(I finished reading the article thoroughly) I don't see any reason to adopt the vocabulary of what those in the 17th century thought was the criterion of scientific knowledge, that physical explanations equated to "common sense" and what counts as common sense were people's experience with engineered machines. Of course the world isn't a machine, the world is the world. The modern version of this nonsense is asking whether "if the universe is a simulation" now that we're familiar with video games. There's no reason the world has to comport with our everyday experience, but that doesn't mean increased knowledge of counterintuitive things isn't actual knowledge of how the world works.

The details in the article about Newton, Hume, Locke, etc. is all interesting intellectual history (and as a person on a philosophy forum, I do have great interest in what the old guys think), but I start from an understanding of scientific explanation in terms of conceptualizing what we know from the sciences today, so it doesn't matter to me if Newton's discoveries betrayed some old promise. As I said, as far as I can tell, General Relativity is a more descriptively physical (not just mathematically) explanation of action at a distance than the notions Newton were able to provide. Chomsky conspicuously doesn't mention any of this, and spends many pages talking about how Newton completely dismantled mechanistic philosophy and that what proceeded its course is what tells us about the nature of science. Well, there's no reason to take mechanical philosophy or its corollary seriously now that we have completely new notions, we know what Newton and his contemporaries did not know. The piece is one-sided, a long list of historical roadblocks of when we figured out how much we don't know as science progressed without mentioning any progressive changes of our picture in reality that science has given us.

*Chomsky clearly doesn't believe in the reductionist program when it comes to unification of the sciences, very quite the contrary actually. My use of the term reductionism was atypical because it was addressing Chomsky's portrayal of even foundational physics as superficial manifestations of the real underlying principles governing the world, that we're not actually obtaining descriptions of scientific phenomenon unless we see what's happening regarding totality at the very bottom, like what Laplace's demon supposedly sees or something.

I've heard this take on Chomsky's position before and it seems reasonable. What do you think is going on for Chomsky then? Is he being disingenuous in avoiding certain ideas and over capitalising on others? Do you think he is trying to lead people in a particular direction, or is he grappling with the facts?

I'm not in a position to psychoanalyze him, he came to his position through observation and experience of real difficulties in science. Those are real, I just take other things into account and don't agree with his philosophical conclusion.

I'm not in a position to psychoanalyze him, — Saphsin

I hear you but I am not asking for anything as vulgar as amateur psychoanalysis. I'm asking if you think he is being disingenuous. You write -

Chomsky conspicuously doesn't mention any of this, and spends many pages talking about how Newton completely dismantled mechanistic philosophy and that what proceeded its course is what tells us about the nature of science. Well, there's no reason to take mechanical philosophy or its corollary seriously now that we have completely new notions, we know what Newton and his contemporaries did not know — Saphsin

Sounds to me as if you are describing a basic flaw from C and that this approach is possibly taken with calculative intent - leading us away from potential answers and into mystery. Or have I read you wrong?

I think psychoanalyzing involves speculating intent, but it looks to me that’s his biased emphasis at least.

I don't see any reason to adopt the vocabulary of what those in the 17th century thought was the criterion of scientific knowledge, that physical explanations equated to "common sense" and what counts as common sense were people's experience with engineered machines. Of course the world isn't a machine, the world is the world. The modern version of this nonsense is asking whether "if the universe is a simulation" now that we're familiar with video games. There's no reason the world has to comport with our everyday experience, but that doesn't mean increased knowledge of counterintuitive things isn't actual knowledge of how the world works. — Saphsin

This seems exactly right. The whole essay is incredibly underwhelming. It reminds of that parable about the man who can't find his lost keys because they are not under the streetlamps which he is looking for them below. Except Chomsky adduces a few examples of such historical streetlamps from which we are supposed, I guess, to generalize? Or to change the image: one can imagine a post-Scholastic philosopher lamenting how centuries of writing about essence and existence, modes and attributes, have not yet yielded definitive knowledge about the world. But just as that hypothetical writer would be lamenting about nothing more than the uselessness of a mostly outdated vocabulary, is Chomsky doing any different?

One would think that an essay dealing with the limits of intelligibility would have something more to say about the very concept of intelligibility other than what is effectively an outdated literature review! - In this sense @180 Proof is right too. There is little by way of conceptual analysis here, and I don't think Chomsky's historical erudition, no matter how impressive, really gets us any further in thinking about the limits of intelligibility.

