaper
> for your computer.
Yes. The solution to *that* problem lies in realising that the social
context assigns meanings. Intent of the individual when you are dealing
with a social activity is not the determinant. If I intend to solve a
mathematical problem, and in my intention believe I have done so, it is
not actually solved until it can be recognised as a solution by the
community of methematicians, once you get past a very small number of
simple and direct implications.
An analogy: the intent of the gazelle and the intent of the lion are not
what, in themselves, makes either fit or not.
>
> I can't argue with that position, other than to say if I want to consider
> science dealing with strictly philosophical notions and generate science
> that works as well as one who is much more conservative, my process
> should be as good as theirs; now it's an issue of which is more likely
> to generate good results. It's also a question as to whether the minimalist
> position WRT to metaphysics has any special place as a meaningful
> distinction since there is no difference that doesn't make a difference
> to a true pragmatist.
I am not arguing for a minimalist approach to metaphysics in science. I
am saying that, no matter what of the many metaphysics that actually
*are* employed by scientists, the scienceness of the science is not
determined by any of those metaphysics. Let 'em all in, I say, from
dialectical materialism to eternal essences. It matters not at all, from
the perspective of the science. What matters is whether or not the
science so generated explains the data better than any other
alternative.
>
> So you are correct no metaphysical outlook is necessary in science. But
> do philosophically inclined scientists have some sort of advantage over
> those who are not? If they do, that would be an argument in favor of
> that POV because it is an advantage. (I remember reading a paper that
> took the position that if not believing in pragmatism was an advantage,
> then one must pragmatically disregard the notion.)
That's another, more interesting, question. Ever since E.A. Burtt's
book, the idea has been that worldviews are somehow effective in
generating scientific hypotheses. Certainly we can find many cases where
that is true (e.g., Kepler, Copernicus, and many in the biological
sciences, including Linnaeus, Owen, and Lamarck etc). But are they more
effective than those whose metaphysics do not affect their practice?
That is arguable, and depends a lot on what one counts as "effective".
It is my view that a surfeit of metaphysics will cause individuals to
generate more global hypotheses than those who tend to deal on a case by
case basis. But it is also my view that the vast majority of global
hypotheses will turn out to be rejected or fail to deal adequately with
the data (Huxley's comment about Spencer and the ugly fact), while the
majority of Little Hypotheses will turn out to be true enough but not
very interesting. What we want are Optimal Hypotheses, which are true in
areas we didn't expect, but not so global that they are vapid.
Evolutionary theory as Fisher and Sewall Wright developed it is at the
higher end of that scale. Fisher was a Christian, Wright a Leibnizian.
What that means, I don't know...
John Wilkins
:P
There is a problem with this? We observe an object moving and mark its
location and velocity and acceleration, the surrounding environment, and
the like. There are two questions here: one is, how accurately do our
measurements capture that actual states of the object? Another is, how
adequately can we explain it in terms of our known rules of how things
behave? Both of these are *epistemic* problems, not metaphysical ones.
There is no conclusion to be drawn from this about rocks remembering
what they are supposed to do with their impetus, no conclusions to be
drawn about what rocks actually are, along with all other physical
objects. Merely a couple of statements about what we observe and what
that implies given our dynamic laws. Both are statements about what we
know of rocks. The rocks get off scot free of metaphysical implications.
Now you can do definitional substitutions all you like, and that is a
good way to figure out what a statement means, of course, but it is
*far* less baroque in metaphysical terms than an ontology of force,
innate knowledge of objects and so on. At best it implies an ontology of
phenomenal regularity and intersubjective accuracy. And, of course, the
ontology of the theory in which the dynamical rules are embedded (for as
Quine tells us, to be is to be the value of a bound variable in a
scientific law :-).
>
> My point, which you attempted to avoid by going off into statistics,
> is that when someone says the object remembers they do not really mean
> that it has a brain and a personality - your jibe about panpsychism is
> just a strawman in that respect. However, the scheme that you propose
Without qualification, in the context of a discussion of the
metaphysical implications of theories, I would not call it a strawman.
It is, shall we say, an attempt to stress test the axioms...
> in its place attempts to remove the metaphysical assumption that the
> law is resident within the particle. You succeed in half the problem,
> you can generalize your observations into a "law" and put it in a box
> labelled "Abstractions, do not feed with metaphysics" and that side of
> things is just fine. However you've not dealt with the whole matter
> since a law is not merely a summary of past observations, it's a
> statement about the universe that makes predictions about future
> observations. That seems to require a metaphysics - something to
> account for the consistency. Fisher analysis doesn't help. All you
> find is that the universe is consistently consistent.
I believe it simply doesn't require a metaphysics. Of course some
construals of laws of nature *do* require metaphysics, but they are
neither necessary nor universal to scientific interpretation. Equally
one can live on Quine's desert island ontology.
Fisher analysis is not inherently statistical - it is a statement of
certainty of measurement (which of course falls into a normal
distribution about the likely real value). We are concerned here with
the epistemic value of observations. I don't think it is a herring of
any color.
>
> >Of course, the object en soi is just following the physical nature it
> >and the world around it has, however we represent it. No consciousness
> >involved apart from our modes of representation.
>
> Did I mention consciousness? :)
You implied it, subconsciously...
David Wilson
in talk.origins john...@wilkins.id.au (John Wilkins) wrote:
> Craig Franck <craig....@verizon.net> wrote:
... [snip] ....
> > My view of things is that of process philosophy. Reality is a process of
> > events. Call them physical, mental, or something else all together. It
> > doesn't matter if it's the same functionality in the end. (This assumes,
> > of course, that the world is indeed basically as it appears to us.)
>
> By we know the world is *not* how it appears to us (through science). We
> know this because we can measure and infer unobservables that undercut
> the default view. ...
>
"Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive
realism is false. Therefore, naive realism, if true, is false; therefore
it is false." --- Bertrand Russell
(I don't think I believe this any more---at least not in the sense which
Russell seems to have meant it, but I still think it's a great quote.)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Wilson
SPAMMERS_fingers@WILL_BE_fwi_PROSECUTED_.net.au
(Remove underlines and upper case letters to obtain my email address.)
Derek Potter
Ah well, you may have an idiosyncratic metric of baroquicity. I
thought we were aiming at removing *all* metaphysics, not chosing one
for its aesthetic appeal :)
Seriously, it's the phenomenal regularity that strikes me as highly
metaphysical. You brought in Fisher analysis - we can make a
prediction and then the fact that it is confirmed implies that our
model is predictive. This is simple pragmatism. However, it could be
argued that pragmatism doesn't get rid of metaphysics it just ignores
it. I would agree 100% that, operationally, science does not need to
address the problem of where the laws of physics reside, witness the
fact that most scientists wouldn't give it head-room. You appeared to
be saying a bit more that merely raising the possibility of ignoring a
question. If a philosopher of science berates "laws of physics" for
imputing metaphysical properties to rocks then it's reasonable enough
for other folk to ask him what he puts in their place. Does a
so-called law of physics mean anything if it's just a formula for
prediction and not a statement about the universe? I would say that it
is totally meaningless - the meaning, the predictive power, lies in
the metaphysical system that says you can make predictions about the
real world by applying these formulae you have created through
observation. Yes, we know the methodology works. But the fact that it
works, the fact that the universe consistently delivers consistent
results also requires an explanation, though once again we can ignore
the question and Fisherize it. This way you can trade in the
metaphysics of "physical laws" for an infinite regress of ignored
metaphysical questions. <shrug> And this is "less baroque"?
>And, of course, the
>ontology of the theory in which the dynamical rules are embedded (for as
>Quine tells us, to be is to be the value of a bound variable in a
>scientific law :-).
That sounds like a recursive definition. To be is to be... Dear me,
surely Quine didn't *really* say that?
I'm always suspicious when people start using the verb "to be" without
a complement.
>> My point, which you attempted to avoid by going off into statistics,
>> is that when someone says the object remembers they do not really mean
>> that it has a brain and a personality - your jibe about panpsychism is
>> just a strawman in that respect. However, the scheme that you propose
>
>Without qualification, in the context of a discussion of the
>metaphysical implications of theories, I would not call it a strawman.
>It is, shall we say, an attempt to stress test the axioms...
I suspect a lot of strawmen start life like that :)
>> in its place attempts to remove the metaphysical assumption that the
>> law is resident within the particle. You succeed in half the problem,
>> you can generalize your observations into a "law" and put it in a box
>> labelled "Abstractions, do not feed with metaphysics" and that side of
>> things is just fine. However you've not dealt with the whole matter
>> since a law is not merely a summary of past observations, it's a
>> statement about the universe that makes predictions about future
>> observations. That seems to require a metaphysics - something to
>> account for the consistency. Fisher analysis doesn't help. All you
>> find is that the universe is consistently consistent.
>
>I believe it simply doesn't require a metaphysics. Of course some
>construals of laws of nature *do* require metaphysics, but they are
>neither necessary nor universal to scientific interpretation. Equally
>one can live on Quine's desert island ontology.
I am beginning to realize why I haven't re-visited Quine.
>Fisher analysis is not inherently statistical - it is a statement of
>certainty of measurement (which of course falls into a normal
>distribution about the likely real value). We are concerned here with
>the epistemic value of observations. I don't think it is a herring of
>any color.
Oh but it is. It's the argument from obscurity. Why invoke a
statistical technique whan all you mean is "it seems to work?" You
just said "Much of this debate hinges on the odd uses of terms." I
would suggest that some of it hinges on the unneccessary use of,
jargon. Why drag a statistical package into the argument when all
that's needed is the meta-observation that science seems to deliver
consistent regularities?
>> >Of course, the object en soi is just following the physical nature it
>> >and the world around it has, however we represent it. No consciousness
>> >involved apart from our modes of representation.
>>
>> Did I mention consciousness? :)
>
>You implied it, subconsciously...
No, I thought it subconsiously. I implied it subliminally. In fact
this entire thread is a meta-phenomenon hiding a non-conscious
dielectic taking place between contentless abstractions.
Fun in its own way, if "fun" isn't too metaphysical a term.
Craig Franck
> John Wilkins
> >Fisher analysis is not inherently statistical - it is a statement of
> >certainty of measurement (which of course falls into a normal
> >distribution about the likely real value). We are concerned here with
> >the epistemic value of observations. I don't think it is a herring of
> >any color.
>
> Oh but it is. It's the argument from obscurity. Why invoke a
> statistical technique whan all you mean is "it seems to work?" You
> just said "Much of this debate hinges on the odd uses of terms." I
> would suggest that some of it hinges on the unneccessary use of,
> jargon. Why drag a statistical package into the argument when all
> that's needed is the meta-observation that science seems to deliver
> consistent regularities?
I believe it's because it's the instrumentalism that removes the meta-
character of the statements and keeps things metaphysically neutral.
Whatever events are most likely occur most often.
Those events that occur most often are most likely.
The circularity of those two statements acts like a philosophical short
circuit.
I thought is was obvious that any view of reality had a metaphysical
component in the same way any particular fact implied a certain state
of affairs.
But when you state it statistically, you are speaking about the past, not
making claims about how the world actually is. When a meteorologist
says there is a 60% chance of rain, he means that in the past when the
conditions were similar, it rained 60% of the time. That's a fact, not a
claim that anything even remotely resembling it will occur again: the
atmosphere may float away into space for no reason, it's just statistically
unlikely.
Making meta-statements seems to imply the atmosphere should remain,
so if it dissipated overnight, nature would somehow be violating herself,
so that would no longer be metaphysically neutral.
Derek Potter
Yes. I was going to try to embark on a similar argument myself. To get
from the fact that we have observed a consistency in the past to
predicting future consistency requires a meta-observation and a
metaphysics. The meta-observation is the one that I think John was
hinting at with his Fisher reference. Our system is then that in the
past our extrapolations from past constistency to future consistency
have proved to be reliable therefore we can rely on them in the
future. The key word is "therefore" complete with quotes. There is no
therefore without assuming that there is a "law" of consistency. Which
is simply to repeat the "metaphysical" claim after having worked so
hard to get rid of it. Or else you justify it with another neo-Fisher
statement. It's an infinite regress and at each level you still have
the metaphysical law saying "thus it was, so thus it will be". I
guess you can interpret it two ways. You can say it's metaphysical
because the metaphysics keeps reassering itself, or you can say it's
not metaphysical because at each level of regression you ignore the
metaphysics and promise yourself it will go away if you Fisherize it
one more time.
Poor Fisher.
John Wilkins
> "Derek Potter" wrote
>
> > John Wilkins
>
> > >Fisher analysis is not inherently statistical - it is a statement of
> > >certainty of measurement (which of course falls into a normal
> > >distribution about the likely real value). We are concerned here with
> > >the epistemic value of observations. I don't think it is a herring of
> > >any color.
> >
> > Oh but it is. It's the argument from obscurity. Why invoke a
> > statistical technique whan all you mean is "it seems to work?" You
> > just said "Much of this debate hinges on the odd uses of terms." I
> > would suggest that some of it hinges on the unneccessary use of,
> > jargon. Why drag a statistical package into the argument when all
> > that's needed is the meta-observation that science seems to deliver
> > consistent regularities?
>
> I believe it's because it's the instrumentalism that removes the meta-
> character of the statements and keeps things metaphysically neutral.
>
> Whatever events are most likely occur most often.
> Those events that occur most often are most likely.
>
> The circularity of those two statements acts like a philosophical short
> circuit.
Certainly it short circuits, but not viciously. The first is a statement
of Bayesian likelihood; the latter of frequentist.
>
> I thought is was obvious that any view of reality had a metaphysical
> component in the same way any particular fact implied a certain state
> of affairs.
