I'm getting to the end of this book on ontology. Hartmann says that average scientific minds focus only on abstraction, failing to achieve the "overall synthesis" whereby science becomes part of the totality of experience:
This situation cannot be remedied, but there is a counterweight to it, namely, PHILOSOPHY. It is the enduring task of philosophy to be the conscience of science and to always lead it back to a living comprehensive vision.
(Hartmann, Ontology: Laying the Foundations)

isn't every position metaphysical? — Tom Storm

Exactly.

even that naïve realism is true — Tom Storm

Yes. Nicolai Hartmann describes the 'natural attitude', which is engaging with reality as if phenomena are independently real, which is exactly acting in the context of a natural realism, epitomized by science. However, while phenomena may be translucent, in that we see the world through them, they are nevertheless there, and become evident upon reflection. Which is why science isn't a substitute for metaphysics.

I think the earliest mention I made of metaphysics was that "metaphysics needs to continue to inspire scientific exploration, while ethics guides technological implementation."

How might one invalidate metaphysics? — Leontiskos

I don't even understand why one would want to?

But if positivism replaces metaphysics and then "denies that there is metaphysics," hasn't it invalidated metaphysics? I agree that not all positivism aims at direct invalidation of metaphysics, but I would also want to say that denying the existence of metaphysics counts as a significant form of invalidation. — Leontiskos

I think it is a common ailment to have metaphysical presuppositions while denying metaphysics. I don't believe denial is equivalent to invalidation, no.

The cows put out 1 ppm of methane. The plants take up 1 ppm of methane. That's what net-zero means. — frank

Yes, and it also means that there is always a correlative amount of methane hanging about in the system. It doesn't just flow from the butt of the cow into the tissues of the plant.

Are you of the opinion that Comte ignored metaphysics but did not attempt to invalidate it? — Leontiskos

I would say positivism in general represents the frequent tendency to elevate epistemology to replace metaphysics while denying that there is metaphysics. So in a way I guess my answer to your question is yes.

I'm not seeing this. Let's say we start from today. There's an average of 1.7 ppm of methane in the atmosphere. This average covers seasonal variation. Now we'll add a cattle farm in Mexico, and it's truly net zero, which means that after 12 years, its output is entirely absorbed by its input. — frank

You are not grasping that this is a system and there is a definable quantity of methane within the entire system that correlates with a specific population level of cattle. Ergo any decrease in the population of the cattle is simultaneously a decrease in the associated methane level. It is irrelevant over what period of time the cattle achieve a net-zero methane balance.

If cattle farming were truly net-zero, this wouldn't be true. — frank

Yes, it would be true. This is why:

This is true. But what is not mentioned is that the more cows there are, the higher the stable amount of methane in the atmosphere is — unenlightened

This is exactly what I have been describing. Livestock population levels correlate with a certain systemic level of methane.

The fact of the matter is, we should be making whatever reductions even remotely make sense and actively searching for new possibilities to do so. We have been quite content to radically disturb the biosphere haphazardly in aid of profit, we should be courageous enough to do so systematically in aid of human well being.

But it's the nature of a cycle that as methane is emitted today, the components of yesterday's emissions are simultaneously being taken up by plants. This is the argument, anyway. — frank

Right. And if all methane-producing elements in the environment were somehow eliminated, the methane levels would drop. Whether, in the grand scheme of things, a cow is "methane-neutral" is a pretty hard to say. But biologically (vs systemically) speaking, cows are "methane generators". If all cattle were gone, methane levels would decrease.

Any process that involves methane, for example, involves the transport of that methane throughout a cycle, portions of which are stored for durations in the environment. Carbon is stored and flows in such a cycle. And nitrogen. Viewing cattle as an abstract point of methane data is unrealistic. Short-term, a cow is a very-high-net methane producer. Reduce the number of cows and you must reduce the net-methane load in the environment.

Even if that were true, there is a certain "environmental load" to maintaining any greenhouse-gas involved process. If scale of cattle-farming were reduced, the "environmental load" would also be reduced. Which is part of the goal, I think.

