I agree that reality/existence in day to day living can be taken at face value. This is the nature of culture, common ideation and the interpersonal utility of language.
It's surface level - vague, imprecise, unquestioned, unassumed and therefore useful in a day to day context.
However existence is not just surface level. It stems from the furthest/most distant origins. The most primitive, the beginning of all things. All encompassing.
Trying to apply specificity to a macroscopic scale is much more difficult then applying vaguery to the everyday microscopic scale. — Benj96
On April 30, 1897, English physicist Joseph John Thomson gave the first experimental proof of the electron, which had been already theoretically predicted by Johnstone Stoney.
None. Physicalism, in practice, is an epistemology (re: a paradigm used in natural science).What's the justification for a physicalist ontology? — Agent Smith
The question lacks grounds for raising it (Witty, Peirce).Why is it that when talking about material stuff, nobody goes "is the chair I'm sitting on real?"
Nominalists & pragmatists, naturalists & existentialists don't ask 'whether or not numbers are real'. Platonists & rationalists, for example, promiscuously misplaced concreteness like that. By "nonphysical stuff", by the way, you do mean abstract objects, not "angels", right? :smirk:... while quite the opposite happens when we discuss apparently nonphysical stuff like numbers.
Ironically, that Empirical, tangible-results-oriented, understanding of "Reason" is common even on The Philosophy Forum, where we don't do anything remotely empirical. Materialism, as a belief system, sometimes seems to be the un-official doctrine of TPF. :sad:So when most people say 'reason' in effect they mean 'scientific reason' which operates within constraints that are rarely made the object of explicit awareness. Philosophers (or some philosophers) are well aware of this. — Wayfarer
Ironically, that Empirical, tangible-results-oriented, understanding of "Reason" is common even on The Philosophy Forum, where we don't do anything remotely empirical. — Gnomon
What's the justification for a physicalist ontology? — Agent Smith
The entire truth/the true nature of reality has been proposed many times from many disciplines but never fully adopted or unanimously accepted, — Benj96
It's not complicated. There's broad consensus that religion and metaphysics are archaic, they haven't moved with the times, and are no longer relevant to life as it's lived now. By default, the only yardsticks we have are those provided by science. Of course there is an enormous variety of attitudes and views, but that is broadly true in secular cosmopolitan culture. Materialism as a philosophy arises mainly from attempt to apply scientific methods to philosophical problems, or to deny that there are philosophical problems that are not in scope for scientific method. — Wayfarer
And your point? — 180 Proof
What is your explanation for existence? — Benj96
It's happy hour here (near Portland, Oregon) so I'll lustily drink to that! :yum: :up:At heart my ontology is trivial: every possible concrete thing either has no parts (and thus has the structure of the empty set) or has parts (and thus has the structure of a non-empty set). These concrete things make up all possible worlds and all possible worlds are real worlds because there is no difference between possible and real. — litewave
haha that's quite a use if the word presumption. In truth I think there's a lot of Interplay between "fact", "belief" "hypothesis" and "presumption" over long times — Benj96
You're taking issue with a strawman of your own making, much like theists do with "atheism" and idealists (antirealists) do with "naturalism". I'm not aware of any physicalist who actually uses the concept of physicalism the way you (wiki?) do define it. — 180 Proof
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