Surely you know that DNA replication is something that has been explained at the level of individual molecules. What does "enable" mean in the context of molecules obeying the laws of physics? — Frederick KOH

DNA replication is one thing, genetic inheritance is another. The inheritance at issue is inheritance of function. Biological function only can be explained with reference to the high level functional organization typical of specific forms of life. If you abstract away from the context that gives significance to physiological processes, then you are doing physics and chemistry all right, but you have given up providing a biological explanation. You have just narrowed the focus to questions of material constitution, which are just one sort of question one can ask about a biological system.

Actually it has been done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_bond — Frederick KOH

That's not an explanation of what a gene is and/or of what genes do. Likewise, listing the components of a computer and specifying the way they are soldered together doesn't amount to an explanation of the way such a computer is supposed to function or of what the programs are that such a computer can run. There is much more to a gene being the gene that it is than the nature of the chemical bonds that hold together in DNA molecules the sequence of nucleotides encoding it. The existence of those chemical bonds merely are enabling conditions for those molecules being able to carry stable functional structures from one (or two) living progenitor(s) to its(their) progeny (i.e. whole living organisms). The whole epigenetic context -- which includes many determinate features: (1) of the wider cellular structures and functions; (2) of the whole organism; and (3) of its extended phenotype, and (4) of many aspects of its normal ecological niche (natural affordances) -- plays much more of an explanatory role than do the low level molecular enabling conditions of those high level functions and structures.

Perhaps I chose the wrong words. What I mean is that we can, from sunyata, realize that to do good we shouldn't have an ulterior motive e.g. attaining nirvana or salvation etc. Simply be good. — TheMadFool

Yes, that makes sense. Sorry for misconstruing what you had said. One can indeed act for a reason and one's acting for this reason not constituting one's having an ulterior motive, right?

It is when you realize that there's nothing you become truly free. What follows then is a choice you make on your own terms, devoid of external influences - to be good for no reason whatever. This is beautiful. — TheMadFool

It seems self-contradictory, though. You can't divorce reason from moral goodness. Non-rational animals can't behave well or badly in a moral sense since they lack moral understanding. If someone choses to act well (in a moral sense) for no reason at all, then what would be the measure of her action according to which it isn't seen to be deviating from goodness into some gratuitous cruel or unjust behavior? If you chose to act well -- or to be good -- "on your own terms", as you say, then your own understanding of goodness, as distinguished from evil, provides your reason for acting. This rational understanding becomes the law, or the measure, of your own behavior, as it were, even if this law is autonomously endorsed by you (rather in the way a mathematician acquires intellectual autonomy when she comes to rationally endorse the principles of valid logical inference that she first was trained to follow unreflectively by her community, because those principles later withstood her own attempts at criticizing them.)

These are prevalent caricatures of his work, but they are wrong. — StreetlightX

That is useful to know!

What about Gorgias? — andrewk

The case of Gorgias is difficult to decide for we may never know whether his claim that Empedocle had ordered his office in Leontini to be "eavesdropped on" purported to be factual or merely rhetorical.

Further, the argument is aimed at persuading not the interlocutor, but the audience of the debate. Hence I am not constrained to use techniques that the interlocutor accepts as valid. All that matters is that the audience sees them as valid. — andrewk

Anders Weinstein who introduced me to philosophy 17 years ago (on the comp.ai.philosophy Usenet newsgroup) was constantly reminding me of this through his patient attitude to often fairly hostile fellow group participants. Also useful to do is to picture yourself conversing with your interlocutor's 'future self', as it were. People seldom change their minds on a dime. That doesn't mean that some of your (or her) arguments won't sink in in the distant future, when much of the rhetorical dust will have settled, and many stubborn background assumptions will have mollified.

Under such premises it is futile to argue against anyone's detailed ideas. — jkop

What if your goal precisely is to assert power? Might that not be worthwhile? It need not be nefarious either. One may want to defend ideas in order to assert power on behalf of some oppressed group (or on one's own behalf), say, and not with an aim of revenge but rather as a claim for legitimate re-enfranchisement. I'm not used to argue on those terms, but that seems to be a line that would be available to a constructive (or social-democrat) Foucaultian, if there can be such a beast.