Yes, many people think that is obvious. I don't. A statement may imply a
state, but the ontological standing of the state depends on further
interpretation in a metaphysical framework.
>
> But when you state it statistically, you are speaking about the past, not
> making claims about how the world actually is. When a meteorologist
> says there is a 60% chance of rain, he means that in the past when the
> conditions were similar, it rained 60% of the time. That's a fact, not a
> claim that anything even remotely resembling it will occur again: the
> atmosphere may float away into space for no reason, it's just statistically
> unlikely.
>
> Making meta-statements seems to imply the atmosphere should remain,
> so if it dissipated overnight, nature would somehow be violating herself,
> so that would no longer be metaphysically neutral.
I agree. Many people talk about the weather, but nobody ever
metaphysicalises it.
John Wilkins
At no point was I suggesting we remove metaphysics, and in these
post-positivist times I am surprised anyone would think that possible.
Baroqueness is defined by having things for aesthetic purposes that have
no functional necessity. I am unable to envisage a metaphysics that
lacks, for example, dispositions, propensities or causal relations. I
can happily do without universals and intensions (in the metaphysics),
possibilities and formal causes. We should retain whatever we need to do
the epistemic job at hand.
>
> Seriously, it's the phenomenal regularity that strikes me as highly
> metaphysical. You brought in Fisher analysis - we can make a
> prediction and then the fact that it is confirmed implies that our
> model is predictive. This is simple pragmatism. However, it could be
> argued that pragmatism doesn't get rid of metaphysics it just ignores
> it. I would agree 100% that, operationally, science does not need to
> address the problem of where the laws of physics reside, witness the
> fact that most scientists wouldn't give it head-room. You appeared to
> be saying a bit more that merely raising the possibility of ignoring a
> question. If a philosopher of science berates "laws of physics" for
> imputing metaphysical properties to rocks then it's reasonable enough
> for other folk to ask him what he puts in their place. Does a
> so-called law of physics mean anything if it's just a formula for
> prediction and not a statement about the universe? I would say that it
> is totally meaningless - the meaning, the predictive power, lies in
> the metaphysical system that says you can make predictions about the
> real world by applying these formulae you have created through
> observation. Yes, we know the methodology works. But the fact that it
> works, the fact that the universe consistently delivers consistent
> results also requires an explanation, though once again we can ignore
> the question and Fisherize it. This way you can trade in the
> metaphysics of "physical laws" for an infinite regress of ignored
> metaphysical questions. <shrug> And this is "less baroque"?
Try to draw breath, if you will. It makes it easier to intersprese
comments.
Pragmatism does not dispose of all metaphysical commitments. Nothing
does. I am merely defending the claim that *science* has no metaphysical
commitments other than the ability of observers to measure things. The
rest of this paragraph is a non sequitur to that issue.
>
>
> >And, of course, the ontology of the theory in which the dynamical rules
> >are embedded (for as Quine tells us, to be is to be the value of a bound
> >variable in a scientific law :-).
>
> That sounds like a recursive definition. To be is to be... Dear me,
> surely Quine didn't *really* say that?
It's a slogan, and a slight joke that summarises much actual
argumentation. Hence the smiley.
>
> I'm always suspicious when people start using the verb "to be" without
> a complement.
Cogito ergo sum?
>
> >> My point, which you attempted to avoid by going off into statistics,
> >> is that when someone says the object remembers they do not really mean
> >> that it has a brain and a personality - your jibe about panpsychism is
> >> just a strawman in that respect. However, the scheme that you propose
> >
> >Without qualification, in the context of a discussion of the
> >metaphysical implications of theories, I would not call it a strawman.
> >It is, shall we say, an attempt to stress test the axioms...
>
> I suspect a lot of strawmen start life like that :)
Perhaps. A lot of philosophical argumentation starts life like that too.
It's called reductio ad absurdum.
>
> >> in its place attempts to remove the metaphysical assumption that the
> >> law is resident within the particle. You succeed in half the problem,
> >> you can generalize your observations into a "law" and put it in a box
> >> labelled "Abstractions, do not feed with metaphysics" and that side of
> >> things is just fine. However you've not dealt with the whole matter
> >> since a law is not merely a summary of past observations, it's a
> >> statement about the universe that makes predictions about future
> >> observations. That seems to require a metaphysics - something to
> >> account for the consistency. Fisher analysis doesn't help. All you
> >> find is that the universe is consistently consistent.
> >
> >I believe it simply doesn't require a metaphysics. Of course some
> >construals of laws of nature *do* require metaphysics, but they are
> >neither necessary nor universal to scientific interpretation. Equally
> >one can live on Quine's desert island ontology.
>
> I am beginning to realize why I haven't re-visited Quine.
Pity. _From a logical point of view_ is one of the more entertaining
collections of essays, and very influential. I suggest "On what there
is" is worth reading.
>
> >Fisher analysis is not inherently statistical - it is a statement of
> >certainty of measurement (which of course falls into a normal
> >distribution about the likely real value). We are concerned here with
> >the epistemic value of observations. I don't think it is a herring of
> >any color.
>
> Oh but it is. It's the argument from obscurity. Why invoke a
> statistical technique whan all you mean is "it seems to work?" You
> just said "Much of this debate hinges on the odd uses of terms." I
> would suggest that some of it hinges on the unneccessary use of,
> jargon. Why drag a statistical package into the argument when all
> that's needed is the meta-observation that science seems to deliver
> consistent regularities?
My own metaphysics (remember, I never said one can't have one, just that
none is needed to do science) has it that information about the world is
gathered by observation and summarised in our best laws and models. Fot
this, one needs an account of information. Shannon, Kolmogorov and
semiotic information are all human-relative and contextual. But Fisher
information is an objective relation between an observer system and the
thing measured. So it is this I mention, just to be clear.
>
> >> >Of course, the object en soi is just following the physical nature it
> >> >and the world around it has, however we represent it. No consciousness
> >> >involved apart from our modes of representation.
> >>
> >> Did I mention consciousness? :)
> >
> >You implied it, subconsciously...
>
> No, I thought it subconsiously. I implied it subliminally. In fact
> this entire thread is a meta-phenomenon hiding a non-conscious
> dielectic taking place between contentless abstractions.
>
> Fun in its own way, if "fun" isn't too metaphysical a term.
Fun is what young organisms have in order to learn the techniques for
survival and reproduction as adults. No, I don't think that is
metaphysical - more a physical necessity.
Derek Potter
>Try to draw breath, if you will. It makes it easier to intersprese
>comments.
Actually, interspersing comments that break up an argument is a pet
hate of mine. If writing in breathless monoblocks deters such
vandalism I shall continue to do so.
...
>Pragmatism does not dispose of all metaphysical commitments. Nothing
>does. I am merely defending the claim that *science* has no metaphysical
>commitments other than the ability of observers to measure things. The
>rest of this paragraph is a non sequitur to that issue.
You seem to be defining as science something which does not attempt to
explain the world, but just makes predictions without knowing why they
work. A sort of data logger with an data analyser on the end, finding
rules for prediction but saying nothing about the nature of reality. I
am sure that you have succeeded in defining *something* but I don't
recognize it as science.
...
>> I'm always suspicious when people start using the verb "to be" without
>> a complement.
>
>Cogito ergo sum?
Exactly. Cartesian logic - highly suspect!
>My own metaphysics (remember, I never said one can't have one, just that
>none is needed to do science) has it that information about the world is
>gathered by observation and summarised in our best laws and models. Fot
>this, one needs an account of information. Shannon, Kolmogorov and
>semiotic information are all human-relative and contextual. But Fisher
>information is an objective relation between an observer system and the
>thing measured. So it is this I mention, just to be clear.
Perhaps I need to look more deeply into Fisher information. It seems
to me that Shannon's view of information was abstract not metaphysical
in his original work with Weaver. I'm afraid I can't get my head
around any other sense of the word.
John Wilkins
> John Wilkins gets an answer from me...
> ...
>
> >Try to draw breath, if you will. It makes it easier to intersprese
> >comments.
>
> Actually, interspersing comments that break up an argument is a pet
> hate of mine. If writing in breathless monoblocks deters such
> vandalism I shall continue to do so.
Nothing will deter me :-)
>
> ...
>
> >Pragmatism does not dispose of all metaphysical commitments. Nothing
> >does. I am merely defending the claim that *science* has no metaphysical
> >commitments other than the ability of observers to measure things. The
> >rest of this paragraph is a non sequitur to that issue.
>
> You seem to be defining as science something which does not attempt to
> explain the world, but just makes predictions without knowing why they
> work. A sort of data logger with an data analyser on the end, finding
> rules for prediction but saying nothing about the nature of reality. I
> am sure that you have succeeded in defining *something* but I don't
> recognize it as science.
Under the leading account of explanation, making predictions (or
retrodictions, including probabilistic inferences) from models *is* the
explanation of things. The Hempelian n-d model or h-d model as it is
sometimes called, of explanation is sufficient in science.
Now whether or not this means that electrons, quarks and so forth exist
to a scientist is another matter; if a scientist were a total prgamatist
or positivist or whatever, they could *still do perfectly good science*
_and_ explain things with theories.
>
> ...
>
> >> I'm always suspicious when people start using the verb "to be" without
> >> a complement.
> >
> >Cogito ergo sum?
>
> Exactly. Cartesian logic - highly suspect!
Well, we agree on one thing at least.
>
>
> >My own metaphysics (remember, I never said one can't have one, just that
> >none is needed to do science) has it that information about the world is
> >gathered by observation and summarised in our best laws and models. Fot
> >this, one needs an account of information. Shannon, Kolmogorov and
> >semiotic information are all human-relative and contextual. But Fisher
> >information is an objective relation between an observer system and the
> >thing measured. So it is this I mention, just to be clear.
>
> Perhaps I need to look more deeply into Fisher information. It seems
> to me that Shannon's view of information was abstract not metaphysical
> in his original work with Weaver. I'm afraid I can't get my head
> around any other sense of the word.
If you have access to statistics books, look up Cramer-Rao Bound.
Or go here:
http://www.colorado.edu/isl/papers/info/node2.html
or here
http://economics.about.com/library/glossary/bldef-cramer-rao-lower-bound
.htm
Basically, you have the most Fisher information when the distribution
curve of the estimation of the value is flat.
Derek Potter
>> >Pragmatism does not dispose of all metaphysical commitments. Nothing
>> >does. I am merely defending the claim that *science* has no metaphysical
>> >commitments other than the ability of observers to measure things. The
>> >rest of this paragraph is a non sequitur to that issue.
>>
>> You seem to be defining as science something which does not attempt to
>> explain the world, but just makes predictions without knowing why they
>> work. A sort of data logger with an data analyser on the end, finding
>> rules for prediction but saying nothing about the nature of reality. I
>> am sure that you have succeeded in defining *something* but I don't
>> recognize it as science.
>
>Under the leading account of explanation, making predictions (or
>retrodictions, including probabilistic inferences) from models *is* the
>explanation of things. The Hempelian n-d model or h-d model as it is
>sometimes called, of explanation is sufficient in science.
Arguments from Authority carry no weight with me. If a philosopher
talks BS and wraps it up in advanced statistics or impenetrable jargon
or ambiguous terms it may end up as very neat BS but it's still BS.
If science predicts something but can't exhibit the reason, only the
method, - "based on past experience, this seems likely", it's no
longer science, it's just voodoo. No wonder New Agery is rife.
>Now whether or not this means that electrons, quarks and so forth exist
>to a scientist is another matter; if a scientist were a total prgamatist
>or positivist or whatever, they could *still do perfectly good science*
>_and_ explain things with theories.
Yes I understand about the "doing". There is no obligation to ask
epistemolgical questions or to provide statements if your only aim is
to predict. But please explain to me what you mean by "explain things
with theories" if the explanation makes no assumption about reality...
...ah, I get it! You've redefined science so it doesn't need to speak
about the nature of the thing it's studying and in order to maintain
this farce you redefine "explanation" as prediction so the question
doesn't arise.
<break inserted for comment>
The question that does arise is whether this metamodel is sufficient
for the science that scientists do. At this point I am tempted to play
devils advocate and say that many scientists probably don't give a
tinker's cuss about what's really going on, all they want is results
so that they get paid, but to my mind that is a personality defect,
nothing to do with the nature of science. You seem to think that it is
actually an improvement.
<break inserted for comment>
Perhaps my real problem is that I don't understand how you can draw
the line between essential epistemological underpinnings and other
metaphysical stuff. A layman asks "Why do rocks fall?" Science used to
say "There is an attractive force between all massive objects. It's
normally very small but the Earth is pretty big so the force on a rock
is big and it pulls the rock to the ground." Purging that of
metaphysics would seem to be a null task, but you seem to be including
statements like "there is a force" in metaphysics. So we are left with
something like (I am a beginner in this double-think stuff so I'll
probably get it a bit wrong) "Rocks have always fallen [insert
optional Fisherism: 'in the past whenever things have always acted in
a particular way the have continued to do so, thus (don't ask why) we
expect that this consistent behaviour will continue for rocks'] and
here is the formula. We can apply this formula to other rocks. When we
do this it gives this answer, which we presume will turn out to be
true." At this point the layman is likely to ask why the formula
works or what it means. I don't think "It just does!" is a scientific
answer.
catshark
wrote:
[...]
Pardon my butting in to this interesting thread (keep it up) . . .
>>> >Pragmatism does not dispose of all metaphysical commitments. Nothing
>>> >does. I am merely defending the claim that *science* has no metaphysical
>>> >commitments other than the ability of observers to measure things.
