Check out Søren Brier's academic homepage (and I was alerted to him by Apokrisis) - titles like 'Information and consciousness: A critique of the mechanistic concept of information', 'Bateson and Peirce on the pattern that connects and the sacred'. I also found a paper by Marcello Barbieri on the history of biosemiosis and it's very wide-ranging. — Wayfarer
:up:On the whole, I think physicalism is on the wane. It's real heyday was actually the late 19th century, I think the scientific justification for it was demolished by the introduction of quantum physics in 1927. — Wayfarer
if you provide physicalism with the baggage of every phenonemon, it loses its explanatory power as to what "physical" even means. — schopenhauer1
The alternative is a view of science which opens the door to the soft sciences, including theology. If the repeatability requirement is softened then interpersonal realities can be the subject of scientific study, because repeated interpersonal interactions do yield true and reliable knowledge, even though the repeatability is not as strict as that of the lab scientist who deals with a passive and subordinate substance. — Leontiskos
I will often answer that there is indeed a kind of peer-review and 'quality control' method, if you like, in spiritual cultures, such as Zen Buddhism... — Wayfarer
The real problem with the idea of higher knowledge is the lack of a vertical axis against which the term 'higher' is meaningful. But that is the very thing that physicalism has undermined. Physicalism has a 'flat ontology', with matter (or nowadays, matter-energy-space-time) being the sole constituent of existence. — Wayfarer
That is, the ability to know and understand the metaphysical basis of reality constitutes wisdom. — Leontiskos
But I don't understand how anything Anderson says refutes a potentially physicalist understanding of the world. He refutes reductionism very well, but my attempt to invent a "best we can do now" version of physicalism was not meant to affirm reductionism, quite the contrary. — J
Published in 1924, Burtt's work explores how the shift to a scientific worldview in the 17th century was underpinned by (often unstated) metaphysical assumptions.
I think this is a good line of argument. I had thought of physicalism, also metaphorically, as kind of a snake pit where whenever one snake pops its head up and you cut it off, another one simply reappears in its place, reflecting the adaptive ability of physicalism to proliferate new versions of itself in response to new objections. This overall amorphism seems highly suspect in the context of scientifc endeavour. But then the question arises, as you and others have pointed out, is it really realistic to presume you can entirely rid yourself of that type of problem and "just do" science under the guidance of methodological naturalism or some other supposedly more neutral framework? Aren't there snakes everywhere? Aren't there metaphysical commitments inherent in making your job philosophically coherent as an enterprise?
I think to an extent there are. And an associated problem is even finding generally accepted definitions of the concepts in question, so that hard lines can be drawn. Perhaps the scientific method, methodological naturalism, metaphysical naturalism (including physicalism) can be placed on a kind of spectrum of increased commitment and perhaps even that modest enterprise has its complications. — Baden
But I still think its useful to try to get out Occam's razor and try to do what we can, especially when one finds oneself defending science against ideological and metaphysical encroachment in general. — Baden
But qualitative studies do play a part in science and the soft sciences are absolutely drenched in philosophical commitments, particularly structuralist ones. Though, again, there is some kind of division envisioned between methodologies and metaphysics, it's very hard to see where that line really is. That's probably a conversation that's too broad for the scope of this thread, though I won't deny its relevancy. — Baden
I guess part of the problem is that unifications are often misunderstood as reductions in popular science. — Count Timothy von Icarus
But the metaphysical naturalism of the physicalist posits that as the universe must behave in a law-like manner, i.e. in a way which is replicable and predictive (in principle if not in practice), anything we encounter in the universe that does not seem to behave so, must despite appearances, ultimately do so by virtue of its very existence. — Baden
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