The indeterminate nature of so many questions is real enough, but it doesn't mean the answer is "somewhere in the middle" (though, of course, that's where it might be). — Bitter Crank

I am unsure how to interpret this other than meaning that for some questions truth can lay in the middle (i.e. be ill defined, or nuanced) but for some other questions (also asked in specific contexts regarding well defined particulars) truth is categorical. Am I reading you correctly or is there some point I am missing?

No. — Bitter Crank

In that case we are in agreement. (And I agree with all the rest of your post too.) But then your earlier claim that "a murder spree is a murder spree and war is war", which seemed to preclude the possibility of undecidable cases, or of middle ground judgments, in specific cases where a verdict seems to be called for in point of legality or of moral legitimacy, was misleading.

So, what I know about string theory could be written on the back of a postage stamp in none-too-small lettering. Any thoughts I have about string theory are fourth hand and not worth your time. — Bitter Crank

OK, so you are walking back your claim that the truth of string theory can't be in the middle, and that either the theory works or it doesn't. It could turn out that, just as is the case for Newtonian mechanics (or any other well surveyed, well established scientific theory, in my view) string theory could turn out to have a restricted scope of applicability such that the question of its categorical truth (i.e. non-scope relative) is ill defined.

If the French Resistance shot 10 Nazi officials one day in occupied Paris, neither the Nazis nor the Resistance should call it murder (though the Germans might want to tell the story that way). — Bitter Crank

Sure, but you can also fill up the details of the case such that it isn't so clear cut. Imagine this to occur on the brink of liberation, or with low level officers, or soldiers, who may want to claim prisoner status, etc. etc. Whatever question is raised that problematizes the verdict, you can for sure imagine filling up the details of the case in such a way as to resolve it unambiguously (though still conditionally to the endorsement of a specific value system, as others have pointed out), or, in such a way as to problamatize the case even more. The real world often is like that. The more you learn about some (though not all) specific criminal cases, the more curveballs are thrown at you.

A murder spree is a murder spree and war is war. — Bitter Crank

In order to defend this claim you provided paradigmatic examples of clear cut cases, or examples where our suspension of judgment is naturally lifted after we are appraised of more facts about the case and of relevant features of its context. But is it always like that? Are there not cases where the very existence of a state of war between two nations can be disputed? (e.g. the "invaders" conceive of themselves as "liberators"?) Or where the motives of the criminal come very close to constituting extenuating circumstances. A jury may be deadlocked not on account of lack of information but rather because the applicability of agreed upon criteria to the specific case are in dispute. In such "soft" cases, the claim that truth lies in the middle might be a way of pointing out that both the case for the defense and the case for the prosecution necessarily leave out troublesome features of the case.

I do not have a position on Newtonian Mechanics vs. Quantum Mechanics. Sorry. — Bitter Crank

But you do have a position on string theory??

Challenge accepted. I propose as reference his Reductionism Redux collected in Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries — Frederick KOH

Do you really endorse that? OK, let me read this chapter and I'll comment later.

You forgot the gratuitous name dropping. — Frederick KOH

You are the one who dropped Weinberg's name and endorsed his views on reductionism as authoritative (without providing specific references).

I was referring specifically to the Bouveresse v Rorty debate — Frederick KOH

Yes, and I was reminding you that your take on "this debate" shouldn't motivate your dismissal of Ramberg's unrelated piece, which is directly relevant to the topic of scientistic reductionism, to Rorty's take on it, and is furthermore endorsed by him.

