What do you think of this explanation of "explanation"?

I like it. I'm a big fan of Popper, btw. Something I didn't mention in the OP was the postulation of unseen entities. That's very important. But I thought I'd focus on the "projection" of necessity. Of course the assumed uniformity of nature figures into this.

I would suggest a more organic and less mechanical notion of explanation.

Things are explained by pointing to the constraints that bound possibility. This view has the advantage of starting with the idea that anything could be the case. But then limits arise for various reasons to specify what actually is. And yet in so bounding possibility, possibility still remains.

If nature makes a horse, it could be any colour, any size. If the horse is in fact white, or dwarf, then these are further constraints on possibility that explain why this colour and not that, why this size and not some other.

Then of course Aristotle came up with four kinds of "becauses". We can say a horse is what it is because of the specific constraints in terms of what it is made of, how it came to be made, for what reason it was made, and with what design it was made.

So specificity in the world arises from the extent to which there are constraints impinging on naked possibility. And explanation just has to account for those constraints to the degree it epistemically matters. Our own conception of a horse can be vague or more definite - depending on the demands of the situation, the degree to which we need to care.

A donkey is at least horse-like from some angles. Is this really a Lipizzaner stallion if it is not grey?

So what is necessary and what is accidental when it comes to explanations? Confusion arises because we tend to mix up epistemology and ontology.

There is the question of what it would take for us to create "a horse". Then the separate question of how a horse arises in nature - a question which has to include the one of is there "a mind" at work such as to care about sufficiently meeting some set of causal conditions. Is nature really specifying some constraints in terms of formal and final cause, or even material and efficient cause. When it comes to the existence of "a horse" - either as genus or individual - what is actually necessary and what is merely accident (ie: unconstrained possibility).

So an organic approach steps back far enough not to simply assume nature shares our highly epistemic and self-interested approach to forming explanations. We always end up thinking about explanation in terms of how could we replicate or control nature as if it were a machine or device that we wanted to craft. And from there a huge number of familiar philosophical confusions flow.

Things are explained by pointing to the constraints that bound possibility. — apokrisis

Then of course Aristotle came up with four kinds of "becauses". We can say a horse is what it is because of the specific constraints in terms of what it is made of, how it came to be made, for what reason it was made, and with what design it was made. — apokrisis

This still seems like the postulation of necessity. Horsesmust be within specific constraints. Our postulates become more specific. But how does one avoid a "If x then y" as a premise from which y can be deduced in the context of x?

This still seems like the postulation of necessity. Horsesmust be within specific constraints. Our postulates become more specific. But how does one avoid a "If x then y" as a premise from which y can be deduced in the context of x? — Hoo

It is the postulation of necessity. But it allows also for the role played by possibility or contingency. And also distinguishes between epistemic and ontic models of formal and final cause.

So horse becomes nothing but a state of constraint. It is constraints all the way down. But now we must realise how out of pure epistemic blinkeredness, we often class accidental constraints along with the actually naturally necessary. Or indeed, vice versa.

Is a horse still a horse if it is made out of pottery, and created in a factory rather than born of a mare?

Accidents and necessities may be considered quite differently when switching between a mechanical and organic notion of explanation. There may still be postulations and deductions, but within quite contrasting frameworks of thought.

So horse becomes nothing but a state of constraint. It is constraints all the way down. But now we must realise how out of pure epistemic blinkeredness, we often class accidental constraints along with the actually naturally necessary. Or indeed, vice versa. — apokrisis

I like this. I don't see how we could know that we have the "actually naturally necessary," but I can see that we can and do act successfully as if. I see a spectrum of intensisty. On one side the postulated necessity is just acted upon as necessity in deed. The other side is tentative, the cutting edge of the imagination.
I think this analysis of the horse is the other side of the question, which I've neglected. We need x and y before we can postulate necessity. And perhaps we can view x and y as unstable systems of constraints. Change one entity in the same and you change them all. In basic physics, we have a point mass, which in practice is just a way to use signs. So we translate signs in the manifest image into signs in the mathematical model, calculate, and translate back into the manifest image. I've neglected all of this, but I acknowledge it.

I think this analysis of the horse is the other side of the question, which I've neglected. We need x and y before we can postulate necessity. And perhaps we can view x and y as unstable systems of constraints. Change one entity in the same and you change them all. — Hoo

Remember also that deduction is simply a calculus of constraints. Take one premise, combine it with another, logic tells you what is necessarily the new more specified state of constraint. So deduction is the crisp addition and subtraction of identified or separable constraints. It's a maths of constraint.