One thing that I suggested was that the value of philosophy lies both in the academic body of knowledge, and in the quality of the minds and personae produced by exposure to the philosophical milieu. Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander and may have contributed to the shape of history significantly in that way. The sophists were highly regarded as teachers and probably exerted much influence independent of the content of their philosophies.

the situation is already stabilized. The current number of cows won't cause any additional global warming. The total methane level from cows is already constant in the atmosphere. — Agree to Disagree

There isn't a shred of logic in these statements. Even if it were true that output was stabile, that doesn't imply that the situation to which the output is a contributing factor is stabile. And the fact that the current number of cows won't cause "any additional" global warming just means that the ongoing amount of their ecological impact isn't decreasing. Which is the point.

Ignoring metaphysics and invalidating it aren't the same thing though. Same thing for teleology. As Nicolai Hartmann says, it is an error to believe that the reasons for an illusion are themselves illusory.

You can't get "ought" from science, so philosophy will always be around. — RogueAI

Yes, ethics is a pretty strong contender for 'practical philosophy', I agree.

It seems that what we mean by philosophy might be the glue that holds together all of the other formalizations of human understanding. For example, suppose we try to make scientific knowledge the gold standard of meaning. Even in the days when it was possible for one person to achieve a comprehensive scientific understanding (renaissance man), features of human life continued to be evident that defied scientific explanation (art, love, spirit, etc.). Today, scientific understanding is simultaneously so broad and detailed that even the most gifted scientists only really understand certain aspects of it. Even if your area of specialization is quantum cosmology, you could not claim to have a privileged ontological understanding, because dark matter and dark energy form explicit lacunae in that field of knowledge. Hence philosophy exists to constantly challenge simplistic reductions and to chart the boundaries of the unknown, relative to the project of human existence. If it were abolished as a discipline, people would still attempt to make sense of life. String theory, proven, would not help a single person make a more-informed moral decision.

But most people seem to refuse to accept personal responsibility for the problem. They claim that it is all the fault of the oil companies. Climate change will not be solved with that attitude. — Agree to Disagree

Neither will it be solved by doing nothing. Humanity should be trying every reasonable approach consistent with good ecological practice to counteract what it knows to be contributing factors to climate change. It may well be that some types of remediation are more effective than others. That's why they need to be tried. Now is not the time for quietism. The will to effect change is essential. As solutions are tried our understanding of the mechanics of the problem will grow, leading to new, better solutions. That's how it works.

Today there seems to be no "first philosophy," and therefore we have philosophies rather than philosophy. — Leontiskos

That's funny. Hartmann laments that he cannot "reclaim" the use of the term "first philosophy" in his major work on ontology which I am just reading.

"Why should we really return to ontology at all? Wasn't the foundation of the whole of philosophy at one time ontology? And hasn't this foundation crumbled beneath it, leading everything that depended on it to a state of utter collapse along with it?"
~Nicolai Hartmann, Ontology: Laying the Foundations. Opening paragraph.

The Decameron
by Giovanni Boccaccio

One way to get at this is to consider that no epistemology can be installed without appeals to the nature of the subject. We might talk of the entanglement of epistemology and ontology, because the ontologist has to make a case for claims, and the form of such a case will presumably imply or manifest an epistemology. — plaque flag

Yes. Hartmann goes further and talks about something which encompasses both the object of ontology and the subject of epistemology. Now you could get sticky and say, well, that more comprehensive reality is itself what is ontologically primary. But Hartmann elects to maintain the posture of separation, which allows for further investigation into their unique natures. His dyad of Dasein (the ontological ) existence and Sosein (the epistemological) essence are linked together through a kind of pragmatics of primitive action. Sosein and Dasein are related in almost systems theoretical terms, where the Sosein of a specific individual tree (its unique essence) has its Dasein in its place in the forest.

The knowledge that people have of reality is itself a part of reality, as an event among other events

This I firmly believe.