[big snip]
>At this point the layman is likely to ask why the formula
>works or what it means. I don't think "It just does!" is a scientific
>answer.
So you are saying that explaining things to laymen is part of "science"?
---------------
J. Pieret
---------------
In the name of the bee
And of the butterfly
And of the breeze, amen
- Emily Dickinson -
Derek Potter
>On Fri, 16 Apr 2004 11:03:16 +0000 (UTC), Derek Potter <m...@privacy.net>
>wrote:
>
>[...]
>
>Pardon my butting in to this interesting thread (keep it up) . . .
>
>>>> >Pragmatism does not dispose of all metaphysical commitments. Nothing
>>>> >does. I am merely defending the claim that *science* has no metaphysical
>>>> >commitments other than the ability of observers to measure things.
>
>[big snip]
>
>>At this point the layman is likely to ask why the formula
>>works or what it means. I don't think "It just does!" is a scientific
>>answer.
>
>So you are saying that explaining things to laymen is part of "science"?
Ultimately it is the sole purpose of science!
Not in the trivial sense of dumbing down artificial intelligence or
quantum gravity to a five minute sound bite for couch potatoes with
negligible attention span, but in the sense of being able *in
principle* to explain your whole theory in terms which are meaningful
to someone who lacks knowledge but is intelligent and asks searching
questions.
For this reason I am inclined to agree with John (we make progress)
that the physical notion of a "force" is metaphysical: we cannot see a
force, so explaining gravity as a "force" merely introduces another
entity into the picture. A layman will naively ask "What's a force?"
and the classic school-science answer "It is that which produces or
tends to produce motion" is a circular cop-out.
However, the layman in my scenario is also ignorant of postmodern
philosophy. I would suggest that most lay people still think a spade
is a spade, not a bundle of spade-ish properties, let alone a formula
for predicting the discovery of a spade in the garden shed. John,
incidentally, *seems* to agree that this metaphysical question is best
answered by making some naive epistemic assumptions. Spades exist.
I'm a layman. If I get out of my depth I just google or wiki for half
an hour. I am fixated on the remarkable ability of science to craete
what seems to be an understanding of the real world in my mind. There
has to be a bridge between the scientific models and pictures and the
belief that it is talking about reality. It can be carved off and
labelled "epistemology" or "metaphysics" by philosophers of science,
but to the layman it is part and parcel of science itself. I have yet
to understand why anyone should want to strip science of its innate
realism but I dare say I am about to learn :)
John Wilkins
> catshark gets an answer from me...
>
> >On Fri, 16 Apr 2004 11:03:16 +0000 (UTC), Derek Potter <m...@privacy.net>
> >wrote:
> >
> >[...]
> >
> >Pardon my butting in to this interesting thread (keep it up) . . .
> >
> >>>> >Pragmatism does not dispose of all metaphysical commitments. Nothing
> >>>> >does. I am merely defending the claim that *science* has no metaphysical
> >>>> >commitments other than the ability of observers to measure things.
> >
> >[big snip]
> >
> >>At this point the layman is likely to ask why the formula
> >>works or what it means. I don't think "It just does!" is a scientific
> >>answer.
> >
> >So you are saying that explaining things to laymen is part of "science"?
>
> Ultimately it is the sole purpose of science!
>
> Not in the trivial sense of dumbing down artificial intelligence or
> quantum gravity to a five minute sound bite for couch potatoes with
> negligible attention span, but in the sense of being able *in
> principle* to explain your whole theory in terms which are meaningful
> to someone who lacks knowledge but is intelligent and asks searching
> questions.
Rubbish. You can give increasingly complicated summaries and
journalistic soundbites until you are teaching the full, complex and
technical theory, but science is *never* done in order to explain *to
laymen* what is real, true or otherwise explanatory. In fact, in order
to get some of these ideas across the "common sense boundary" of default
ideas we are born with and acquire from general culture, you often have
to simplify it so badly it is false, in order to have something you can
then refine until you *do* have the theory.
Pratchett, Cohen and Stewart call this "Lying to Children". It is a
propaedeutic necessity.
>
> For this reason I am inclined to agree with John (we make progress)
> that the physical notion of a "force" is metaphysical: we cannot see a
> force, so explaining gravity as a "force" merely introduces another
> entity into the picture. A layman will naively ask "What's a force?"
> and the classic school-science answer "It is that which produces or
> tends to produce motion" is a circular cop-out.
Whereas it is merely undefined in the actual science. Each undefined
term provides the next generation's research program.
>
> However, the layman in my scenario is also ignorant of postmodern
> philosophy. I would suggest that most lay people still think a spade
> is a spade, not a bundle of spade-ish properties, let alone a formula
> for predicting the discovery of a spade in the garden shed. John,
> incidentally, *seems* to agree that this metaphysical question is best
> answered by making some naive epistemic assumptions. Spades exist.
For values of "exist" that means "makes a difference to X practices",
but then, I'm a pragmatist.
>
> I'm a layman. If I get out of my depth I just google or wiki for half
> an hour. I am fixated on the remarkable ability of science to craete
> what seems to be an understanding of the real world in my mind. There
> has to be a bridge between the scientific models and pictures and the
> belief that it is talking about reality. It can be carved off and
> labelled "epistemology" or "metaphysics" by philosophers of science,
> but to the layman it is part and parcel of science itself. I have yet
> to understand why anyone should want to strip science of its innate
> realism but I dare say I am about to learn :)
I used to think as you do. I no longer do. Science is not innately
relaist, except in the very trivial sense that scientific theories posit
the "reality" of the ontology of their models. That is, if there is an
entity in a successful theory, then those who propose that theory will
tend (not always!) to say those entities exist.
John Wilkins
> John Wilkins gets an answer from me...
>
> >> >Pragmatism does not dispose of all metaphysical commitments. Nothing
> >> >does. I am merely defending the claim that *science* has no metaphysical
> >> >commitments other than the ability of observers to measure things. The
> >> >rest of this paragraph is a non sequitur to that issue.
> >>
> >> You seem to be defining as science something which does not attempt to
> >> explain the world, but just makes predictions without knowing why they
> >> work. A sort of data logger with an data analyser on the end, finding
> >> rules for prediction but saying nothing about the nature of reality. I
> >> am sure that you have succeeded in defining *something* but I don't
> >> recognize it as science.
> >
> >Under the leading account of explanation, making predictions (or
> >retrodictions, including probabilistic inferences) from models *is* the
> >explanation of things. The Hempelian n-d model or h-d model as it is
> >sometimes called, of explanation is sufficient in science.
>
> Arguments from Authority carry no weight with me. If a philosopher
> talks BS and wraps it up in advanced statistics or impenetrable jargon
> or ambiguous terms it may end up as very neat BS but it's still BS.
I was not giving an argument from authority. If philosophy has any
purpose at all, when most philosophers come to a consensus, it is likely
they have stumbled on a workable solution. Hempel's theory of
explanation is the default view of nearly all philosophers of science,
of history, of ethics and so forth. It makes sense of most explanatory
issues (even those of semioticians, who are sometimes barely
comprehensible).
If you have a rival notion of explanation, I'd love to hear it. I sort
of collect these things...
>
> If science predicts something but can't exhibit the reason, only the
> method, - "based on past experience, this seems likely", it's no
> longer science, it's just voodoo. No wonder New Agery is rife.
If scientific explanation is successful, even though it doesn't satisfy
Derek Potter's a priori intuitions, then frankly, my dear, I'll go with
scientific explanation.
>
> >Now whether or not this means that electrons, quarks and so forth exist
> >to a scientist is another matter; if a scientist were a total prgamatist
> >or positivist or whatever, they could *still do perfectly good science*
> >_and_ explain things with theories.
>
> Yes I understand about the "doing". There is no obligation to ask
> epistemolgical questions or to provide statements if your only aim is
> to predict. But please explain to me what you mean by "explain things
> with theories" if the explanation makes no assumption about reality...
> ...ah, I get it! You've redefined science so it doesn't need to speak
> about the nature of the thing it's studying and in order to maintain
> this farce you redefine "explanation" as prediction so the question
> doesn't arise.
>
> <break inserted for comment>
Thank you.
I haven't redefined science. This is how science has always proceeded.
It is you who are redefining it, to be a deliverer of metaphysics. This
view is rather late. In fact, it begins, so far as I can tell, in the
New Age you so rightly denigrate; with morons like Capra, and less
moronic but equally misguided folk like Arthur Koestler. Prior to that,
nobody I know of sought to have science *provide* a metaphysics,
although a good many drew metaphysical conclusions or set up
metaphysical problems from science (and *that* goes back to Locke and
Hobbes).
Explanation *is* the deduction of phenomena observed from intitial
conditions and generalisations. That is what Newton did, that is what
Laplace did, that is what *all* explanation does. All else is not
science.
>
> The question that does arise is whether this metamodel is sufficient
> for the science that scientists do. At this point I am tempted to play
> devils advocate and say that many scientists probably don't give a
> tinker's cuss about what's really going on, all they want is results
> so that they get paid, but to my mind that is a personality defect,
> nothing to do with the nature of science. You seem to think that it is
> actually an improvement.
Not exactly. What I think is that this is why science makes progress at
all. It's like saying there is nothing really virtuous in the tendency
of gasoline and air to explode, but that is what moves the car.
I guess you might say that science is not interior to the individual
scientist - it is something that gets done by an entire community.
>
> <break inserted for comment>
Don't think I'm not appreciative here :-)
>
> Perhaps my real problem is that I don't understand how you can draw
> the line between essential epistemological underpinnings and other
> metaphysical stuff. A layman asks "Why do rocks fall?" Science used to
> say "There is an attractive force between all massive objects. It's
> normally very small but the Earth is pretty big so the force on a rock
> is big and it pulls the rock to the ground." Purging that of
> metaphysics would seem to be a null task, but you seem to be including
> statements like "there is a force" in metaphysics. So we are left with
> something like (I am a beginner in this double-think stuff so I'll
> probably get it a bit wrong) "Rocks have always fallen [insert
> optional Fisherism: 'in the past whenever things have always acted in
> a particular way the have continued to do so, thus (don't ask why) we
> expect that this consistent behaviour will continue for rocks'] and
> here is the formula. We can apply this formula to other rocks. When we
> do this it gives this answer, which we presume will turn out to be
> true." At this point the layman is likely to ask why the formula
> works or what it means. I don't think "It just does!" is a scientific
> answer.
Newton's answer is - "bodies attract each other inversely to the square
of their distance according to their mass." This gets written up as a
lawlike generalisation, but it is simply an equation from which we
derive the observed phenomena based on initial conditions. And this was
held to be an explanation even though, as Cotes observed in the preface
to the second edition fo the Principia, "gravity is an occult property,
and occult causes are to be quite banished from philosophy" (pxxvi in
the Cajori edition).
Newton himself, the type specimen of modern science, failed to do what
you think ought to be done. It might be that we have this resolved by
Einstein, but all he has done is come up with generalisations from which
Newton's laws fall out. Every theory has ineffable quantities and
qualities, and always will.
So if the layman says, "Yes, but what is gravity *really*?" and is told
that it is a deformation caused by mass in the spacetime continuum
according to the equations of general and special relativity and its
heirs and successors, have they been given these metaphysics you seem to
want science to deliver? If not, and they aren't, then you really have
no historical requirement for science to deliver metaphysics. All we are
left with is this rule:
The Potter Requirement - Science must give metaphysical answers.
Which, so far as I can see runs contrary to history, practice, logic and
philosophy. In short, you are imposing requirements on science that
science never has and never shall adhere to.
catshark
wrote:
>catshark gets an answer from me...
>
>>On Fri, 16 Apr 2004 11:03:16 +0000 (UTC), Derek Potter <m...@privacy.net>
>>wrote:
>>
>>[...]
>>
>>Pardon my butting in to this interesting thread (keep it up) . . .
>>
>>>>> >Pragmatism does not dispose of all metaphysical commitments. Nothing
>>>>> >does. I am merely defending the claim that *science* has no metaphysical
>>>>> >commitments other than the ability of observers to measure things.
>>
>>[big snip]
>>
>>>At this point the layman is likely to ask why the formula
>>>works or what it means. I don't think "It just does!" is a scientific
>>>answer.
>>
>>So you are saying that explaining things to laymen is part of "science"?
>
>Ultimately it is the sole purpose of science!
So the sole purpose of auto mechanics is to explain automobiles to
non-mechanics?
Now, of course, some mechanics must spend some time explaining how cars
work to other people who want to learn to be mechanics themselves. And
some time must be spent explaining what the mechanics are doing to
customers' cars to justify the customers paying for it. But I don't think
that those things are properly called the sole or even the main purpose of
auto mechanics.
>
>Not in the trivial sense of dumbing down artificial intelligence or
>quantum gravity to a five minute sound bite for couch potatoes with
>negligible attention span, but in the sense of being able *in
>principle* to explain your whole theory in terms which are meaningful
>to someone who lacks knowledge but is intelligent and asks searching
>questions.
I would call that the philosophy of science or science education.
Admittedly, that is just back to the definition of what is "science".
>
>For this reason I am inclined to agree with John (we make progress)
>that the physical notion of a "force" is metaphysical: we cannot see a
>force, so explaining gravity as a "force" merely introduces another
>entity into the picture. A layman will naively ask "What's a force?"
>and the classic school-science answer "It is that which produces or
>tends to produce motion" is a circular cop-out.
Aren't all definitions ultimately circular? What is an apple? An apple is
something that displays all the characteristics we associate with apples.
