When 'science' is pilfered for a deck of 'science-against-science' cards (quotes),it calls to mind someone in fear of a conquering civilization who believes what they hold dear can only be saved so long as members of that civilization reveal their angelic aspect and swoop down (condescend) to save. Tales of such salvific miracles (ala the 'good samaritan') are sought out, and then held dearly, as one collects stories of the saints, or centurions with a heart of gold. — csalisbury
So I brought up a discussion of the ontology of universals, from Russell's Problems of Philosophy, and other sources on the ontology of math, referencing a couple of articles from SEP and IEP. I note very little reaction to or comment on those issues, which are actually the kinds of things that academic metaphysics discusses. — Wayfarer
But a difficulty emerges as soon as we ask ourselves how we know that a thing is white or a triangle. — Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy (1912)
Is it, do electrons exist? Okay, sure. Is it, do electrons have similar properties? Okay, sure.
What else is there to say? — Snakes Alive
Are you talking about the general ability to use nouns? — Snakes Alive
Do things share properties and if so, what does that entail? — Marchesk
If we wish to avoid the universals whiteness and triangularity, we shall choose some particular patch of white or some particular triangle, and say that anything is white or a triangle if it has the right sort of resemblance to our chosen particular. But then the resemblance required will have to be a universal. — Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy (1912)
But I don't understand why nominalism should be tarred with the same brush, if all it says is, let's assume we are talking about physical particulars and also about the talking of organisms such as ourselves, about those particulars, and let's be especially careful not to get confused when the two targets of our talk overlap, which they probably often must. — bongo fury
Words signify forms—this is the heart of Aquinas’s realism. It is not that these signified forms are universals or have any universal existence; they exist only as the individual acts of [intellect], characterizing individual things. (And, as we will see, even the sense in which they “exist” in individuals can admit of great qualification.) But as the individual forms of individual things, they have a potential intelligibility which can be abstracted by the mind; abstracting this potential intelligibility—making it actually understood by the mind—is the formation of the concept. It is by means of such a concept that a word signifies, and the mind is aware of, many things insofar as they all share that same form. This is why Aquinas said that universality is a feature of individual forms existing in the mind, insofar as those individual forms relate that mind to many things. — Joshua Hothschild
You might find this article which talks about his Critical Realism and General Empirical Method interesting. — Janus
Metaphysics anticipates the general structures of reality by formulating the way our knowing operates. Science actually works out the explanation of the data by a never-ending process of research. — Bernard Lonergan
... that anything is white or a triangle if it has the right sort of resemblance to our chosen particular. — Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy (1912)
I’m therefore sorry that my sketch of an answer prompted such an outpouring of metaphysics. — bongo fury
But you can't say he doesn't do metaphysics, that article mentions metaphysics 14 times, and phenomenology only once, in a footnote. — Wayfarer
seems to be saying that nobody understands what they believe themselves to be claiming metaphysically. If they could understand it they ought to be able to explain it. — Janus
It's facile (and usually their only "comeback") for such enunciators to claim that those who claim that their claims are meaningless simply "do not understand". — Janus
I believe that what they are saying really amounts to something like "you don't feel it"; they are conflating discursive understanding with feeling. It's just the same with poetry and the arts in general; there is nothing determinately discursive to understand; it is all a matter of feeling. — Janus
The point is that if I state that any empirical object is real, we all know what that means; that we can all ( given that we are not blind, or lacking in tactile sensitivity , etc.) see it, touch it and so on. — Janus
Or those who think metaphysical arguments are meaningless dismiss logical arguments because they don't feel like those arguments are discursive. — Marchesk
On the other hand we all know that if something is physically real, it or its effects can be observed or detected in some way. — Janus
It;s not that the arguments are not thought to be discursive; they may be valid as fuck; but that their premises are groundless and even incoherent. — Janus
Reason, positivists think, can be a guide to life only in a very limited sense. Its role is restricted to discharging three tasks: (1) it can criticize a set of beliefs and ends for failing to satisfy certain minimal principles of logical consistency; (2) it can criticize a given choice of means towards a given end on a variety of possible empirical grounds, such as that the means in question will not actually lead to the envisaged end or will have undesirable side effects, and it can propose more appropriate means; (3) it can unmask inherently non-cognitive beliefs, for instance value judgments, that are presenting themselves as if they had cognitive content. The role of reason in discharging the third of these tasks is especially important in the view of the positivists because any statements that do not belong to the descriptive and explanatory apparatus of science, and in particular any statement about what ought to be the case, stand wholly outside the domain of rational argumentation and can be nothing but the expression of arbitrary choice or personal preference.