And my point is that instability is the necessary flip side of this presumption of stable necessities in life. Instability stands for raw possibility. The world could be anything - if it were not regulated.

So it is not constraint that is unstable. It is fundamental instability (ie: vagueness or Apeiron) that creates some kind of "stuff" for constraints to act upon.

In nature, constraints are in reality more holistic and non-separable. Quantum physics confirms the radical metaphysical truth of this. But still we can mechanically imagine reality in terms of a composition or accumulation of separable constraints. And it is that epistemic vision of existence that standard logic - as a formal calculus of constraints - underwrites. We can imagine reality as a hierarchy of constraints that traps possibility into a particular state of substantial being.

I can relate to all of this. By the instability of "constraints" I just meant the still-in-progress image we have of the possible. Sometimes we are surprised. "What goes up must come down." Then someone figures out how to achieve escape velocity. Also, yes, logic can be viewed in terms of implicit constrains being made explicit. Also "a hierarchy of constraints that traps possibility into a particular state of substantial being" is nice.

Something I didn't mention in the OP was the postulation of unseen entities. That's very important. But I thought I'd focus on the "projection" of necessity. Of course the assumed uniformity of nature figures into this. — Hoo

You've just made Popper turn in his grave, and Deutsch has just banged his head on his desk. There is no assumed uniformity of nature!

I'm trying to think of a single scientific theory that does not involve unseen entities. Maybe you could help? As Deutsch points out, what we see is a spot on a photographic plate, and if you analyse that fully, we don't even *see* that. The explanation however, involves planets, the sun, and spacetime curvature.

It is interesting to note that Boltzmann killed himself in 1906 because the German scientific establishment would not accept the existence of molecules or atoms, because they could not be seen!

Anyway, I cannot find fault with Deutsch's definition of explanation - a statement about what exists in reality, how it behaves and why.

And, I think Deutsch's discovery of his "hard-to-vary" criterion is new.

There is no assumed uniformity of nature! — tom

OK, but will there be assumed uniformity of nature in 5 minutes?

OK, but will there be assumed uniformity of nature in 5 minutes? — Hoo

But you claim to be interested in the meaning of "explanation" while promoting the compete absence of one!

How does the "assumed uniformity of nature" constitute an explanation for anything?

And, if you are interested in Popper, relying on such an assumption is a fundamental mistake.

I didn't say I worshiped or followed Popper. I've just really enjoyed reading him. Here's something I find interesting:

Suppose that Hume is right about how we actually think. So far all we have is a fact about human cognitive psychology. And this fact, however interesting, does not settle the normative question: Is it legitimate for us to proceed in this way? Are the conclusions we reach as a result of inductive inference really justified?

A first pass suggests a negative answer. After all, the inference pattern

(DATA) In my experience, all Fs are Gs

(THEORY) Therefore, in general all Fs are Gs, (or at least, the next F I examine will be G).

is not deductively valid. It is logically possible for the conclusion to be false when the premise is true. So a skeptic might say: In so-called inductive reasoning, human beings commit a fallacy. They accept a general proposition on the basis of an invalid argument. And this means that their acceptance of that general proposition is unjustified.

Now this is not exactly Hume's way of raising skeptical worries. Hume rather takes the invalidity of the inference from DATA to THEORY as evidence that we have failed to make our method fully explicit. That we unheasitatingly pass from DATA to THEORY shows that we accept a principle connecting the two, a principle that normally passes unnoticed because we take it so completely for granted, but which figures implicitly in every instance of inductive reasoning.

Hume formulates this missing premise as the claim that the future will resemble the past. But for our purposes it will be useful to work with a somewhat more precise formulation. What we need to make the inverence from DATA to THEORY valid is a premise of the form:

(UN) For the most part, if a regularity R (e.g., All Fs are Gs) holds in my experience, then it holds in nature generally, or at least in the next instance.

"UN" stands for the "Uniformity of Nature". This is a traditional (post-Humean) label for the missing premise, though in fact it is misleading. For UN is not simply the claim that nature exhibits regularities. It is the claim that the regularities that have emerged in my experience are among the regularities that hold throughout nature. It might better be called a principle or representativeness, for its central message is that my experience, though limited in time and space to a tiny fraction of the universe, is nonetheless a representative sample of the universe.