>
>However, the layman in my scenario is also ignorant of postmodern
>philosophy. I would suggest that most lay people still think a spade
>is a spade, not a bundle of spade-ish properties, let alone a formula
>for predicting the discovery of a spade in the garden shed. John,
>incidentally, *seems* to agree that this metaphysical question is best
>answered by making some naive epistemic assumptions. Spades exist.
>
>I'm a layman. If I get out of my depth I just google or wiki for half
>an hour. I am fixated on the remarkable ability of science to craete
>what seems to be an understanding of the real world in my mind.
Then you are agreeing that John is right that this "naive epistimic
assumption" is best? No offense to John (or you, if you are also a
professional philosopher) but, in my ignorance, it seems to me that some
(most?) intractable philosophic problems are the result of overthinking*
around the edges of what we can ever know (including the question of what
we can "know").
I suspect that the reason you find science so easily and quickly gives an
understanding of the "real" world is precisely because it shares the same
assumptions we all base our daily lives on reflexively and unconsciously.
What appears real to us *is* real in all senses important to our lives. If
I burn my hand in a fire, I pull my hand out, not spend a day or two
contemplating *how* I "know" my hand is burned or what is causing it.
>There
>has to be a bridge between the scientific models and pictures and the
>belief that it is talking about reality. It can be carved off and
>labelled "epistemology" or "metaphysics" by philosophers of science,
>but to the layman it is part and parcel of science itself. I have yet
>to understand why anyone should want to strip science of its innate
>realism but I dare say I am about to learn :)
Maybe I've lost the thread of your argument but, if that is what you mean,
why did you say, in the part I snipped,
If science predicts something but can't exhibit the reason,
only the method, - "based on past experience, this seems
likely", it's no longer science, it's just voodoo. No wonder
New Agery is rife."
That is exactly what we do in our daily lives, the ultimate "realism". If
people want "deeper" explanations of "science", then they have to go to the
philosophers and endure their talk about "epistemology" or "metaphysics",
even if their only conclusion, like John's, is that one or more don't apply
to science.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
*Which is not to say I find these issues uninteresting. Under John's
influence, I have been undertaking some readings in the philosophy of
science, though I'll never be more than a dilettante.
Derek Potter
I would agree about the common-sense boundary, but I do not think that
laymen are a special variety of human beings who cannot be persuaded
that common-sense is misleading and cannot learn. The ability to
suspend the common-sense defaults is, itself common-sense. So-called
"science" that cannot do so in principle is just magick or
hippy-mumble.
However, you should appreciate that my saying "it is the sole purpose"
was hyperbole. As I said elsewhere, the purpose of "doing science" is
usually to get paid at the end of the month. However I stick with my
assertion that science *ought* to create theories that can be related,
via a naive theory of observation, to the fact that the scientist gets
up in the morning, goes to work, switches on the accelerator,
sequencer, mass spectrometer etc and observes readings. Off-hand I
can't think of any kind of science where this
reduction-to-objective-lay-concepts doesn't apply: with the single
exception of the meta-science of artificial consciousness, which, I am
informed, makes a claim to be studying a lay concept without feeling
obliged to tell anyone how the method works.
The word *ought* was deliberate. I do not deny that you can construct
a concept of science which is operational, offloading any metaphysics,
even the minimalist ontology and epistemology, to yourself - as the
observer of science. If someone were to argue that I am talking about
"science-plus" i.e. science plus a teleological value system, then I
would say, "No, you are talking about 'science-minus', science
stripped of the values that motivate scientists". The problem isn't so
much where you put the line round science but what you do with the
values. If they are not part of science they are still so closely
associated with it that laymen assume they are part of it. Separation
doesn't remove the obligation of the scientist to give an account of
reality or else give a convincing reason why he/she should not.
>> For this reason I am inclined to agree with John (we make progress)
>> that the physical notion of a "force" is metaphysical: we cannot see a
>> force, so explaining gravity as a "force" merely introduces another
>> entity into the picture. A layman will naively ask "What's a force?"
>> and the classic school-science answer "It is that which produces or
>> tends to produce motion" is a circular cop-out.
>
>Whereas it is merely undefined in the actual science. Each undefined
>term provides the next generation's research program.
>>
>> However, the layman in my scenario is also ignorant of postmodern
>> philosophy. I would suggest that most lay people still think a spade
>> is a spade, not a bundle of spade-ish properties, let alone a formula
>> for predicting the discovery of a spade in the garden shed. John,
>> incidentally, *seems* to agree that this metaphysical question is best
>> answered by making some naive epistemic assumptions. Spades exist.
>
>For values of "exist" that means "makes a difference to X practices",
>but then, I'm a pragmatist.
I do not feel obliged to join any party. There is sense in pragmatism
as there is in empiricism, realism etc. To my mind the significance of
theories of science is philosophical, in particular it's
epistemological. They should not restrict the practice of science nor
determine what is said in the name of science. To repeat the point, if
a layman asks what quarks are, he/she deserves a better answer than
"they are just entities in a model, we don't know whether they exist".
Obviously nobody knows that anything exists in the sense of being able
to prove solipsism false, but science should be able to say whther
quarks exist in the same way as particle accelerators exist or whether
they are merely computational methods. The criterion is pretty simple:
does the model suggest a *thing* or not? That is, obviously,
subjective, but the bundle of properties called a "spade" does
*suggest* a substantial spade, whether you actually believe in
substance or not. Whereas a correlation between drinking and accidents
does not. If this naive view - that there is a reality of things -
doen't fit in which postmodern definitions of sceince, too bad. It's
not as if any theory of knowledge is totally without problems - or is
the subject "finished" now? :)
>> I'm a layman. If I get out of my depth I just google or wiki for half
>> an hour. I am fixated on the remarkable ability of science to craete
>> what seems to be an understanding of the real world in my mind. There
>> has to be a bridge between the scientific models and pictures and the
>> belief that it is talking about reality. It can be carved off and
>> labelled "epistemology" or "metaphysics" by philosophers of science,
>> but to the layman it is part and parcel of science itself. I have yet
>> to understand why anyone should want to strip science of its innate
>> realism but I dare say I am about to learn :)
>
>I used to think as you do. I no longer do. Science is not innately
>relaist, except in the very trivial sense that scientific theories posit
>the "reality" of the ontology of their models. That is, if there is an
>entity in a successful theory, then those who propose that theory will
>tend (not always!) to say those entities exist.
Eh? Isn't that what we were discussing?
Derek Potter
Qute so. If you *define* sceince operationally then it has no purpose.
If you accept that the purpose of mechanics is to fix cars, then the
purpose of science is to explain.
>>Not in the trivial sense of dumbing down artificial intelligence or
>>quantum gravity to a five minute sound bite for couch potatoes with
>>negligible attention span, but in the sense of being able *in
>>principle* to explain your whole theory in terms which are meaningful
>>to someone who lacks knowledge but is intelligent and asks searching
>>questions.
>
>I would call that the philosophy of science or science education.
>Admittedly, that is just back to the definition of what is "science".
I was meaning that to explain, say, "time before the big-bang" you
need to educate the layman about time, about spacetime, about
Riemannian geometry etc. Byt the time he can assimilate GR he is no
longer a layman, but his understanding can be linked to everyday
concepts - even if part of the process is to abandon what John has
dubbed "common-sense defaults". But something better is put in their
place, you don't just leave a vacuum there.
>>
>>For this reason I am inclined to agree with John (we make progress)
>>that the physical notion of a "force" is metaphysical: we cannot see a
>>force, so explaining gravity as a "force" merely introduces another
>>entity into the picture. A layman will naively ask "What's a force?"
>>and the classic school-science answer "It is that which produces or
>>tends to produce motion" is a circular cop-out.
>
>Aren't all definitions ultimately circular?
No, you always need some primitives in any system in order to avoid
circularity.
> What is an apple? An apple is
>something that displays all the characteristics we associate with apples.
One would hope that the qualities of an apple are defined in physical
terms. "Applehood", however, is not a useful predicate.
>>However, the layman in my scenario is also ignorant of postmodern
>>philosophy. I would suggest that most lay people still think a spade
>>is a spade, not a bundle of spade-ish properties, let alone a formula
>>for predicting the discovery of a spade in the garden shed. John,
>>incidentally, *seems* to agree that this metaphysical question is best
>>answered by making some naive epistemic assumptions. Spades exist.
>>
>>I'm a layman. If I get out of my depth I just google or wiki for half
>>an hour. I am fixated on the remarkable ability of science to craete
>>what seems to be an understanding of the real world in my mind.
>
>Then you are agreeing that John is right that this "naive epistimic
>assumption" is best? No offense to John (or you, if you are also a
>professional philosopher)
Splutter! I'm an electronic designer... This argument is purely an
excuse to break from work :)
> but, in my ignorance, it seems to me that some
>(most?) intractable philosophic problems are the result of overthinking*
>around the edges of what we can ever know (including the question of what
>we can "know").
This is probably true but I guess most philosophers would agree that
much of their efforts are attempts to reduce traditional metaphysical
questions to epistemology. If someone then comes up with a theorem
showing that the problem is not solvable then that's the end of the
matter, but until then the dielectic continues.
>I suspect that the reason you find science so easily and quickly gives an
>understanding of the "real" world is precisely because it shares the same
>assumptions we all base our daily lives on reflexively and unconsciously.
Yes! And this is why I object when someone tries to remove them.
>What appears real to us *is* real in all senses important to our lives. If
>I burn my hand in a fire, I pull my hand out, not spend a day or two
>contemplating *how* I "know" my hand is burned or what is causing it.
>
>>There
>>has to be a bridge between the scientific models and pictures and the
>>belief that it is talking about reality. It can be carved off and
>>labelled "epistemology" or "metaphysics" by philosophers of science,
>>but to the layman it is part and parcel of science itself. I have yet
>>to understand why anyone should want to strip science of its innate
>>realism but I dare say I am about to learn :)
>
>Maybe I've lost the thread of your argument but, if that is what you mean,
>why did you say, in the part I snipped,
>
> If science predicts something but can't exhibit the reason,
> only the method, - "based on past experience, this seems
> likely", it's no longer science, it's just voodoo. No wonder
> New Agery is rife."
Sorry, I can't see what you're asking. I may have mixed up some ideas
from different threads but we have had some arguments as to whether it
matters if science explains anything as long as it gets results.
>That is exactly what we do in our daily lives, the ultimate "realism". If
>people want "deeper" explanations of "science", then they have to go to the
>philosophers and endure their talk about "epistemology" or "metaphysics",
>even if their only conclusion, like John's, is that one or more don't apply
>to science.
I find that Usenet discussions tend to get bogged down in arguments
about these "deeper" matters before the simpler stuff is addressed. If
someone asks "how can we possibly know how the solar system formed,
there was nobody there to see it" all it needs is a little
common-sensical science. It doesn't need an epistemological diatribe
on "How do we know anything?"
I can give a very simple example of where thae operational view of
science makes mockery of real science. Suppose you have a dog and a
wasp. The old fashioned view of science is that if there is a sudden
yelping sound, you can infer that the wasp has stung the dog. The
postmodern view is that you can say nothing about what has happened,
all you know is that there was the same yelping sound which is
frequently associated with wasps and dogs. The old-fashioned way
allows you to slip the particular case under the unbrella of a general
explanation: wasps sting dogs, dogs don't like being stung, they yelp
when hurt. The new way hides it in the totality of observations and
notes the statistical correlations present in the data. It makes
predictions but it doesn't rely on any assumptions about what exists.
My preference is for the system that says that dogs are real.
>*Which is not to say I find these issues uninteresting. Under John's
>influence, I have been undertaking some readings in the philosophy of
>science, though I'll never be more than a dilettante.
Oh indeed. I haven't stirred myself to go the bookshop yet thogh :)
Derek Potter
Tsk! I am merely probing your system.
You said "making predictions ... from models *is* the explanation of
things". That is so completely contrary to my intuition of what
comprises explanation that you may as well be talking a different
language. As far as I can tell, you say a model need not reflect
reality as long as it works, so a crack-pot theory that gets the same
result as orthodox science is just as good an explanation. That seems
silly so I assume you stick a patch on it by invoking global coherence
(if that's the right term) but then you are not talking about "a
scientific theory" but the entire body of science.
>> If science predicts something but can't exhibit the reason, only the
>> method, - "based on past experience, this seems likely", it's no
>> longer science, it's just voodoo. No wonder New Agery is rife.
>
>If scientific explanation is successful, even though it doesn't satisfy
>Derek Potter's a priori intuitions, then frankly, my dear, I'll go with
>scientific explanation.
More fool you, my dear, for thinking that a formula explains anything.
>> >Now whether or not this means that electrons, quarks and so forth exist
>> >to a scientist is another matter; if a scientist were a total prgamatist
>> >or positivist or whatever, they could *still do perfectly good science*
>> >_and_ explain things with theories.
>>
>> Yes I understand about the "doing". There is no obligation to ask
>> epistemolgical questions or to provide statements if your only aim is
>> to predict. But please explain to me what you mean by "explain things
>> with theories" if the explanation makes no assumption about reality...
>> ...ah, I get it! You've redefined science so it doesn't need to speak
>> about the nature of the thing it's studying and in order to maintain
>> this farce you redefine "explanation" as prediction so the question
>> doesn't arise.
>>
>> <break inserted for comment>
>
>Thank you.
>
>I haven't redefined science. This is how science has always proceeded.
>It is you who are redefining it, to be a deliverer of metaphysics. This
>view is rather late. In fact, it begins, so far as I can tell, in the
>New Age you so rightly denigrate; with morons like Capra, and less
>moronic but equally misguided folk like Arthur Koestler. Prior to that,
>nobody I know of sought to have science *provide* a metaphysics,
>although a good many drew metaphysical conclusions or set up
>metaphysical problems from science (and *that* goes back to Locke and
>Hobbes).