Assuming we know what "physically real" means. As for effects, we can say the existence of categories of particulars in the world is an "effect" of universals, if one wishes to argue for realism. — Marchesk
So who's right? Depends on which set of arguments you find more persuasive. So what now? Do we just agree it's all sophistry? — Marchesk
Or, 'how you feel about it'. — Wayfarer
In terms theologian Bernard Lonergan develops in his major work Insight, Krauss is caught in a notion of reality as "already-out-there-now," a reality conditioned by space and time. (This is the point I made up-thread about the naturalist conception of 'what exists' as being conceived solely in terms of 'what is out there' or what exists in space and time.) Lonergan refers to this conception of reality as based on an "animal" knowing, on extroverted biologically-dominated consciousness. He distinguishes it from a fully human knowing based on intelligence and reason, arguing that many philosophical difficulties arise because of a failure to distinguish between these two forms of knowing.
This distinction can help us identify why Krauss is confused about the ontological status of space. Our "animal" knowing identifies "reality" as an "already-out-there-now" of things, particles, fields and so on, "in" space and time. Our genuine fully human knowing, on the other hand, knows that space exists because it is intelligent and reasonable to affirm its reality.
As a scientist, Krauss is obviously fully committed to the use of intelligence and reason. Indeed, the whole of scientific method is predicated on the use of intelligence and reason. Intelligence is the creative ecstatic origin of all scientific hypotheses. In the moment of insight - when the "light goes on," or "the penny drops," when we move from struggling to grasp anything at all to that moment of illumination when everything becomes clear - that moment is the beginning of every scientific and mathematical discovery.
Nonetheless, it is only a first step. While we well remember the scientific and mathematical successes, the insights which were genuine breakthroughs, we tend to forget the less successful ones, the failures. Something more is needed: in science it is verification and in mathematics it is rigorous proof. Both of these involve a movement from insight to judgment; from hypothesis to checking that the hypothesis works or is correct.
This process of reasoning leading to judgment is very different from the process of insight, less exciting, more imperious, demanding and exacting. Alternate explanations need to be eliminated; hidden assumptions need to be uncovered and verified if needed; more data may need to be found; possible predictions or consequences need to be investigated and so on.
This is a process of reasoning; it is more than just logic and much more than just a mechanical process, because it involves an element of personal responsibility. Our insights are spontaneous and serendipitous, they cannot be forced or produced at will; judgments involve us as persons, for we may judge too hastily and appear foolish, or too slowly and appear pedestrian.
So Krauss is very familiar with the operations of intelligence and reason. However, he has a notion of reality, not as uncovered by the operations of intelligence and reason, but by mere looking - the already-out-there-now "real" of animal extroversion (i.e. what is 'out there', what can be discovered by telescopes or microscopes). To break out of this metaphysical muddle, Krauss needs to shift his criteria of reality from "taking a look" to "intelligently grasped and reasonably affirmed."
This is the underlying criteria which grounds the scientific method, with hypothesis intelligently grasped and reasonably affirmed in empirical verification. It is not an alien intrusion to the scientific project, but it is nonetheless a startling and unsettling shift to accomplish. Indeed, it is so startling that if you do not think it is startling, you haven't made it. This shift is the beginning of what Lonergan calls "intellectual conversion."