The inference from DATA + UN to THEORY is valid. Moreover, there is no question for now about our right to accept the DATA. So if we want to know whether we ever have a right to accept a generalization like THEORY, we must ask whether we have reason to believe UN. — link below

https://www.princeton.edu/~grosen/puc/phi203/induction.html

Now I suspect you will argue around this via Popper. But I wonder if the assumption UN isn't going to be hiding somewhere. I like the notion that the mind is an expectation machine and that violations of expectation in particular come to our attention. We expect the future to resemble the past (in very complex and torturous and indirect ways as we tame the cruder forms of this expectation). I'd the prestige of science itself is founded on the tools it provides. We use technology. It gives us what we want. We value it because we expect this utility to endure. I don't see how we can deduce this "illogical" expectation without UN. I'm not saying we live by pure deduction, of course. I think we creatively posit necessity and then deduce. But any postulation is sustained first and foremost by a utility that we project from the past and present into the future...

Now I suspect you will argue around this via Popper. But I wonder if the assumption UN isn't going to be hiding somewhere. I like the notion that the mind is an expectation machine and that violations of expectation in particular come to our attention. We expect the future to resemble the past — Hoo

I would say rather that we expect the past to be a constraint on future freedoms. The past can lock the free flow of events into restricted possibility.

Both Popper and Peirce took a propensity view of probability in this fashion. It has the advantage of recognising chance and spontaneity (or vagueness) as ontically real. And hence the determinism of existence is balanced by indertiminsm.

So far as logic goes, that makes induction more realistic and fundamental than deduction. Deduction depends on ontic determinism. But induction is happy to talk about the development of propensities which only constrain the space of the future possible and don't absolutely determine if t.

That's a good point. I haven't really addressed probability densities, etc. That was sort of under the hood in the "complex and indirect and torturous ways." Yes, a constraint on the future (or rather our image in the present thereof), not its strict determination. I completely agree. Even if we had a strictly deterministic model that earned our trust, we can only do finitely many calculations. Uncertainty will always be with us, I think, but so will the projection of constraints on our (genuine, living) expectations.

"UN" stands for the "Uniformity of Nature". This is a traditional (post-Humean) label for the missing premise, though in fact it is misleading. For UN is not simply the claim that nature exhibits regularities. It is the claim that the regularities that have emerged in my experience are among the regularities that hold throughout nature. — link below

So, you have completely abandoned the idea of explanation. That's a shame.

UN is one of the fundamental misconceptions of inductivism. It is a principle in that no one has ever been able to properly formulate, beyond vague notions such as "the future will resemble the past" or "the seen resembles the unseen". Your suggestion that it might be formulated "the regularities of experience are universal regularities"?

Let's assume that such a principle exists - the PUN, to give it its full acronym, and let's try to use it to infer a scientific theory from some data. Would you like to pick a theory?

So, you have completely abandoned the idea of explanation. That's a shame. — tom

The thesis is that explanation of X is deduction of X from postulated necessity. Now this postulation is the creative act, the myth or element of rationalism. So it's not what I'd call "inductivism." I'm lazy, so here's Wiki:

Popper coined the term "critical rationalism" to describe his philosophy. Concerning the method of science, the term indicates his rejection of classical empiricism, and the classical observationalist-inductivist account of science that had grown out of it. Popper argued strongly against the latter, holding that scientific theories are abstract in nature, and can be tested only indirectly, by reference to their implications. He also held that scientific theory, and human knowledge generally, is irreducibly conjectural or hypothetical, and is generated by the creative imagination to solve problems that have arisen in specific historico-cultural settings. — W

Theories (postulations of necessity that allow for the generations of implications that can be falsified) are seemingly going to be stronger and more falsifiable as they are projected across time and space.

Popper and David Hume agreed that there is often a psychological belief that the sun will rise tomorrow, but both denied that there is logical justification for the supposition that it will, simply because it always has in the past. Popper writes, "I approached the problem of induction through Hume. Hume, I felt, was perfectly right in pointing out that induction cannot be logically justified." (Conjectures and Refutations, p. 55) — W

This is also my starting point.

Nor is it rational according to Popper to make instead the more complex assumption that the sun will rise until a given day, but will stop doing so the day after, or similar statements with additional conditions.

Such a theory would be true with higher probability, because it cannot be attacked so easily: to falsify the first one, it is sufficient to find that the sun has stopped rising; to falsify the second one, one additionally needs the assumption that the given day has not yet been reached. — W

This "probability" seems to reduce to economy. Popper prefers more uniformity. Hence it is "irrational" to project "extra conditions." He tries to milk this from convenience of falsification (ease of attack.) But of course we also want a stronger theory for its greater utility (we want our technology to work everywhere and everywhen.) As far as the use of PUN, it looks to be at the heart of any theory worth suggesting. If we can't infer from the past and present to the future, we are lost. We trust theories because they have worked for us and because we assume that this utility will continue. Wh

I also get the feeling that you want to narrow what I mean by explanation to some ideal scientific explanation. But I'm interested in what folks are generally "really doing" when they explain.