I do not see that providing an realistic explanation within a
realistic metaphysics comprises "delivering a metaphysics". I have
tried to avoid playing tit-for-tat here but your concept of science
also has ontological problems. I gave an example, which you instantly
dismissed as irrelevant, the infinite regress involved if you attempt
to Fisherize the scientific method itself.
>Explanation *is* the deduction of phenomena observed from intitial
>conditions and generalisations. That is what Newton did, that is what
>Laplace did, that is what *all* explanation does. All else is not
>science.
So you keep saying.
>> The question that does arise is whether this metamodel is sufficient
>> for the science that scientists do. At this point I am tempted to play
>> devils advocate and say that many scientists probably don't give a
>> tinker's cuss about what's really going on, all they want is results
>> so that they get paid, but to my mind that is a personality defect,
>> nothing to do with the nature of science. You seem to think that it is
>> actually an improvement.
>
>Not exactly. What I think is that this is why science makes progress at
>all. It's like saying there is nothing really virtuous in the tendency
>of gasoline and air to explode, but that is what moves the car.
<shug> Forget values and teleology. You haven't demonstrated that
realism inhibits science. Many people would say it fosters it. Or it
did until Bohr started the hippie-mumble tendancy.
Indeed so.
>Newton himself, the type specimen of modern science, failed to do what
>you think ought to be done. It might be that we have this resolved by
>Einstein, but all he has done is come up with generalisations from which
>Newton's laws fall out. Every theory has ineffable quantities and
>qualities, and always will.
It's the effing I'm concerned about.
>So if the layman says, "Yes, but what is gravity *really*?" and is told
>that it is a deformation caused by mass in the spacetime continuum
>according to the equations of general and special relativity and its
>heirs and successors, have they been given these metaphysics you seem to
>want science to deliver?
Yes.
> If not, and they aren't, then you really have
>no historical requirement for science to deliver metaphysics. All we are
>left with is this rule:
>
> The Potter Requirement - Science must give metaphysical answers.
>Which, so far as I can see runs contrary to history, practice, logic and
>philosophy. In short, you are imposing requirements on science that
>science never has and never shall adhere to.
Finished ranting?
catshark
wrote:
No, I'd say the purpose of science is to fix the existing scientific
theories.
The question is: are theories supposed to explain what you want them to
explain and to whom.
>
>>>Not in the trivial sense of dumbing down artificial intelligence or
>>>quantum gravity to a five minute sound bite for couch potatoes with
>>>negligible attention span, but in the sense of being able *in
>>>principle* to explain your whole theory in terms which are meaningful
>>>to someone who lacks knowledge but is intelligent and asks searching
>>>questions.
>>
>>I would call that the philosophy of science or science education.
>>Admittedly, that is just back to the definition of what is "science".
>
>I was meaning that to explain, say, "time before the big-bang" you
>need to educate the layman about time, about spacetime, about
>Riemannian geometry etc. Byt the time he can assimilate GR he is no
>longer a layman, but his understanding can be linked to everyday
>concepts - even if part of the process is to abandon what John has
>dubbed "common-sense defaults". But something better is put in their
>place, you don't just leave a vacuum there.
Nope. I don't see what you are getting at. What "something"?
Using common sense default assumptions in doing science, we sometimes get
results that cannot be related to (I think a different type of) common
sense notions of what "ought" to happen.
>
>>>
>>>For this reason I am inclined to agree with John (we make progress)
>>>that the physical notion of a "force" is metaphysical: we cannot see a
>>>force, so explaining gravity as a "force" merely introduces another
>>>entity into the picture. A layman will naively ask "What's a force?"
>>>and the classic school-science answer "It is that which produces or
>>>tends to produce motion" is a circular cop-out.
>>
>>Aren't all definitions ultimately circular?
>
>No, you always need some primitives in any system in order to avoid
>circularity.
>
>> What is an apple? An apple is
>>something that displays all the characteristics we associate with apples.
>
>One would hope that the qualities of an apple are defined in physical
>terms. "Applehood", however, is not a useful predicate.
I wasn't disagreeing, so much as pointing out that those "primitives" are
arrived at by the methodology that John is advocating.
>
>>>However, the layman in my scenario is also ignorant of postmodern
>>>philosophy. I would suggest that most lay people still think a spade
>>>is a spade, not a bundle of spade-ish properties, let alone a formula
>>>for predicting the discovery of a spade in the garden shed. John,
>>>incidentally, *seems* to agree that this metaphysical question is best
>>>answered by making some naive epistemic assumptions. Spades exist.
>>>
>>>I'm a layman. If I get out of my depth I just google or wiki for half
>>>an hour. I am fixated on the remarkable ability of science to craete
>>>what seems to be an understanding of the real world in my mind.
>>
>>Then you are agreeing that John is right that this "naive epistimic
>>assumption" is best? No offense to John (or you, if you are also a
>>professional philosopher)
>
>Splutter! I'm an electronic designer... This argument is purely an
>excuse to break from work :)
Same here (just not an electronic designer).
>
>> but, in my ignorance, it seems to me that some
>>(most?) intractable philosophic problems are the result of overthinking*
>>around the edges of what we can ever know (including the question of what
>>we can "know").
>
>This is probably true but I guess most philosophers would agree that
>much of their efforts are attempts to reduce traditional metaphysical
>questions to epistemology. If someone then comes up with a theorem
>showing that the problem is not solvable then that's the end of the
>matter, but until then the dielectic continues.
>
>>I suspect that the reason you find science so easily and quickly gives an
>>understanding of the "real" world is precisely because it shares the same
>>assumptions we all base our daily lives on reflexively and unconsciously.
>
>Yes! And this is why I object when someone tries to remove them.
I don't see how John is doing that. He is merely saying (AIUI) that
anything beyond those basic assumptions are irrelevant to the process of
*doing* science. The larger "explanatory" (metaphysical?) layers of the
type you seem to be advocating are added, if at all (and John has said we
all have them), afterwards.
>
>>What appears real to us *is* real in all senses important to our lives. If
>>I burn my hand in a fire, I pull my hand out, not spend a day or two
>>contemplating *how* I "know" my hand is burned or what is causing it.
>>
>>>There
>>>has to be a bridge between the scientific models and pictures and the
>>>belief that it is talking about reality. It can be carved off and
>>>labelled "epistemology" or "metaphysics" by philosophers of science,
>>>but to the layman it is part and parcel of science itself. I have yet
>>>to understand why anyone should want to strip science of its innate
>>>realism but I dare say I am about to learn :)
>>
>>Maybe I've lost the thread of your argument but, if that is what you mean,
>>why did you say, in the part I snipped,
>>
>> If science predicts something but can't exhibit the reason,
>> only the method, - "based on past experience, this seems
>> likely", it's no longer science, it's just voodoo. No wonder
>> New Agery is rife."
>
>Sorry, I can't see what you're asking. I may have mixed up some ideas
>from different threads but we have had some arguments as to whether it
>matters if science explains anything as long as it gets results.
You are asking for a "reason". I don't ask for a reason why I don't hit
the ceiling when I get out of bed in the morning rather than the floor. I
simply go about my business.
You seem to want science to go beyond explaining that there is gravity and
how it works to why there should even be such a thing as gravity.
>
>>That is exactly what we do in our daily lives, the ultimate "realism". If
>>people want "deeper" explanations of "science", then they have to go to the
>>philosophers and endure their talk about "epistemology" or "metaphysics",
>>even if their only conclusion, like John's, is that one or more don't apply
>>to science.
>
>I find that Usenet discussions tend to get bogged down in arguments
>about these "deeper" matters before the simpler stuff is addressed. If
>someone asks "how can we possibly know how the solar system formed,
>there was nobody there to see it" all it needs is a little
>common-sensical science. It doesn't need an epistemological diatribe
>on "How do we know anything?"
Well, it is sometimes a healthy reminder to people (not you) who assume
that what they *believe* is what everyone "knows".
>
>I can give a very simple example of where thae operational view of
>science makes mockery of real science. Suppose you have a dog and a
>wasp. The old fashioned view of science is that if there is a sudden
>yelping sound, you can infer that the wasp has stung the dog. The
>postmodern view is that you can say nothing about what has happened,
>all you know is that there was the same yelping sound which is
>frequently associated with wasps and dogs. The old-fashioned way
>allows you to slip the particular case under the unbrella of a general
>explanation: wasps sting dogs, dogs don't like being stung, they yelp
>when hurt. The new way hides it in the totality of observations and
>notes the statistical correlations present in the data. It makes
>predictions but it doesn't rely on any assumptions about what exists.
>My preference is for the system that says that dogs are real.
I don't see where John is saying the dog isn't real, he is just noting that
its reality is irrelevant to whether the inference is a good or a bad one.
Realizing that this was just meant as an example, you seem to be arguing
beyond "dogs are real" to "science can determine and rely on what dogs
'like' and 'don't like' as a basis for prediction of future observations".
Or, to put it the other way 'round, that there is some sort of "essence" to
dogs that science can discover. John is saying, I think, that science
observes the wasp, the stinger, the toxins, the nervous system of the dog,
how the nervous system is affected by the toxins, the vocal cords of the
dog, other stimuli that cause dogs to vocalize, etc., etc. If the wasp was
observed stinging the dog the inference that the sting was what caused the
dog to yelp, given the other information we have, may be strong but the
inability to rule out other causes for the dog to vocalize *this time*
still leaves you with a statistical correlation. Turning that into what
dogs like or don't like is what people almost always do, but not as part of
doing science. That is done under a different hat.
>
>>*Which is not to say I find these issues uninteresting. Under John's
>>influence, I have been undertaking some readings in the philosophy of
>>science, though I'll never be more than a dilettante.
>
>Oh indeed. I haven't stirred myself to go the bookshop yet thogh :)
Ask Wilkins for recommendations . . . if you have good credit at a
bookstore . . .
Derek Potter
>No, I'd say the purpose of science is to fix the existing scientific
>theories.
>
>The question is: are theories supposed to explain what you want them to
>explain and to whom.
Well, let's get our feet on the ground here! Science is what
scientists do. I have been arguing that scientists want to understand
nature thus the function of science is to explain. Of course they are
less inclined to admit it now because the postmodern bully-boys jeer
at them if they talk about the real world in such metaphysical terms
:) However, it seems to me that if scientists basically want to
understand the world than what they do must contain the allegedly
metaphysical idea that the world exists and that a scientific model
corresponds to it and that the workings of the model should correspond
to the workings of reality if it is to comprise an explanation and not
just voodoo.
The controversy then bifurcates. On one side John claims he can strip
science of such metaphysics, on the other you seem to be querying the
teleology without worrying about epristemology or ontology... Oh stuff
these 'ologies. You seem to be concerned with the "practical" aims of
science as opposed to John's concern to strip science of all baggage
just leaving it as pure data collection and analysis.
>>>>Not in the trivial sense of dumbing down artificial intelligence or
>>>>quantum gravity to a five minute sound bite for couch potatoes with
>>>>negligible attention span, but in the sense of being able *in
>>>>principle* to explain your whole theory in terms which are meaningful
>>>>to someone who lacks knowledge but is intelligent and asks searching
>>>>questions.
>>>
>>>I would call that the philosophy of science or science education.
>>>Admittedly, that is just back to the definition of what is "science".
>>
>>I was meaning that to explain, say, "time before the big-bang" you
>>need to educate the layman about time, about spacetime, about
>>Riemannian geometry etc. Byt the time he can assimilate GR he is no
>>longer a layman, but his understanding can be linked to everyday
>>concepts - even if part of the process is to abandon what John has
>>dubbed "common-sense defaults". But something better is put in their
>>place, you don't just leave a vacuum there.
>
>Nope. I don't see what you are getting at. What "something"?
A good cosmology. Not a pile of data and some statistical summary
which doesn't mention any real object in the universe.
I can understand why you find it hard to see what I'm getting at. I'm
not getting at anything new or smart. I'm just sticking to a naive
view of science - that it seeks to explain.
>Using common sense default assumptions in doing science, we sometimes get
>results that cannot be related to (I think a different type of) common
>sense notions of what "ought" to happen.
Indeed. Then common-sense kicks in again and revises its
preconceptions. What's obscure about that?
>
>>
>>>>
>>>>For this reason I am inclined to agree with John (we make progress)
>>>>that the physical notion of a "force" is metaphysical: we cannot see a
>>>>force, so explaining gravity as a "force" merely introduces another
>>>>entity into the picture. A layman will naively ask "What's a force?"
>>>>and the classic school-science answer "It is that which produces or
>>>>tends to produce motion" is a circular cop-out.
>>>
>>>Aren't all definitions ultimately circular?
>>
>>No, you always need some primitives in any system in order to avoid
>>circularity.
>>
>>> What is an apple? An apple is
>>>something that displays all the characteristics we associate with apples.
>>
>>One would hope that the qualities of an apple are defined in physical
>>terms. "Applehood", however, is not a useful predicate.
>
>I wasn't disagreeing, so much as pointing out that those "primitives" are
>arrived at by the methodology that John is advocating.
The nature of primitives is to admit them a priori rather than arrive
at them. In one sense John's ideas imply that every damn observation
ever made is a primitive. On the other hand, I assume he allows
abstractions. Can't speak for the man though...
The key phrase is "doing science". If you mean going through the
motions, picking up your salary, and turning out effective drugs for
Pfizer then certainly you can "do science" without employing a single
metaphysical synapse in your skull. However, if you mean "doing what
scientists have always done" and providing an account of nature, then
the metaphysics is inseparable from it. To be honest, I do not
consider that the ontology and epistemology required for realism
warrents the derogatory term "metaphysics" but c'est la vie.