Welcome to a fuller reality
It goes without saying that you cannot prove the existence of God to a materialist without first converting the materialist away from materialism. In the present context, if we think of the real as an "already-out-there-now" real of extroverted consciousness, then God is not real. God becomes just a figment of the imagination, a fairy at the bottom of the garden, an invisible friend (and the frequent subject of debate on forums). However, if the real is constituted by intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation, then reality suddenly becomes much richer, and the God-question takes on a different hue.
But it is not just the God-question that we can now begin to address more coherently. There are a whole range of other realities whose reality we can now affirm: interest rates, mortgages, contracts, vows, national constitutions, penal codes and so on. Where do interest rates "exist"? Not in banks, or financial institutions. Are they real when we cannot touch them or see them? We all spend so much time worrying about them - are we worrying about nothing? In fact, I'm sure we all worry much more about interest rates than about the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson! Similarly, a contract is not just the piece of paper, but the meaning the paper embodies; likewise a national constitution or a penal code.
Once we break the stranglehold on our thinking by our animal extroversion, we can affirm the reality of our whole world of human meanings and values, of institutions, nations, finance and law, of human relationships and so on, without the necessity of seeing them as "just" something else lower down the chain of being yet to be determined.
My initial impetus towards what I now understand as philosophy was actually counter-cultural. I came of age in the 1960’s, and in that period there was a strong sense that ‘straight culture’ (means something different now!) was basically hostile towards anything creative, spiritual or good. Remember it was the Vietnam era, there was a strong sense of antagonism between the counter-culture and mainstream culture.
In the decades since, some counter-cultural memes have really begun to affect mainstream society. I think of ‘biosemiotics’ and ‘systems theory’ as some aspects of that, along with environmentalism generally. But overall, science in the sense it was and is deployed by the military-industrial complex, by consumer capitalism, is often dehumanising and alienating and we see the consequences of that writ large in many facets of modern culture.
The reason I ‘cherry pick’ quotations from the likes of Bohr and Heisenberg and others, is because they’re used to illustrate salient points in the context of this whole debate. Many of their aphorisms, in particular, are pregnant with meaning, and in fact Capra’s Tao of Physics is still a counter-cultural classic for good reason. But I know that many of those born in the decades since have no feel for any of those issues - as if a window was opened into another dimension for a brief period of time, then it slammed shut again, and pretty soon at was as if nothing had happened.
And yet..... — Wayfarer
In short, the middle layer is the layer at which the language takes action – and since at the first layer it has no coherent set of truth conditions, the middle layer acts as a proposal, conscious or not, to change the way one speaks, so that the same null truth conditions, involving the world as one always took it to be, are scrambled to be described in different vocabulary. Since we can create infinite vocabularies to describe the same state of affairs, this arena of changing the way people talk is endless. It's important to realize that this second stage can be more or less conscious, since we are typically not finely aware of how the claims we make do or don't have descriptive application, and we just stick to the words themselves, sort of like magic talismans, which we hold onto and say 'this is true!' Note that this also explains why metaphysicians have no subject matter, and do not investigate anything, but only converse – it is because the practice in principle only offers new ways of speaking, these proposals to speak in new ways are always available by talking. — Snakes Alive
This does not work of course, and the philosopher consciously may know this. But the process itself is so intoxicating that it pulls us in pre-rationally. And it may even service deeper desires – for instance, if I fear change, the mantra that 'time is unreal' may comfort me, because that means change is unreal, and so change cannot hurt me. — Snakes Alive
Morris Lazerowitz was interested in the nature of metaphysics, starting from the hunch that it was not what its practitioners claimed it was (an inquiry into the basic nature of things). — Snakes Alive
The Existence of Universals (1946) — SophistiCat
It is convenient, however, to regard such general terms [ 'wise', 'city' ] as names on the same footing as 'Socrates' and 'Paris': names each of a single specific entity, though a less tangible entity than the man Socrates or the town Boston. — W.V. Quine, Mathematical Logic
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