I think the DN model is more or less what I'm defending, thoughI'm looking at it in a broader context than physical science. We have a "folk science" of human nature that we use to navigate social situations, for instance. And metaphysicians also seem to explain things this way or mean something like this by "explanation." — Hoo

UN is one of the fundamental misconceptions of inductivism. It is a principle in that no one has ever been able to properly formulate, beyond vague notions such as "the future will resemble the past" or "the seen resembles the unseen". Your suggestion that it might be formulated "the regularities of experience are universal regularities"? — tom

It is hard to know what you are driving at but science is comfortable with the cosmological principle for good reason.

The thesis is that explanation of X is deduction of X from postulated necessity. Now this postulation is the creative act, the myth or element of rationalism. — Hoo

That is utterly incompatible with the assumption of the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature, and what you were claiming about inducing THEORY from DATA, which is impossible.

I'm going to quibble about your thesis. A scientific theory *is* a conjectured explanation of some aspect of reality - the explicanda of the theory. The explanation takes the form of a statement of what exists in reality, how it behaves, and how it accounts for the explicanda. So yes, the eXplicanda can be deduced from the claim about what exists in reality, but what is this "postulated necessity"?

Theories (postulations of necessity that allow for the generations of implications that can be falsified) are seemingly going to be stronger and more falsifiable as they are projected across time and space. — Hoo

I'm losing track of this, maybe it was another thread, but I have definitely mentioned the Quine-Duhem Thesis several times somewhere. There is no such thing as an experimental test that can logically falsify a theory, if that is what you mean.

This "probability" seems to reduce to economy. — Hoo

You can't use probability calculus with explanations.

I bring this up all the time--that it's often not clear what someone is asking for in requesting an explanation, or why what they're asking for should count as an explanation, or why it should exhaust what can count as an explanation.

This is particularly important, because so many arguments hinge on whether there is an explanation of something or not. If it's not clear just what would count as an explanation and why it would or should count as an explanation, then that seriously undermines arguments that hinge on explanation requirements.

I suspect that demarcation criteria for what counts as an explanation, criteria that are both (a) intuitively satisfactory to most people and (b) specific enough to be useful and exclude some things, yet general enough to cover most things that people intuitively count as explanations, are likely to be as problematic as demarcation criteria for cleaving science and non-science or pseudoscience.

And for example, a deduction combined with prediction requirement is probably both not specific enough to rule out explanation constructions that are essentially trivial, and too specific to be able to include phenomena that are unpredictable but nevertheless real.

That is utterly incompatible with the assumption of the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature, and what you were claiming about inducing THEORY from DATA, which is impossible. — tom

I never mentioned induction. I'm basically saying that we postulate uniformity. Now the concepts are related. The caveman sees things go up and then come down, but that whatever goes up must come down adds an extra something. And the caveman projects this onto the past. Whatever went up must have come back down. So stories to the contrary are doubted. Similarly, the caveman makes plans for the future with this "must" in mind. Perhaps you are misunderstanding me, because what you claim is impossible is something that (by my meaning) we do all of the time. The keyword is expectation. We can probably reduce this necessity to strong expectation, but it is also projected backwards. Sort of like this:

I recall well how the key ideas of my idealistic theory of natural laws - of “lawfulness as imputation” - came to me in 1968 during work on this project while awaiting the delivery of Arabic manuscripts in the Oriental Reading Room of the British Museum. It struck me that what a law states is a mere generalization, but what marks this generalization as something special in our sight -- and renders it something we see as a genuine law of nature -- is the role that we assign to it in inference. Lawfulness is thus not a matter of what the law-statement says, but how it is used in the systematization of knowledge -- the sort of role we impute to it. These ideas provided an impetus to idealist lines of thought and marked the onset of my commitment to a philosophical idealism which teaches that the mind is itself involved in the conceptual constitution of the objects of our knowledge. (Instructive Journey: An Essay in Autobiography, pages 172-173) — Rescher

I'm going to quibble about your thesis. A scientific theory *is* a conjectured explanation of some aspect of reality - the explicanda of the theory. The explanation takes the form of a statement of what exists in reality, how it behaves, and how it accounts for the explicanda. So yes, the eXplicanda can be deduced from the claim about what exists in reality, but what is this "postulated necessity"? — tom

The postulated necessity is there in the fixed nature of "what exists in reality and how it behaves." An electron is the sort of thing that "must" be repelled by another electron. We can allow for "motion" within the nature of an object, but the law of this notion is fixed to the degree that we have knowledge about it. Prediction implies expectation implies something like necessity. As I said, maybe we can boil it down to intensity of expectation.