That said, what little conceptual analysis there is seems to bear on our notions of 'matter', 'the physical', and 'mechanism'. I did like the suggestion - not pursued with any of the depth it deserved - that 'intelligibility' stands or falls with mechanism. But rather than following the path to see what this might say about intelligibility, Chomsky pursues the path of mechanism, and its failure. But why should we have any stake in that beyond antiquarian interest? Surely it is intelligibility which is of interest here? It just seems like Chomsky had avoided the subject of his own paper to follow what he found more convenient.

This probably comes off as a bit harsh. But I did enjoy the discussion. It is good to have a check, every now and then, on our metaphysical ambitions. But this paper is more gestural than substantive, imo.

Edit: to put the question in the sharpest possible way: even every doubt raised by Chomsky over matter, the physical, or mechanism is correct - why would this tell us anything at all about intelligibility apart from the fact that we have approached it with inadequate terms?

I can only give you what I understand his view to entail. The point of this thread is to discuss the text.

Not for me to explain it in his words - for that you should read the text.

If you're not convinced by the outline, and think these are ramblings, then skip it.



Thanks. I spend a lot of time on it, part of my thesis after all. Also many emails and even a meeting.

But regardless, he is pretty straightforward. Some people don't like the idea, for some reason, that there are things we can't understand.

Oh well.

I've been to a few public lectures he'd given in the 80's & 90's and have read most of his books published before the turn of the millenium. Apologetic pedants don't impress me where Chomsky's polemics are concerned.

I didn't ask for an explanation or interpretation of the text, just for someone who's read it to cite from Chomsky's article where he clearly states what he means by

• understanding
• explanation, explaining — 180 Proof

and also demonstrates

how he / we can know (i.e. scientifically explain)^ what we cannot know^ or, more fundamentally, what cannot (in principle) be known^.

If the article is saying something new, or at least conceptually coherent, about this old bugbear of his, then I'm interested to read what the great man has (re)written.

So by "mysterian" (not a term he likes for himself), or "common sense", he simply means that there are aspects about the world we don't understand, given the creatures we are — Manuel

Platonists would say that insofar as we can understand anything whatever, it's because the faculty of reason is not something that creatures (other than ourselves) possess. I mean, there's no obvious reason to presume that evolution would equip us for anything beyond what successful adaptation requires.

Has there ever been a thread about the presuppositions necessary for the possibility of rationality and intelligible experience?

Here's a six month old thread discussion on "presuppositions" you'd participated in ...

Thanks. Totally forgot about this one. :wink:

All the mystery will have gone and at the same time be infinite if we consider charge the magic stuff in nature. Nature is charged, that's a scientific fact. Charge is a mystery. That's a scientific fact. Thus the conscious is a mysterious scientific fact for scientists don't know the nature of charge.

What is charge?

Exactly! A mystery!

Exactly! A mystery! — Raymond

Well it's such a mystery I have no idea what it's connected to. Is charge about cooking or trees?

Well it's such a mystery I have no idea what it's connected to. Is charge about cooking or sport? — Tom Storm

Charge is the content of matter. Electric charge (and more deeper color charges, giving massless fields mass) is contained in in all processes. Structured in the brain, in atoms, proteins, cells, organs, etc. Without it there is no change, no interaction. It's a fundamental will, an unconscious will. It's described in physical theories without them saying what it actually is. Known for it's effects, unknown in nature.

Ok, thanks. How do you get from electric charge in matter to will?

I think the will is associated with charge. If a magnet pulls a piece of metal it seems there is a will in the magnet and the piece to be together. Just as in people. People are a lot more complicated though. If only we were protons and electrons... :smile:

Different people have different ways of approaching science. I think the issue here is one of having different takes on intuition. If you say General Relativity is more intuitive than mechanistic materialism, then we slightly differ in common sense understanding.

the world is the world. The modern version of this nonsense is asking whether "if the universe is a simulation" — Saphsin

It's very obvious know, with 300 years of accumulated knowledge.

"To paraphrase with regard to the contemporary analogue I mentioned, it “would be a very great step in science to account for mental aspects of the world in terms of manifest principles even if the causes of these principles were not yet discovered”—or to put the matter more appropriately, even if unification with other aspects of science had not been achieved. To learn more about mental aspects of the world or
chemical or electrical or other aspects—we should try to discover “manifest principles” that partially explain them, though their causes
remain disconnected from what we take to be more fundamental aspects of science. The gap might have many reasons, among them, as has repeatedly been discovered, that the presumed reduction base was misconceived, including core physics.". p. 173

I think this is in line with Integrated Information theory. It lays out what the principles of phenomenal consciousness should look like prior to offering an explanation.