>>
>>>What appears real to us *is* real in all senses important to our lives. If
>>>I burn my hand in a fire, I pull my hand out, not spend a day or two
>>>contemplating *how* I "know" my hand is burned or what is causing it.
>>>
>>>>There
>>>>has to be a bridge between the scientific models and pictures and the
>>>>belief that it is talking about reality. It can be carved off and
>>>>labelled "epistemology" or "metaphysics" by philosophers of science,
>>>>but to the layman it is part and parcel of science itself. I have yet
>>>>to understand why anyone should want to strip science of its innate
>>>>realism but I dare say I am about to learn :)
>>>
>>>Maybe I've lost the thread of your argument but, if that is what you mean,
>>>why did you say, in the part I snipped,
>>>
>>> If science predicts something but can't exhibit the reason,
>>> only the method, - "based on past experience, this seems
>>> likely", it's no longer science, it's just voodoo. No wonder
>>> New Agery is rife."
>>
>>Sorry, I can't see what you're asking. I may have mixed up some ideas
>>from different threads but we have had some arguments as to whether it
>>matters if science explains anything as long as it gets results.
>
>You are asking for a "reason". I don't ask for a reason why I don't hit
>the ceiling when I get out of bed in the morning rather than the floor. I
>simply go about my business.
>
>You seem to want science to go beyond explaining that there is gravity and
>how it works to why there should even be such a thing as gravity.
Not at all. I agree that that would indeed be unambiguously
metaphysical. I want science to do exactly what you describe. I want
it to be free to explain without harrassment from people who claim
that observation without explanation is all that's needed.
>
>>
>>>That is exactly what we do in our daily lives, the ultimate "realism". If
>>>people want "deeper" explanations of "science", then they have to go to the
>>>philosophers and endure their talk about "epistemology" or "metaphysics",
>>>even if their only conclusion, like John's, is that one or more don't apply
>>>to science.
>>
>>I find that Usenet discussions tend to get bogged down in arguments
>>about these "deeper" matters before the simpler stuff is addressed. If
>>someone asks "how can we possibly know how the solar system formed,
>>there was nobody there to see it" all it needs is a little
>>common-sensical science. It doesn't need an epistemological diatribe
>>on "How do we know anything?"
>
>Well, it is sometimes a healthy reminder to people (not you) who assume
>that what they *believe* is what everyone "knows".
I'd include myself. I lapse into naive realism between bouts of Usenet
fever.
>>I can give a very simple example of where thae operational view of
>>science makes mockery of real science. Suppose you have a dog and a
>>wasp. The old fashioned view of science is that if there is a sudden
>>yelping sound, you can infer that the wasp has stung the dog. The
>>postmodern view is that you can say nothing about what has happened,
>>all you know is that there was the same yelping sound which is
>>frequently associated with wasps and dogs. The old-fashioned way
>>allows you to slip the particular case under the unbrella of a general
>>explanation: wasps sting dogs, dogs don't like being stung, they yelp
>>when hurt. The new way hides it in the totality of observations and
>>notes the statistical correlations present in the data. It makes
>>predictions but it doesn't rely on any assumptions about what exists.
>>My preference is for the system that says that dogs are real.
>
>I don't see where John is saying the dog isn't real, he is just noting that
>its reality is irrelevant to whether the inference is a good or a bad one.
No, *John* is not saying the dog isn't real, he's saying that science
also does not say so. However, I can't make any sense of the idea that
science predicts an observation (that the dog will be more sensitive
than usual to having his nose touched, for instance) without having to
make the assumption that the dog exists. What is the theory of
observations that does not require existence of the thing observed?
>Realizing that this was just meant as an example, you seem to be arguing
>beyond "dogs are real" to "science can determine and rely on what dogs
>'like' and 'don't like' as a basis for prediction of future observations".
>Or, to put it the other way 'round, that there is some sort of "essence" to
>dogs that science can discover.
I sincerely hope science does not discover "essence of dog" in my
lifetime.
> John is saying, I think, that science
>observes the wasp, the stinger, the toxins, the nervous system of the dog,
>how the nervous system is affected by the toxins, the vocal cords of the
>dog, other stimuli that cause dogs to vocalize, etc., etc. If the wasp was
>observed stinging the dog the inference that the sting was what caused the
>dog to yelp, given the other information we have, may be strong but the
>inability to rule out other causes for the dog to vocalize *this time*
>still leaves you with a statistical correlation. Turning that into what
>dogs like or don't like is what people almost always do, but not as part of
>doing science. That is done under a different hat.
Yes, that's what he's saying. I think he's wrong. Claims to be
explaining something about reality are implicit in every scientific
theory.
catshark
wrote:
>catshark gets an answer from me...
>
>
>>No, I'd say the purpose of science is to fix the existing scientific
>>theories.
>>
>>The question is: are theories supposed to explain what you want them to
>>explain and to whom.
>
>Well, let's get our feet on the ground here! Science is what
>scientists do. I have been arguing that scientists want to understand
>nature thus the function of science is to explain.
No, you said they want/need to explain it to non-scientists. Within
science, they seem to be content to have data and predictive models.
>Of course they are
>less inclined to admit it now because the postmodern bully-boys jeer
>at them if they talk about the real world in such metaphysical terms
>:) However, it seems to me that if scientists basically want to
>understand the world than what they do must contain the allegedly
>metaphysical idea that the world exists and that a scientific model
>corresponds to it and that the workings of the model should correspond
>to the workings of reality if it is to comprise an explanation and not
>just voodoo.
>
>The controversy then bifurcates. On one side John claims he can strip
>science of such metaphysics, on the other you seem to be querying the
>teleology without worrying about epristemology or ontology... Oh stuff
>these 'ologies. You seem to be concerned with the "practical" aims of
>science as opposed to John's concern to strip science of all baggage
>just leaving it as pure data collection and analysis.
I'm a pragmatist when it comes to that. As John said he was.
>
>>>>>Not in the trivial sense of dumbing down artificial intelligence or
>>>>>quantum gravity to a five minute sound bite for couch potatoes with
>>>>>negligible attention span, but in the sense of being able *in
>>>>>principle* to explain your whole theory in terms which are meaningful
>>>>>to someone who lacks knowledge but is intelligent and asks searching
>>>>>questions.
>>>>
>>>>I would call that the philosophy of science or science education.
>>>>Admittedly, that is just back to the definition of what is "science".
>>>
>>>I was meaning that to explain, say, "time before the big-bang" you
>>>need to educate the layman about time, about spacetime, about
>>>Riemannian geometry etc. Byt the time he can assimilate GR he is no
>>>longer a layman, but his understanding can be linked to everyday
>>>concepts - even if part of the process is to abandon what John has
>>>dubbed "common-sense defaults". But something better is put in their
>>>place, you don't just leave a vacuum there.
>>
>>Nope. I don't see what you are getting at. What "something"?
>
>A good cosmology. Not a pile of data and some statistical summary
>which doesn't mention any real object in the universe.
But that *is* explained (to scientists) by data and models. What *more* do
you want?
>
>I can understand why you find it hard to see what I'm getting at. I'm
>not getting at anything new or smart. I'm just sticking to a naive
>view of science - that it seeks to explain.
>
>>Using common sense default assumptions in doing science, we sometimes get
>>results that cannot be related to (I think a different type of) common
>>sense notions of what "ought" to happen.
>
>Indeed. Then common-sense kicks in again and revises its
>preconceptions. What's obscure about that?
Besides the fact that it often doesn't (how many people have adjusted their
"common-sense" to the uncertainty principle?), if the results what more is
needed from science, if the results of the process of data-gathering and
forming predictive models is enough?
>>>>>For this reason I am inclined to agree with John (we make progress)
>>>>>that the physical notion of a "force" is metaphysical: we cannot see a
>>>>>force, so explaining gravity as a "force" merely introduces another
>>>>>entity into the picture. A layman will naively ask "What's a force?"
>>>>>and the classic school-science answer "It is that which produces or
>>>>>tends to produce motion" is a circular cop-out.
>>>>
>>>>Aren't all definitions ultimately circular?
>>>
>>>No, you always need some primitives in any system in order to avoid
>>>circularity.
>>>
>>>> What is an apple? An apple is
>>>>something that displays all the characteristics we associate with apples.
>>>
>>>One would hope that the qualities of an apple are defined in physical
>>>terms. "Applehood", however, is not a useful predicate.
>>
>>I wasn't disagreeing, so much as pointing out that those "primitives" are
>>arrived at by the methodology that John is advocating.
>
>The nature of primitives is to admit them a priori rather than arrive
>at them. In one sense John's ideas imply that every damn observation
>ever made is a primitive. On the other hand, I assume he allows
>abstractions. Can't speak for the man though...
He already answered:
[A]ll abstractions are inductive generalisations from our
(very much physical and concrete) behavioral and linguistic
practices and observations. The information here is Fisher
information - the likelihood that a measurement accurately
reflects the actual state of the observed things or processes.
In short, the observed state of a moving object provides
information about the initial state of that object. Much
information is lost, of course.
Of course, the object en soi is just following the physical
nature it and the world around it has, however we represent
it. No consciousness involved apart from our modes of
representation.
Message-ID: <1gc963v.12bjs5z1woxm8yN%john...@wilkins.id.au>
I think I agree (and have been agreeing) with him. But damned if I know
what Fisher information really is . . .
[...]
>>>>I suspect that the reason you find science so easily and quickly gives an
>>>>understanding of the "real" world is precisely because it shares the same
>>>>assumptions we all base our daily lives on reflexively and unconsciously.
>>>
>>>Yes! And this is why I object when someone tries to remove them.
>>
>>I don't see how John is doing that. He is merely saying (AIUI) that
>>anything beyond those basic assumptions are irrelevant to the process of
>>*doing* science. The larger "explanatory" (metaphysical?) layers of the
>>type you seem to be advocating are added, if at all (and John has said we
>>all have them), afterwards.
>
>The key phrase is "doing science". If you mean going through the
>motions, picking up your salary, and turning out effective drugs for
>Pfizer then certainly you can "do science" without employing a single
>metaphysical synapse in your skull. However, if you mean "doing what
>scientists have always done" and providing an account of nature, then
>the metaphysics is inseparable from it.
The only thing I can gather is that you are mistaking what John (and I)
mean by "doing" science. It is not a mere "job" where you punch in and
out, any more than someone "becomes" a scientist by getting some degree.
It is an approach (though not a single, easily definable one) to the data
available that no one follows at all times. Once you stop using that
approach you are no longer doing science but something else, including
explaining what you tink the data means in some "larger sense", which may
or may not be useful.
[...]
>>You seem to want science to go beyond explaining that there is gravity and
>>how it works to why there should even be such a thing as gravity.
>
>Not at all. I agree that that would indeed be unambiguously
>metaphysical. I want science to do exactly what you describe. I want
>it to be free to explain without harrassment from people who claim
>that observation without explanation is all that's needed.
But the explanation *is*: we have observations of data and these predictive
models fit the data . . .
Would it change the data or the model? What is it that you want science to
say about the "existence" of the dog that it doesn't say under John's
formulation?
>
>>Realizing that this was just meant as an example, you seem to be arguing
>>beyond "dogs are real" to "science can determine and rely on what dogs
>>'like' and 'don't like' as a basis for prediction of future observations".
>>Or, to put it the other way 'round, that there is some sort of "essence" to
>>dogs that science can discover.
>
>I sincerely hope science does not discover "essence of dog" in my
>lifetime.
>
>> John is saying, I think, that science
>>observes the wasp, the stinger, the toxins, the nervous system of the dog,
>>how the nervous system is affected by the toxins, the vocal cords of the
>>dog, other stimuli that cause dogs to vocalize, etc., etc. If the wasp was
>>observed stinging the dog the inference that the sting was what caused the
>>dog to yelp, given the other information we have, may be strong but the
>>inability to rule out other causes for the dog to vocalize *this time*
>>still leaves you with a statistical correlation. Turning that into what
>>dogs like or don't like is what people almost always do, but not as part of
>>doing science. That is done under a different hat.
>
>Yes, that's what he's saying. I think he's wrong. Claims to be
>explaining something about reality are implicit in every scientific
>theory.
Maybe. Depending, of course by what "existence" means. But the point is
that it is still the data about the dog that counts. If its existing or
not affects the data, it will change that data one way or another and the
change in the data will require a change in the model. If it doesn't
change the data, how would we ever determine if it "exists" or not? If the
former, the explanation is already captured in the data, if the latter, the
explanation is meaningless anyway.
Derek Potter
>On Sat, 17 Apr 2004 17:59:59 +0000 (UTC), Derek Potter <m...@privacy.net>
>wrote:
>
>>catshark gets an answer from me...
>>
>>
>>>No, I'd say the purpose of science is to fix the existing scientific
>>>theories.
>>>
>>>The question is: are theories supposed to explain what you want them to
>>>explain and to whom.
>>
>>Well, let's get our feet on the ground here! Science is what
>>scientists do. I have been arguing that scientists want to understand
>>nature thus the function of science is to explain.
>
>No, you said they want/need to explain it to non-scientists. Within
>science, they seem to be content to have data and predictive models.
Most of the biologists I know would be very surprised if you suggested
to them that it doesn't matter whether their cell cultures are real or
not.To them, the stuff they see under the microscope is pretty real.
>>Of course they are
>>less inclined to admit it now because the postmodern bully-boys jeer
>>at them if they talk about the real world in such metaphysical terms
>>:) However, it seems to me that if scientists basically want to
>>understand the world than what they do must contain the allegedly
>>metaphysical idea that the world exists and that a scientific model
>>corresponds to it and that the workings of the model should correspond
>>to the workings of reality if it is to comprise an explanation and not
>>just voodoo.