There is no such thing as an experimental test that can logically falsify a theory, if that is what you mean. — tom

I just assumed you were into the falsifiability criterion, with your talk of Popper turning in his grave. I'd say that the epistmology we live by is "irrational" in the sense that it is shaped by pleasure and pain as as consequence of acting as if a given myth is true. Beliefs (postulated necessities, expectations) are "falsified" when they lead to pain and failure. There is also the pleasure of coherence and the pain of cognitive dissonance, so we can sit in an armchair and "improve" our belief system. Call it "radical instrumentalism." Systems of beliefs as a whole are tools in the "hands" of "irrational" feeling. From this perspective, philosophy of science is largely just a "false" foundation, since I think the prestige of science mostly rests on its technological "miracles." Similarly, real analysis can be described as tidying up the cognitive dissonance of a calculus that was already working to satisfy less abstract desires.

You can't use probability calculus with explanations. — tom

Perhaps according to your definition thereof. I think we can project constrains on the future, fit probability densities to data, etc.

I suppose I was aiming at the nature of non-trivial explanations. I can agree that many are satisfied by an explanation of X in terms of a familiar but ultimately unexplained Y. There's a very different path if we are looking into meaning-as-use, but I'd really like to look at the best conceptions of explanation.

I bring this up all the time--that it's often not clear what someone is asking for in requesting an explanation, or why what they're asking for should count as an explanation, or why it should exhaust what can count as an explanation. — Terrapin Station

Many are satisfied by a connection of the unfamiliar to the familiar. But I became interested in this issue as I contemplated theological issues and theories of everything in science. It seems to me that the "totality" must remain unexplained, at least if my concept of explanation is intended.

We can find the "cash value" in this idea by noting that it is useful to "throw away" information sometimes in order to deduce that which is to be expected -- or to explain what was observed. The veil that is stripped is just everything in the totality that isn't relevant to our purpose. The face beneath the veil would be a "skeleton" of postulated necessities that we might in theory use to reconstruct the veil, given some initial conditions. — Hoo

Some examples of successful scientific explanations:

• Germ theory - explained epidemics and communicable diseases
• Copernican astronomy - explained the motion of planets in a heliocentric solar system.
• Newtons laws of motion - explained the motion of bodies
• Maxwell's theories - explained magnetic effects (among other things)

In all these cases, the explanation not only was intellectually pleasing, but also had numerous practical consequences, and furthermore could be born out by any number of further observations, all based on principles.

But if you start to ask 'why those principles' or 'why do Newton's laws obtain and not some other laws', then I think you're going beyond the bounds of what might reasonably be explained.

Incidentally, a piece which McDoodle linked to some time back, might be of relevance here, No God, No Laws, Nancy Cartwright.

It seems to me that the "totality" must remain unexplained, at least if my concept of explanation is intended. — Hoo

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve. — Max Planck

But if you start to ask 'why those principles' or 'why do Newton's laws obtain and not some other laws', then I think you're going beyond the bounds of what might reasonably be explained. — Wayfarer

You're preaching to the choir, brother. That's why I find this issue fascinating. I think Plank is on the right track. We try to contemplate the totality, but that is exactly like trying to see it from the outside. To explain it would be to put it in a relationship with some other object of thought. So we have a triangle. We have the totality, its proposed explanation, and then the "being" of both or our "consciousnes" or awareness of this relation. This is probably where we differ. Any reasonable/conceptual theology looks problematic for the same reason --and indeed, like a sort of science or an extension of nature as a system of necessary relationships between objects in the manifest image and unseen theoretical objects (like quarks).

We try to contemplate the totality, but that is exactly like trying to see it from the outside. — Hoo

I once had the idea 'you couldn't have a "theory of everything" because "the theory" would have to be included in the "everything" that is the subject of the explanation'. So there would always be a problem of recursiveness, that your explanation includes the explainer. And that seems very close to what Planck was driving at.