The paragraph that follows that suggests that there's a pendulum in science that swings between dives for foundations and simple acceptance of what? Ungrounded principles? Honestly, it looks like the pendulum swings between a demand to know the truth vs a kind of faith.

And I was thinking about this while reading it:. if nature was as intelligible as we are intelligent, maybe smart people would be in charge a little more often. This is pure Hayek.

A leftist is in the camp of rejecting faith in nature and demanding that we provide our own foundation, which is intrepid, and maybe some day? Like: it's a testament to human ambition that we propose to know what causes gravity and consciousness... maybe someday.

It's connected to the idea that the world can be fully known - completely, "in itself". It's not mentioned in this article, but one can point to Leibniz and others, who thought we could exhaust the truths about the world by paying careful attention to the phenomena we see.

I don't think it has much to do with faith, anymore, God doesn't figure in modern science. We try to put forth the best model we can, and when we create a model, we obviously have to set aside many phenomena that don't fit into this model.

Of course, it's remarkable that mere creatures like us could have any theories at all. There's nothing in evolutionary theory which would predict that we should be able to do any science at all. So it's amazing that we can do some of it, with significant depth.

It's connected to the idea that the world can be fully known - completely, "in itself". It's not mentioned in this article, but one can point to Leibniz and others, who thought we could exhaust the truths about the world by paying careful attention to the phenomena we see. — Manuel

In a way that's a kind of faith (or groundless confidence): that out present ideas are sufficient to handle whatever nature happens to be.

I don't think it has much to do with faith, anymore, God doesn't figure in modern science. We try to put forth the best model we can, and when we create a model, we obviously have to set aside many phenomena that don't fit into this model. — Manuel

I didn't mean faith in God. Having discovered that our ideas can be insufficient (as with gravity), we have to live with the possibility that out present common sense ideas are limiting our ability to know the truth. I don't know what to call that state of mind. You're right, faith isn't the word.

Sure. I mean most organisms that ever existed and still exist are very simple structures, lacking perception and reason. It seems as if intelligence, on the whole, is not good for survival, mammals tend to do much worse than bacteria.

I didn't mean faith in God. Having discovered that our ideas can be insufficient (as with gravity), we have to live with the possibility that out present common sense ideas are limiting our ability to know the truth. I don't know what to call that state of mind. You're right, faith isn't the word. — frank

I'm guessing that our intuitions do not go beyond what is needed for survival, so we can make sense of a prey chasing us or seeing an apple fall or guessing how far one would need to throw an item to hit a predator, etc.

Luckily, we managed to develop a science forming faculty, which allows us to create theories, which differ from common intuitions.

finished reading the article thoroughly) I don't see any reason to adopt the vocabulary of what those in the 17th century thought was the criterion of scientific knowledge, that physical explanations equated to "common sense" and what counts as common sense were people's experience with engineered machines. Of course the world isn't a machine, the world is the world. The modern version of this nonsense is asking whether "if the universe is a simulation" now that we're familiar with video games. There's no reason the world has to comport with our everyday experience, but that doesn't mean increased knowledge of counterintuitive things isn't actual knowledge of how the world works. — Saphsin

Chomsky isn’t saying we don’t have knowledge about how the world works. He’s saying, at least in my reading, that our ideas of intelligibility have changed, and that words like “physical” and “material” are basically honorific. There can’t be a mind-body problem if we don’t know what “body” is, and there hasn’t been a conception since the mechanistic philosophy, which was destroyed with Newton. That’s basically the thesis.

Science of course did not end with the collapse of the notion of body (material, physical, and so on). Rather, it was reconstituted in a radically new way, with questions of conceivability and intelligibility dismissed as demonstrating nothing except about human cognitive capacities, though that conclusion has taken a long time to become firmly established. Later stages of science introduced more “absurdi- ties.” The legitimacy of the steps is determined by criteria of depth of explanation and empirical support, not conceivability and intelligibil- ity of the world that is depicted.

[my emphasis]

but I start from an understanding of scientific explanation in terms of conceptualizing what we know from the sciences today, so it doesn't matter to me if Newton's discoveries betrayed some old promise. — Saphsin

That’s the point: there hasn’t been a new conception of “physical” since Newton.