Interesting that my new read, Nicolai Hartmann, contests this fundamental dyad of object and subject, saying it is a hypostatization of the relational nature of consciousness (i.e. an unfounded metaphysical assumption) and that there is an avenue to pure being through some kind of pre-reflective 'natural attitude.' This smacks of Collingwood's 'absolute presuppositions.'

However Hartmann's method is also aporetic, embracing the antinomian nature of the development of philosophical thought and its key problems. So I can see this challenge to my fundamental intuitions about the inextricability of objectivity and subjectivity as part of an overall dialectical progress.

Ontology: Laying the Foundations
by Nicolai Hartmann

"Hartmann developed a pluralistic, humanistic realism that attempted to do justice to both the sciences and the humanities. Hartmann may be regarded as the first genuine ontological pluralist of the twentieth century."

Philosophy, in my opinion, should instead recover its ancient roots of being a human experience, a spiritual activity, — Angelo Cannata

I'd agree that it should be 'animated' by this spirit.

I think philosophy can be different by taking on the task that traditionally was held by religion — Angelo Cannata

Yes, I think talking about spirituality as something metaphysical takes away the hocus pocus from the former, rather than introducing it to the latter. I would say 'in spirit' I agree with you.

Our lack of knowledge of knowledge is at the heart of the problem of knowledge. — Fooloso4

Among the paradoxes of the figure of Socrates...is that we cannot classify him as belonging either to the theoretical or the practical world. Every attempt at such a classification immediately turns dialectically into its opposite....Our "knowledge" is transformed into "ignorance" (Cassirer, PSF4, "Basis Phenomena")

This accords with my perspective on the ongoing dialectical tension of antinomies.

already contains within its relational dynamics the precursors of language, consciousness and thought — Joshs

Is it animism? Is it panpsychism? Something else? I know lots of people would draw the line of consciousness at homo sapiens. I prefer the bio-evolutionary perspective that can discern intelligent behaviours in coral colonies. That is more the type of awareness that interests me. People like to draw a certain line in different places.

There cannot be an infinite regress in which what is recollected was not a some time first learned. — Fooloso4

That's certainly the logical conclusion. :up:

This all may be, but my understanding is that the theory of anamnesis is a species of innate knowledge theory. Do you have citations pertaining specifically to the fact that this knowledge had to have at some time been gained directly?

In the Charmides Socrates suggests that wisdom is knowledge of what you know and don't know. — Fooloso4

But Socrates' belief in anamnesis implies the things you don't know you have in some sense forgotten (hence the Platonic strategy of evoking knowledge through dialogue). Unfortunately this creates a nasty circularity.

In other words, the current state of philosophy is not the whole of the story of what philosophy is and will be — Fooloso4

Exactly. And this is exactly the nature of consciousness itself, its present experience is a living amalgam of the past and future, per Cassirer: this monadic being is therefore not contained in the simple present....but rather encompasses the totality of all aspects of life, the present, past, and future...

As I suggested on another thread (all things being related) this can be comprehended as a kind of "experimentalism," a metaphysical conception that is realized through and as the scientific method. Again to quote Cassirer (sorry but it is what I'm currently reading): We experience ourselves as having an influence...[an] essential, constitutive aspect in all our "consciousness of reality."

In other words, I guess, we are engaged and implicated in constructing reality, and reality is what is engaged by the construction thereof.

:ok:

Whereas we’re discussing the metaphysical implications of science. Do you see any difference between biological adaptation and intellectual interpretation, or do you see the latter on a continuum with the former? — Quixodian

Am I biologizing intellect, or intellectualizing biology? Yes, absolutely I'd say we are on a continuum which stretches from the poles of pure objectivity (which is an abstraction) and pure subjectivity (which is also an abstraction). It is in the nature of these antinomies that they are dyadic. There is no subject without object, no object without subject. The Copenhagen interpretation supports this.

Are we pieces of matter that learned to think? Or has thought learned to cloak itself in matter? Is one of those options inherently less improbable than the other?