My eyes glaze over when I see claims like this, these critiques, when unpacked and compared with the exact words actually said by the target, usually show themselves to be talking about something else from what philosophically mature scientists mean. — Frederick KOH

"Mature scientists" seldom are mature philosophers and they engage in as much pseudo-philosophy as any other intellectuals (including philosophers) do when they venture strong opinions about subject matter that fall outside their fields of expertise. Since I have Weinberg's book in my library, I read it, and used to be utterly taken by it (during my naive scientistic youth) then maybe you can tell me what specific pro-reductionist argument Weinberg makes that strikes you as being very strong and/or generally ignored in the philosophical literature. (By the way, it was one of my physics teacher, Jean Le Tourneux, who had informed me of the Sokal affair, while it was beginning to make waves in 1996, and who referred me to Weinberg's piece on it in the New York Review of Books.)

Actually I brought up Bouveresse v Rorty earlier in the thread - also in the volume. This debate is more "classical" in terms what you would expect in a realist v postmodernist fight. — Frederick KOH

I know, which is why I brought it up, and also because of Rorty's portrait in your avatar. I thought you might have been open to considering Rorty's own views regarding reductionism. The contributors to the volume comment on various aspects of Rorty's intellectual legacy. There is no such thing as "this debate" that is uniquely being discussed across all the essays. Bouveresse makes one argument, Ramberg another.

There are no "two sides" to a murder spree. — Bitter Crank

Might it not sometimes be a moral decision? What if the killings occur in the context of war? The assassination of Nazi officers in occupied France by the French resistance, say? Vichy loyalists may even dispute that there is a state of war between France and Germany. I am not arguing that the question of the criminality (or justifiability) of the act can't be decided. I think moral question can be objectively decided. But there certainly seems to be two sides there to be discussed and arbitrated. Murder isn't a "natural kind" as electric charge or biological species are.

On the other hand, the truth of string theory in physics is not somewhere in the middle. The theory either works or it doesn't. — Bitter Crank

What about Newtonian mechanics? It works fairly well with billiard balls and planets, not so much with heat, light and electrons. It has a restricted scope of application, works pretty well within that scope and fails outside. For all we know, could this not also turn out to be the case for string theory? I would surmise that, upon Kantian reflections on the concept of law of nature, this must be the case for any scientific theory whatsoever.

But I am dissapointed Steven Weinberg is not on your list.

I suggest you fight him instead of shadow boxing. He is good on reductionism. You want a real fight, fight him. — Frederick KOH

I had assumed the OP in this thread was a human being rather than a shadow. I was a big fan of Steven Weinberg when I was a student in mathematical physics. His Gravitation and Cosmology was the textbook that we used in the general relativity class. I greatly enjoyed his Dreams of a Final Theory and the broadly Kuhnian (and somewhat anti-naive-empiricist) approach to the philosophy of science that he advocates there. His defense of reductionism, though, is fairly naive, philosophically uninformed, and sharply contradicts the pluralistic/pragmatist viewpoints that I have defended here and that you claim to be "banal". If you've been swayed by his defense of reductionism, I would recommend either George Ellis: How Can Physics Underlie the Mind? Top-Down Causation in the Human Context, or Michel Bitbol, Downward Causation without Foundations (scroll down or search the title in the page; there is a direct link to the pdf file) as counterpoints to reductionism that are both scientifically and philosophically informed.

On edit: By the way, another antireductionist paper that might interest you is Bjorn Ramberg (whom I had the chance to meet in Oslo a couple years ago), 'Post-Ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson', published in Blackwell's volume Rorty and His Critics, Brandom ed. This is the best piece in the volume, in my estimation, and maybe also in Rorty's own estimation. He had this to say in his reply: "Most of my responses in this volume are, at least to some extent, rebuttals. But in the case of Bjorn Ramberg's paper, I find myself not only agreeing with what he says, but very much enlightened by it..."

You seem to need a caricature for banal arguments to be effective against. — Frederick KOH

Did you not notice the topic of this thread, the content of the original post, or the arguments advanced by the original poster? It would seem that my views fall squarely into the "post-modernist" tendency that s/he laments. But you assert that my views are true and banal. Maybe you think that the prejudices about science and philosophy expressed by folks like Sam Harris, Alan Sokal, Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and the original poster, are "caricatures" that ought to be ignored. Since this is a philosophy forum, and the OP purports to be advancing a philosophical argument, I am responding to it seriously rather than insisting that we ought not to care about philosophical arguments.