Well, there's no reason to take mechanical philosophy or its corollary seriously now that we have completely new notions, we know what Newton and his contemporaries did not know. The piece is one-sided, a long list of historical roadblocks of when we figured out how much we don't know as science progressed without mentioning any progressive changes of our picture in reality that science has given us. — Saphsin

What are these “completely new notions”? Chomsky is well aware of relativity and quantum mechanics. I’m not sure what you’re claiming he’s “conspicuously leaving out.” What is the new notion of physical/material?

I've been to a few public lectures he'd given in the 80's & 90's and have read most of his books published before the turn of the millenium. — 180 Proof

An odd remark. What’s the relevance? That you’ve read a lot of Chomsky? That’s great— but what about the text in question?

On Mysteries:

"Newton largely agreed with his scientific contemporaries. He wrote that the notion of action at a distance is “inconceivable.” It is “so great an Absurdity, that I believe no Man who has in philosophical matters a competent Faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.” By invoking it, we concede that we do not understand the phenomena of the material world. As McMullin observes, “By ‘understand’ Newton still meant what his critics meant: ‘understand in mechanical terms of contact action’.”To take a contemporary analogue, the absurd notion of action at a distance is as inconceivable as the idea that “mental states are states of the brain,” a proposal “we do not really understand [because] we are still unable to form a conception of how consciousness arises in matter, even if we are certain that it does.” Similarly,Newton was unable to form a conception of how the simplest phenomena of nature could arise in matter—and they did not, given his conception of matter, the natural theoretical version of common-sense understanding. Locke and others agreed, and Hume carried that failure of conceivability a long step beyond by concluding that Newton had restored these ultimate secrets of nature “to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain”—a stand that we may interpret, naturalistically, as a speculation about the limits of human cognitive capacities."

p.171

On Explanations:

Newton’s famous phrase “I frame no hypotheses” appears in this context: recognizing that he had been unable to discover the physical cause of gravity, he left the question open. He adds that “to us it is
enough that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea.” But while agreeing that his proposals were so absurd that no serious scientist could accept them, he defended himself from the charge that he was reverting to the mysticism of the Aristotelians.His principles, he argued, were not occult: “their causes only are occult”; or, he hoped, were yet to be discovered in physical terms, meaning mechanical terms. To derive general principles inductively from phenomena, he continued, “and afterwards to tell us how the properties of actions of all corporeal things follow from those manifest principles, would be a very great step in philosophy, though the causes of these principles were not yet discovered.”

p.172

That's about as far as I'll go, if you are interested then read on, if not, don't.

A bit more on intuitive understanding:

https://cprtrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/COMPLETE-REPORT-Goswami-Childrens-Cognitive-Development-and-Learning.pdf

"Naïve or intuitive physics, rooted in the perception of objects and events, in general yields
reliable information about the structure and action of physical systems. However, in some
cases naïve physics gives rise to misleading models of the physical causal structure of the
world. For example, most children (and adults) employ a pre-Newtonian, ‘impetus’ theory
of projectile motion (for example Viennot 1979). Each motion must have a cause, and so we
think that if a ball is dropped from a moving train, it will fall downwards in a straight line.
In fact, it will fall forwards in a parabolic arc (Kaiser et al. 1985), as the moving train imparts
a force (Newtonian physics). "

- p.6

Here's a relevant reply to my query .

Btw, are these citations from Chomsky's article? :chin:

Newton largely agreed with his scientific contemporaries.
[ ... ]
As McMullin observes, “By ‘understand’ Newton still meant what his critics meant: ‘understand in mechanical terms of contact action’.” — Manuel

It's not surprising that Newton the alchemist had "agreed" with his contemporaries that there are "occult causes" rather than, also like them, overlooking that those indicated the limits of the scientific practices and prevalent philosophical biases of his day. Anyway, so Chomsky's sense of "understanding" – by extension explicability and therefore inexplicability (i.e. "mysterious, mystery") – is anachronistic and related to / derived from an out-dated, surpassed, methodological paradigm? – okay, got it.

These are from the essay.

Yes and no.

Yes in so far as scientists don't worry about a theory making intuitive sense, for example QM and Feynman's quote about it. Of course, we can argue about which interpretation is more reasonable: Many Worlds, Copenhagen, Relational, etc.

No in so far as common sense understanding (folk understanding) is innate as linked in the post directly above yours.