Yeah but that’s biology. The parameters of what we’re discussing are no longer determined by that, and I think rationalising science, or any other human activities, in those terms is inherently reductionist. And there are better things than simply being well-adapted. — Quixodian

That's a non sequitur. The human enterprise is and always will be a human enterprise. As I pointed out, the nature of the environment to which we are adapting evolves based on our understanding. The only thing reductionistic is your characterization. Evolution can be as open-ended as it apparently is.

No. I mean they’re used to smooth over annoying inconsistencies in current models. Like I said, Everett devised many worlds to avoid the spooky implication that the measurement problem was mind-dependent. Hidden variables theories to make spooky action-at-a-distance go away. The multiverse is routinely invoked to explain away the anthropic cosmological principle. And so on. Examples could be multiplied. — Quixodian

Then they are elements of whatever theories happen to have practical application. Life is on a voyage of discovery wherein it inter-evolves with an environment. At an abstract level, organisms adapt to different types of information in their environments, producing forms that are specialized in various ways to interact with that information. For me, this is what differentiates science from pseudo-science. Science is definitively involved in this process.

Given that all observation (perception) is theory-laden, in essence, learning new knowledge can be like opening a door that lets you peer into a completely new dimension of reality. Since organisms adapt to their environments, expanding its environment through the integration of new knowledge creates the possibility of entirely novel types of adaptations. And as the type of information to which we adapt grows more abstract, the brain becomes more and more the organ of adaption. This is the import I see in the scientific method, cum experimentalism.

What if they solve problems of cognitive dissonance? You know, are used to keep challenged paradigms immune from criticism? — Quixodian

If you mean the theories function in some holistic sense by deepening the coherence of an overall theoretical framework then that would be an application, but it seems a stretch.

But the point of the critiques of speculative physics and cosmology is that they might never be testable at all. — Quixodian

In which case what are they? If they don't have any kind of practical application their value is purely aesthetic.

Ok. The focus on the instruments threw me off. There are norms governing the driving of cars on public roads. — plaque flag

I guess those can be in some sense be formulated in terms of heuristic rules governing systems flow. So while it seems arbitrary and artificial that traffic flow is conventionalized, it can have symbolic meaning relative to something that is actually happening, some kind of functioning circulatory feature. I think that the scientific method only makes sense in terms of experimentalism. I think the most accurate general description of existence is that it is experimental in nature.

I was generalizing the sense in which applying a concept is a commitment to a type of task. Similarly, scientific laws are instantiated by and through human instrumental actions. Hearkening back to the OP theme of the scientific method.

The responsibility one undertakes by applying a concept is a task responsibility: a commitment to do something.

You could say that when we act, we realize the law or principle which guides our actions. Indeed, the scientific method is essentially that, the instantiation (formal codification and social adoption) of some law that coincides with a certain type of human action (experimentalism). If scientific laws can be socially instantiated with tangible physical elements that are enhancements of fundamental human abilities (instruments, tools, symbols), why should not other types of laws (logical, moral) be similarly encapsulable?

By 'free' do you mean normative reason-giving entities like us ? I'm a fan of Brandom. I tend to understand freedom in terms of timebinding responsibility for the coherence of deeds which include speech acts. The responsible subject ( the rational agent ) is very much temporally stretched. Did you ever look at Flatland ? The author used space, but it occurs to me now how eerily temporal humans are relative to other creatures we're aware of. We are spheres among circles if time is spatialized. — plaque flag

Yes, precisely that meaning of free. Regarding our 'eerie temporality', I have lately been speculating on the forum whether consciousness might not actually exist - ie. have a "size" - in the temporal dimension, versus just traversing time.

(edit, just reading this: This monadic being is therefore not contained in the simple present....but rather encompasses the totality of all aspects of life, the present, past, and future... Cassirer, Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms)

I haven't heard of Brandom. I have a rather love-hate relationship with linguistics. I think it has its place, but more as a supporting player, something which can be usefully invoked to clarify particular issues with particular inquiries. But I find it becomes unwieldy as a primary theme. Probably just a matter of personal taste.