>>
>>The controversy then bifurcates. On one side John claims he can strip
>>science of such metaphysics, on the other you seem to be querying the
>>teleology without worrying about epristemology or ontology... Oh stuff
>>these 'ologies. You seem to be concerned with the "practical" aims of
>>science as opposed to John's concern to strip science of all baggage
>>just leaving it as pure data collection and analysis.
>
>I'm a pragmatist when it comes to that. As John said he was.
There is value in a pragmatic methodology - for pragmatic purposes.
But I wouldn't be too hasty to limit myself to *any* theory of what
science is. Why exclude a non-pragmatic teleology a priori?
>>>>>>Not in the trivial sense of dumbing down artificial intelligence or
>>>>>>quantum gravity to a five minute sound bite for couch potatoes with
>>>>>>negligible attention span, but in the sense of being able *in
>>>>>>principle* to explain your whole theory in terms which are meaningful
>>>>>>to someone who lacks knowledge but is intelligent and asks searching
>>>>>>questions.
>>>>>
>>>>>I would call that the philosophy of science or science education.
>>>>>Admittedly, that is just back to the definition of what is "science".
>>>>
>>>>I was meaning that to explain, say, "time before the big-bang" you
>>>>need to educate the layman about time, about spacetime, about
>>>>Riemannian geometry etc. Byt the time he can assimilate GR he is no
>>>>longer a layman, but his understanding can be linked to everyday
>>>>concepts - even if part of the process is to abandon what John has
>>>>dubbed "common-sense defaults". But something better is put in their
>>>>place, you don't just leave a vacuum there.
>>>
>>>Nope. I don't see what you are getting at. What "something"?
>>
>>A good cosmology. Not a pile of data and some statistical summary
>>which doesn't mention any real object in the universe.
>
>But that *is* explained (to scientists) by data and models. What *more* do
>you want?
I disagree. Of course you *could* in principle, strip a such a theory
down to arithmetic, turn the handle and get out "answers" completely
devoid of semantic content so that it says *nothing* about nature. If
you'll pardon my throwing your own words back in your face, you did
talk about laws of nature just now. Our friend John would never soil
his lips with such a metaphysical term.
>>I can understand why you find it hard to see what I'm getting at. I'm
>>not getting at anything new or smart. I'm just sticking to a naive
>>view of science - that it seeks to explain.
>>
>>>Using common sense default assumptions in doing science, we sometimes get
>>>results that cannot be related to (I think a different type of) common
>>>sense notions of what "ought" to happen.
>>
>>Indeed. Then common-sense kicks in again and revises its
>>preconceptions. What's obscure about that?
>
>Besides the fact that it often doesn't (how many people have adjusted their
>"common-sense" to the uncertainty principle?) if the results what more is
>needed from science, if the results of the process of data-gathering and
>forming predictive models is enough?
How many people have had the chance? Opportunity, motivation, ability
or whatever they say in whodunnits.
Predictive models are only enough if you only want prediction, duh. If
you want to understand the world you must either let science be joined
with realism, or acknowledge its innate relaism or else stick with
your pragmatism and redefine "understand" without referring to
existence or objects or reality. It seems a high price to pay just to
maintain the fiction that science has never attempted to explain
anything.
Well don't admit it here, we all have to fake a little :)
From what I gather, it's a mathematical technique that sees how
successful your predictive theory is. I may very well be missing
John's point but if so, it's his fault for not explaining it. But if I
have understood him, Fisher information quantifies how good a model
is. Philosophically I think John is using it to replace metaphysical
assertions about objects being real with mathematical analysis
confirming that the model works. That is all very fine and dandy but
this kind of analysis is needed if you have a realistic philosophy
too. That should trigger an alarm bell. If it has any relevance to the
theory of science then it can't lie in the statistics which are of
equal value in any system but in the metaphysics or alleged lack of
it.
>[...]
>
>>>>>I suspect that the reason you find science so easily and quickly gives an
>>>>>understanding of the "real" world is precisely because it shares the same
>>>>>assumptions we all base our daily lives on reflexively and unconsciously.
>>>>
>>>>Yes! And this is why I object when someone tries to remove them.
>>>
>>>I don't see how John is doing that. He is merely saying (AIUI) that
>>>anything beyond those basic assumptions are irrelevant to the process of
>>>*doing* science. The larger "explanatory" (metaphysical?) layers of the
>>>type you seem to be advocating are added, if at all (and John has said we
>>>all have them), afterwards.
>>
>>The key phrase is "doing science". If you mean going through the
>>motions, picking up your salary, and turning out effective drugs for
>>Pfizer then certainly you can "do science" without employing a single
>>metaphysical synapse in your skull. However, if you mean "doing what
>>scientists have always done" and providing an account of nature, then
>>the metaphysics is inseparable from it.
>
>The only thing I can gather is that you are mistaking what John (and I)
>mean by "doing" science. It is not a mere "job" where you punch in and
>out, any more than someone "becomes" a scientist by getting some degree.
>It is an approach (though not a single, easily definable one) to the data
>available that no one follows at all times. Once you stop using that
>approach you are no longer doing science but something else, including
>explaining what you tink the data means in some "larger sense", which may
>or may not be useful.
So how would this data-prediction paradigm work when the end result is
publishing a paper in Nature about the "Evolution of triple
chlorinated hypersporin antibody resistance in e.coli.pilchardii926
cultures with disabled theta-maltoxin receptors"?
Do Nature and Science really talk metaphysics? Or is it the postmodern
philosophers who have lost track of which is the floor and which the
ceiling?
>[...]
>
>>>You seem to want science to go beyond explaining that there is gravity and
>>>how it works to why there should even be such a thing as gravity.
>>
>>Not at all. I agree that that would indeed be unambiguously
>>metaphysical. I want science to do exactly what you describe. I want
>>it to be free to explain without harrassment from people who claim
>>that observation without explanation is all that's needed.
>
>But the explanation *is*: we have observations of data and these predictive
>models fit the data . . .
The fact that the predictions work is just another observation.
What dog would that be?
*Of course* we can't determine *whether* something exists by pragmatic
means.
John Wilkins
Yur intuition is not the metre against which we test philosophical
theories. If you knew the field you are "probing" you;d know that, agree
or not, that *is* the current consensual view on explanation, and it is
the end result of several centuries of debate on the matter (in fact,
that topic goes back to Aristotle's Topics).
And you still haven't shown how the n-d model and its derivatives for
history and statistical sciences is insufficient. Of course, this
*might* be because you don't understand it.
If you cannot recognise metaphysics when you see it, why are you even
trying to argue? If *realism* is not a metaphysical position, nothing
is.
>
> >Explanation *is* the deduction of phenomena observed from intitial
> >conditions and generalisations. That is what Newton did, that is what
> >Laplace did, that is what *all* explanation does. All else is not
> >science.
>
> So you keep saying.
>
> >> The question that does arise is whether this metamodel is sufficient
> >> for the science that scientists do. At this point I am tempted to play
> >> devils advocate and say that many scientists probably don't give a
> >> tinker's cuss about what's really going on, all they want is results
> >> so that they get paid, but to my mind that is a personality defect,
> >> nothing to do with the nature of science. You seem to think that it is
> >> actually an improvement.
> >
> >Not exactly. What I think is that this is why science makes progress at
> >all. It's like saying there is nothing really virtuous in the tendency
> >of gasoline and air to explode, but that is what moves the car.
>
> <shug> Forget values and teleology. You haven't demonstrated that
> realism inhibits science. Many people would say it fosters it. Or it
> did until Bohr started the hippie-mumble tendancy.
Jesus. I never said realism *inhibits* science. You insist on
misunderstanding, wilfully or no, what I said. I said that realism is
not *part* of science. Fuck, you even quote a bona fide counterexample
to your view. Whether you like Bohr or not (and it is clear you don't
understand *him*), here is someone who is not a realist, and does
*damned* good science.
Yes, and I think we have finished this thread, when I am so frustrated
with a conversant that I start to swear. You think what you think, OK?
In the meantime, I continue to find that science is metaphysics
neutral...
John Wilkins
two people understand each other and simply disagree. I shall respond
henceforth to small bits only
Derek Potter <m...@privacy.net> wrote:
> John Wilkins gets an answer from me...
>
> >Derek Potter <m...@privacy.net> wrote:
> >
...
> I would agree about the common-sense boundary, but I do not think that
> laymen are a special variety of human beings who cannot be persuaded
> that common-sense is misleading and cannot learn. The ability to
> suspend the common-sense defaults is, itself common-sense. So-called
> "science" that cannot do so in principle is just magick or
> hippy-mumble.
This is merely confused. Of *course* laymen can be educated into
understand the science past the common sense boundary. We call it
scientific education. It takes around 8 years beyond the general
education everyone receives. If you wish further to become a specialist
in a field or topic, that can take another 3 - 6 years.
>
> However, you should appreciate that my saying "it is the sole purpose"
> was hyperbole. As I said elsewhere, the purpose of "doing science" is
> usually to get paid at the end of the month. However I stick with my
> assertion that science *ought* to create theories that can be related,
> via a naive theory of observation, to the fact that the scientist gets
> up in the morning, goes to work, switches on the accelerator,
> sequencer, mass spectrometer etc and observes readings. Off-hand I
> can't think of any kind of science where this
> reduction-to-objective-lay-concepts doesn't apply: with the single
> exception of the meta-science of artificial consciousness, which, I am
> informed, makes a claim to be studying a lay concept without feeling
> obliged to tell anyone how the method works.
Catshark has dealt with this well enough. Allow me to say, though, that
science does not deliver soundbites. The "bearer of the knowledge" that
science uncovers is the scientific *community*, and any technical
community that is parasitic upon that knowledge (such as engineers,
manufacturers, policy bodies and computer software programmers).
Scienc eis not here to explain things to the lay person. That is what
science journalists are for. The fact that they almost never are able to
convey the *real* ideas should give you pause. What you are asking for
has *never existed*.
>
> The word *ought* was deliberate. I do not deny that you can construct
> a concept of science which is operational, offloading any metaphysics,
> even the minimalist ontology and epistemology, to yourself - as the
> observer of science. If someone were to argue that I am talking about
> "science-plus" i.e. science plus a teleological value system, then I
> would say, "No, you are talking about 'science-minus', science
> stripped of the values that motivate scientists". The problem isn't so
> much where you put the line round science but what you do with the
> values. If they are not part of science they are still so closely
> associated with it that laymen assume they are part of it. Separation
> doesn't remove the obligation of the scientist to give an account of
> reality or else give a convincing reason why he/she should not.
This gets back to the Potter Principle, then - what Derek seeks is what
science must provide.
And there is no single set of jointly necessary and severall sufficient
values that motivate all and only scientists. The search for that holy
grail was abadnoned a while back...
> >For values of "exist" that means "makes a difference to X practices",
> >but then, I'm a pragmatist.
>
> I do not feel obliged to join any party. There is sense in pragmatism
> as there is in empiricism, realism etc. To my mind the significance of
> theories of science is philosophical, in particular it's
> epistemological.
To your mind, yes. But in fact society doesn't agree with you - it
supports science for what it can do, and what it can find out,
independently of epistemological principles.
> They should not restrict the practice of science nor
> determine what is said in the name of science. To repeat the point, if
> a layman asks what quarks are, he/she deserves a better answer than
> "they are just entities in a model, we don't know whether they exist".
So scientists should *invent* a philosophical explanation over and above
what it is that physics does, to satisfy the Potter Principle?
The way scientists find out what the explanans is, is to do more
science. At any point there are unanalysed entities. Science doesn't
have to make up stories for them, but instead find out the properties
and constituents of these entities. In some cases they have to verify
the existence of these entities first.
> Obviously nobody knows that anything exists in the sense of being able
> to prove solipsism false, but science should be able to say whther
> quarks exist in the same way as particle accelerators exist or whether
> they are merely computational methods. The criterion is pretty simple:
> does the model suggest a *thing* or not? That is, obviously,
> subjective, but the bundle of properties called a "spade" does
> *suggest* a substantial spade, whether you actually believe in
> substance or not. Whereas a correlation between drinking and accidents
> does not. If this naive view - that there is a reality of things -
> doen't fit in which postmodern definitions of sceince, too bad. It's
> not as if any theory of knowledge is totally without problems - or is
> the subject "finished" now? :)
>
...
> > Science is not innately
> >relaist, except in the very trivial sense that scientific theories posit
> >the "reality" of the ontology of their models. That is, if there is an
> >entity in a successful theory, then those who propose that theory will
> >tend (not always!) to say those entities exist.
>
> Eh? Isn't that what we were discussing?
No - you want a metaphysical account of things; scientists merely want a
model that accounts for them.
John Wilkins
> catshark gets an answer from me...
>
> >On Fri, 16 Apr 2004 14:45:28 +0000 (UTC), Derek Potter <m...@privacy.net>
> >wrote:
> >
> >>catshark gets an answer from me...
> >>
> >>>On Fri, 16 Apr 2004 11:03:16 +0000 (UTC), Derek Potter <m...@privacy.net>
> >>>wrote:
> >>>
> >>>[...]
> >>>
> >>>Pardon my butting in to this interesting thread (keep it up) . . .
> >>>
> >>>>>> >Pragmatism does not dispose of all metaphysical commitments.
> >>>>>> >Nothing does. I am merely defending the claim that *science* has
> >>>>>> >no metaphysical commitments other than the ability of observers to
> >>>>>> >measure things.