One of my axioms is the famous quote from the Upanishads: 'the eye can see another, but not itself; the hand can grasp another, but not itself' 1. This is one of the seminal texts of non-duality, in my opinion, and also an apodictic truth.

At issue is this: that naturalism must 'assume the subject'. In other words, naturalism assumes, or begins from, the fact of the intelligent subject in the domain of objects and forces.

But from the viewpoint of non-dualism (not that nondualism has or is 'a viewpoint'), this 'situatedness' can be further reduced. In other words, that sense of 'self-and-world' does not reside on the level of fundamental truth, for the simple (but extremely hard to grasp) reason that we're not actually separate from reality. But consideration of that kind of idea has already been ruled out by natural philosophy; it will only consider those factors which are available to it in the natural domain, and so it will inevitably reject such an approach as 'metaphysical'.

But that only succeeds in 'burying the metaphysics', so to speak - denying that there is any metaphysic, whilst actually being embedded in one (for which, see 'the spirituality of secularity', on pages 189-190 of this essay).

Which, I think, is the problem you're concerned with.

I just assumed you were into the falsifiability criterion, with your talk of Popper turning in his grave. — Hoo

Let me put it this way, according to Popper there is no such thing as an experimental test that can logically falsify a theory.

He makes this point several times in his famous book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

That's all you've got? I welcome insight via Popper, but this thread is not the exegesis of scripture, is it? All the great dead philosophers are just meat for the grinder. The theme is an analysis of explanation, in the context of a thesis. Do we postulate necessities, formalize strong expectations? Does an innate trust that the future will resemble the past inform the use and postulation of such necessities-by-fiat?

I once had the idea 'you couldn't have a "theory of everything" because "the theory" would have to be included in the "everything" that is the subject of the explanation'. So there would always be a problem of recursiveness, that your explanation includes the explainer. And that seems very close to what Planck was driving at. — Wayfarer

Consider this:

To be sure, in the end, “scientific knowledge” comes back toward itself and reveals itself to itself: its final goal is to describe itself in its nature, in its genesis, and in its development.
...
It is by following this “dialectical movement” of the Real that Knowledge is present at its own birth and contemplates its own evolution. And thus it finally attains its end, which is the adequate and complete understanding of itself — i.e., of the progressive revelation of the Real and of Being by Speech — of the Real and Being which engender, in and by their “dialectical movement,” the Speech that reveals them.
...
Taken separately, the Subject and the Object are abstractions that have neither “objective reality” (Wirklichkeit) nor “empirical existence” (Dasein). What exists in reality, as soon as there is a Reality of which one speaks — and since we in fact speak of reality, there can be for us only Reality of which one speaks what exists in reality, I say, is the Subject that knows the Object, or, what is the same thing, the Object known by the Subject.
...
The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought.
— Kojeve

At issue is this: that naturalism must 'assume the subject'. In other words, naturalism assumes, or begins from, the fact of the intelligent subject in the domain of objects and forces.

But that only succeeds in 'burying the metaphysics', so to speak - denying that there is any metaphysic, whilst actually being embedded in one (for which, see 'the spirituality of secularity', on pages 189-190 of this essay). — Wayfarer

Yeah, anti-supernatural naturalism has to be embedded in a metaphysics that founds it. A generalized naturalism, for which the supernatural is not coherent, can be presented as a description of human thinking. If the supernatural is present in terms of empirical claims, objects as the cause of "natural" objects, then this looks like a revision and enlargement of nature (or the systematic conceptual image of nature.) Of course aiming at Being or the eye that cannot see itself (the metaphysical subject in Wittgenstein) or in mystical passion is something else.

I browsed the essay. I find the god-shaped-hole quite manageable. I don't think we can condemn modernity but only the shallow understandings of the metaphysical/spiritual import of the scientific image. We don't have to worship this useful but necessarily reductive tool. I think one can learn to affirm one's mortality and groundlessness, but not without help from symbols that resonate "irrationally"/emotionally perhaps. "Pure" reason and objectivity-for-its-own are strange household gods.

Thanks, those comments from Kojeve are illuminating (although I read somewhere recently that Kojeve has been outed as a KGB spy.)

I don't think we can condemn modernity but only the shallow understandings of the metaphysical/spiritual import of the scientific image — Hoo

I had the idea this is what the thread was about.

Yeah, Kojeve seems to have been quite the character, but he was one of my first paths into Hegel, nevertheless.

I had the idea this is what the thread was about. — Wayfarer

I think we agree on our dismissal of scientism as an option, at least as a personal adjustment. I think we both have access to different non-scientific traditions that sustain us.