> >>>
> >>>[big snip]
> >>>
> >>>>At this point the layman is likely to ask why the formula
> >>>>works or what it means. I don't think "It just does!" is a scientific
> >>>>answer.
> >>>
> >>>So you are saying that explaining things to laymen is part of "science"?
> >>
> >>Ultimately it is the sole purpose of science!
If this was hyperbole, it is false hyperbole.
> >
> >So the sole purpose of auto mechanics is to explain automobiles to
> >non-mechanics?
> >
> >Now, of course, some mechanics must spend some time explaining how cars
> >work to other people who want to learn to be mechanics themselves. And
> >some time must be spent explaining what the mechanics are doing to
> >customers' cars to justify the customers paying for it. But I don't think
> >that those things are properly called the sole or even the main purpose of
> >auto mechanics.
>
> Qute so. If you *define* sceince operationally then it has no purpose.
> If you accept that the purpose of mechanics is to fix cars, then the
> purpose of science is to explain.
To whom? Think hard on that before you answer.
The "goal" (there are many goals, but let's simplify for the point made)
of computer programming is to deliver programs that work for the user,
not to explain how the program was developed, what the algorithms used
were, and so on (despite a considerable number of user manuals written
on the assumption that *is* the purpose of the manual).
"The purpose" of science is to do science - to explain phenomena, to
enable manipulation of them, to predict and retrodict what
>
> >>Not in the trivial sense of dumbing down artificial intelligence or
> >>quantum gravity to a five minute sound bite for couch potatoes with
> >>negligible attention span, but in the sense of being able *in
> >>principle* to explain your whole theory in terms which are meaningful
> >>to someone who lacks knowledge but is intelligent and asks searching
> >>questions.
> >
> >I would call that the philosophy of science or science education.
> >Admittedly, that is just back to the definition of what is "science".
>
> I was meaning that to explain, say, "time before the big-bang" you
> need to educate the layman about time, about spacetime, about
> Riemannian geometry etc. Byt the time he can assimilate GR he is no
> longer a layman, but his understanding can be linked to everyday
> concepts - even if part of the process is to abandon what John has
> dubbed "common-sense defaults". But something better is put in their
> place, you don't just leave a vacuum there.
And why do this? Because the layman wants to become a scientist. But if
nobody asked that question, apart from scientists, the cosmological
community would continue as before.
Incidentally, popular works like Hawking's History of Time do *not*
educate the layman about those concepts, they play with metaphors that
get some rough idea about what the concepts are. You need extensive math
to *understand* them. This, too, has always been a feature of science
since Newton. Education, not popularisation, is how you understand
science. And you understand it on *it's* terms.
>
> >>
> >>For this reason I am inclined to agree with John (we make progress)
> >>that the physical notion of a "force" is metaphysical: we cannot see a
> >>force, so explaining gravity as a "force" merely introduces another
> >>entity into the picture. A layman will naively ask "What's a force?"
> >>and the classic school-science answer "It is that which produces or
> >>tends to produce motion" is a circular cop-out.
> >
> >Aren't all definitions ultimately circular?
>
> No, you always need some primitives in any system in order to avoid
> circularity.
There is vicious circularity, in which the meanings of the terms to be
defined and used in the definition. But there is virtuous circularity in
a large self-supporting system, because the meanings are not *solely*
defined by terms, but also by behavior, or interpretation, as logicians
call it.
Foundationalists require undefined primitives. Coherentists do not. It
is not axiomatic that science must be axiomatic, in other words.
>
> > What is an apple? An apple is
> >something that displays all the characteristics we associate with apples.
>
> One would hope that the qualities of an apple are defined in physical
> terms. "Applehood", however, is not a useful predicate.
To be sure. But that is how it might have been dealt with before
science. Moliere's virtus dormativa is the usual example. But catshark
is right - the words "apple", "Apfel", "pomme", "manzana", "mela" and so
forth are not *defined*, they are exemplified in some object the
community repeatedly applies the words to. From that exemplar, we
investigate further the properties that are associated with it.
If we are scientists, or agricultural breeders using the science, we
will learn a lot more about that exemplar. We might even dissolve the
common sense category because it fails to match the natural world. This
happens a lot.
>
> >>However, the layman in my scenario is also ignorant of postmodern
> >>philosophy. I would suggest that most lay people still think a spade
> >>is a spade, not a bundle of spade-ish properties, let alone a formula
> >>for predicting the discovery of a spade in the garden shed. John,
> >>incidentally, *seems* to agree that this metaphysical question is best
> >>answered by making some naive epistemic assumptions. Spades exist.
> >>
> >>I'm a layman. If I get out of my depth I just google or wiki for half
> >>an hour. I am fixated on the remarkable ability of science to craete
> >>what seems to be an understanding of the real world in my mind.
> >
> >Then you are agreeing that John is right that this "naive epistimic
> >assumption" is best? No offense to John (or you, if you are also a
> >professional philosopher)
>
> Splutter! I'm an electronic designer... This argument is purely an
> excuse to break from work :)
>
> > but, in my ignorance, it seems to me that some
> >(most?) intractable philosophic problems are the result of overthinking*
> >around the edges of what we can ever know (including the question of what
> >we can "know").
>
> This is probably true but I guess most philosophers would agree that
> much of their efforts are attempts to reduce traditional metaphysical
> questions to epistemology. If someone then comes up with a theorem
> showing that the problem is not solvable then that's the end of the
> matter, but until then the dielectic continues.
In fact, most philosophers would not agree with that. There are
epistemic issues and there are metaphysical issues (and ethical ones,
and esthetic ones, and so forth; philosophy is a broad metadiscipline).
*Some* might try to reduce metaphysics to epistemology, but other have
traditionally done the reverse.
>
> >I suspect that the reason you find science so easily and quickly gives an
> >understanding of the "real" world is precisely because it shares the same
> >assumptions we all base our daily lives on reflexively and unconsciously.
>
> Yes! And this is why I object when someone tries to remove them.
You must have real problems with Newton then...
Actually, that depends on what is being argued *against*. If you have a
flat earther who takes all "science" from the cosmologies of the various
authors of the Bible, then you may very well need to address that
epistemological stuff first. It is anything but common sense, as
aquaintance with the history of, say, the telescope would know.
>
> I can give a very simple example of where thae operational view of
> science makes mockery of real science. Suppose you have a dog and a
> wasp. The old fashioned view of science is that if there is a sudden
> yelping sound, you can infer that the wasp has stung the dog. The
> postmodern view is that you can say nothing about what has happened,
> all you know is that there was the same yelping sound which is
> frequently associated with wasps and dogs. The old-fashioned way
> allows you to slip the particular case under the unbrella of a general
> explanation: wasps sting dogs, dogs don't like being stung, they yelp
> when hurt. The new way hides it in the totality of observations and
> notes the statistical correlations present in the data. It makes
> predictions but it doesn't rely on any assumptions about what exists.
> My preference is for the system that says that dogs are real.
These are caricatures of the real views held. But my claim is that
despite the worst excesses of some postmodernists, all science need sto
do is uncover a model, such as the models of central nervous systems and
histamine reactions, in order to have explained the dog's reactions.
Nothing is added by saying that the "there exists" or "forall" operators
at the beginning of the formula for the model have any metaphysical
interpretation, from the PoV of science.
>
> >*Which is not to say I find these issues uninteresting. Under John's
> >influence, I have been undertaking some readings in the philosophy of
> >science, though I'll never be more than a dilettante.
>
> Oh indeed. I haven't stirred myself to go the bookshop yet thogh :)
Then we are going to find that we do not share sufficient common
knowledge to have a sensible discussion. I am already finding some of
your claims outlandish, and something anyone with a basic reading of the
literature would know is outlandish.
Derek Potter
And I have also qualified what I said - to catshark. I was only using
"layman" as an illustration that science ought to have a continuum of
explanation which does tocuch what we all think of as reality until
philosphers come along and screw with our minds.
>> The word *ought* was deliberate. I do not deny that you can construct
>> a concept of science which is operational, offloading any metaphysics,
>> even the minimalist ontology and epistemology, to yourself - as the
>> observer of science. If someone were to argue that I am talking about
>> "science-plus" i.e. science plus a teleological value system, then I
>> would say, "No, you are talking about 'science-minus', science
>> stripped of the values that motivate scientists". The problem isn't so
>> much where you put the line round science but what you do with the
>> values. If they are not part of science they are still so closely
>> associated with it that laymen assume they are part of it. Separation
>> doesn't remove the obligation of the scientist to give an account of
>> reality or else give a convincing reason why he/she should not.
>
>This gets back to the Potter Principle, then - what Derek seeks is what
>science must provide.
Well that's twice. I am beginning to lose what respect I had for you.
>And there is no single set of jointly necessary and severall sufficient
>values that motivate all and only scientists. The search for that holy
>grail was abadnoned a while back...
Phooey. The concept of seeking an explanatory description of nature is
perfectly coherent and the majority of scientists subscribe to the aim
of doing so. That's common sense. You'll have to do a lot better than
decry it as my personal theory.
>> >For values of "exist" that means "makes a difference to X practices",
>> >but then, I'm a pragmatist.
>>
>> I do not feel obliged to join any party. There is sense in pragmatism
>> as there is in empiricism, realism etc. To my mind the significance of
>> theories of science is philosophical, in particular it's
>> epistemological.
>
>To your mind, yes. But in fact society doesn't agree with you - it
>supports science for what it can do, and what it can find out,
>independently of epistemological principles.
<shrug> Society voted for Bush and Blaire.
Derek Potter
And I have also qualified what I said - to catshark. I was only using
"layman" as an illustration that science ought to have a continuum of
explanation which does tocuch what we all think of as reality until
philosphers come along and screw with our minds.
>> The word *ought* was deliberate. I do not deny that you can construct
>> a concept of science which is operational, offloading any metaphysics,
>> even the minimalist ontology and epistemology, to yourself - as the
>> observer of science. If someone were to argue that I am talking about
>> "science-plus" i.e. science plus a teleological value system, then I
>> would say, "No, you are talking about 'science-minus', science
>> stripped of the values that motivate scientists". The problem isn't so
>> much where you put the line round science but what you do with the
>> values. If they are not part of science they are still so closely
>> associated with it that laymen assume they are part of it. Separation
>> doesn't remove the obligation of the scientist to give an account of
>> reality or else give a convincing reason why he/she should not.
>
>This gets back to the Potter Principle, then - what Derek seeks is what
>science must provide.
Well that's twice. I am beginning to lose what respect I had for you.
>And there is no single set of jointly necessary and severall sufficient
>values that motivate all and only scientists. The search for that holy
>grail was abadnoned a while back...
Phooey. The concept of seeking an explanatory description of nature is
perfectly coherent and the majority of scientists subscribe to the aim
of doing so. That's common sense. You'll have to do a lot better than
decry it as my personal theory.
>> >For values of "exist" that means "makes a difference to X practices",
>> >but then, I'm a pragmatist.
>>
>> I do not feel obliged to join any party. There is sense in pragmatism
>> as there is in empiricism, realism etc. To my mind the significance of
>> theories of science is philosophical, in particular it's
>> epistemological.
>
>To your mind, yes. But in fact society doesn't agree with you - it
>supports science for what it can do, and what it can find out,
>independently of epistemological principles.
<shrug> Society voted for Bush and Blaire.
>> They should not restrict the practice of science nor
>> determine what is said in the name of science. To repeat the point, if
>> a layman asks what quarks are, he/she deserves a better answer than
>> "they are just entities in a model, we don't know whether they exist".
>
>So scientists should *invent* a philosophical explanation over and above
>what it is that physics does, to satisfy the Potter Principle?
No, science includes an ontological and epistemological framework
regardless of Potter.
>The way scientists find out what the explanans is, is to do more
>science. At any point there are unanalysed entities. Science doesn't
>have to make up stories for them, but instead find out the properties
>and constituents of these entities. In some cases they have to verify
>the existence of these entities first.
Existence?
>> Obviously nobody knows that anything exists in the sense of being able
>> to prove solipsism false, but science should be able to say whther
>> quarks exist in the same way as particle accelerators exist or whether
>> they are merely computational methods. The criterion is pretty simple:
>> does the model suggest a *thing* or not? That is, obviously,
>> subjective, but the bundle of properties called a "spade" does
>> *suggest* a substantial spade, whether you actually believe in
>> substance or not. Whereas a correlation between drinking and accidents
>> does not. If this naive view - that there is a reality of things -
>> doen't fit in which postmodern definitions of sceince, too bad. It's
>> not as if any theory of knowledge is totally without problems - or is
>> the subject "finished" now? :)
>>
>...
>> > Science is not innately
>> >relaist, except in the very trivial sense that scientific theories posit
>> >the "reality" of the ontology of their models. That is, if there is an
>> >entity in a successful theory, then those who propose that theory will
>> >tend (not always!) to say those entities exist.
>>
>> Eh? Isn't that what we were discussing?
>
>No - you want a metaphysical account of things; scientists merely want a
>model that accounts for them.
According to your principles, accounting for things is precisely what
models do not do, they predict but do not account for.
Derek Potter
>Derek, we are starting either repeat ourselves or reach that point where
>two people understand each other and simply disagree. I shall respond
>henceforth to small bits only
Sorry, I overlooked this. Also, for some reason a slip of the finger
meant I sent the original message before I had finished writing it. So
you get three answers.
I willingly accept the above. I feel we are going round in circles . I
think I understand your position though I disagree. I am, however,
glad to acknowledge the point (albeit, it seems, an old one) about the
metaphysical status of "physical laws" and indeed anything else that
is reified instead of being left as an abstraction.
Perhaps, though, it is time to say "see you in another thread"?