In the generation that included Bohr and Heisenberg and many more. You are contradicting reality. — Frederick KOH

I singled out Bohr and Heisenberg as beacons of light. They were vanguard of a philosophical revolution that is quite antithetical to the "shut up and calculate" attitude that has been wrongly ascribed to them. They never shied from discussing the philosophical implications of the new physics. Most contemporary physicists still happily ignore this revolution and hope for an as of yet undeveloped interpretation of quantum mechanics that would restore something akin to the metaphysical realism that permeated the old Newtonian/Laplacian view of an "objective" mechanistic/deterministic universe that has its salient empirical features determined quite independently from our scientific practices.

When something is banal , its the banal and not the a fortiori that people notice. — Frederick KOH

Scientists are people too, they tend not to notice what you and I now seem to be agreed on, and indeed to angrily take exception to what you now claim to be banal. They tend to object to is as philosophical nonsense, "post-modernism", relativism, etc.

And I was responding to your claim that... — Frederick KOH

Yes, and you didn't contradict it, whereas mine was contradicting yours. You also still are dodging the main point regarding the inevitability of an at least tacitly understood background of conceptual practice and shared concerns and interests for sustaining claims of scientific objectivity.

Put in such general terms, it is true to the point of banality. — Frederick KOH

What is true to the point of banality is a fortiori true. Yet, it is the most common thing to be denied by typical critics of "post-modernism".

So, some scientists do this and others do that. Those who do this tend to be older that those who do that. Got it. — Frederick KOH

I was responding to your claim that "The last time things became degenerative, physicists rushed to the new paradigm." History of science show this to seldom be the case unless your idea of a "rush" is a community wide process that spans decades to centuries. You also are ignoring the main point, relevant to this thread, that even in the odd case of a successful and rapid scientific revolution, the former set of tacit assumptions and unreflexive interpretive practices necessarily gives way to another.

It has been on my Amazon wish list for a while, and this list has 850 items currently! Thanks for remembering me of it. I may move this title nearer to the top since it is quite intriguing.

You're welcome. Since the OUP link for Wiggin's book now seems dead (at least on my end) here is another one: Needs, Value, Truth.

I think where postmodernism fails is that it takes this limitation to be a warrant for a kind of indiscriminate relativism, that as there are no absolutes, in the traditional sense, and as science is a matter of falliballistic hypotheses, then all manner of truths are 'in the eye of the beholder', so to speak. — Wayfarer

Absolutism (dogmatic metaphysics, as Kant would call it, metaphysical realism, as Putnam would call it) ignores the constitutive role of human concepts in the disclosure of the empirical world. Indiscriminate relativism ignores constraints that are internal to conceptualized empirical reality. Putnam has proposed an alternative to both a naive conception of objectivity (embodied in scientific modernity) and the unqualified rejection of objectivity. He advocated this alternative under the label Realism with a Human Face. John McDowell and David Wiggins also have advocated forms of naturalized Kantianism that appeal to both Wittgenstein and Aristotle in order to demystify the role of human concepts in the constitution of empirical reality (while also bridging the gap between practical and theoretical reason). If post-modernism is correct in its criticism of absolutist metaphysics, thinkers like Putnam, McDowell and Wiggins have suggested that this criticism can be acknowledged while a suitably pragmatized Kantian concept of objectivity (which Wiggins also called 'A Sensible Subjectivism' -- see Chapter 5 in his Needs, Value, Truth) can be salvaged.

What was this broad agreement (if there was one) like in 1000AD (or 1000CE if you like)?
Significance indeed. — Frederick KOH

I am not questioning that physics, and the atomic theory of matter, are significant intellectual achievements. They most certainly are. I am rather arguing that such material sciences aren't any different from other sciences in point of reliance on (often merely tacit and uncritical) interpretation of the scope of their claims (e.g. the interpretation of their "laws", and of what would constitute falsification of then, or admissible auxiliary hypotheses, or genuine boundaries of the domain of the specific science, etc.) I am also questioning the reductionist assumption that material composition of the ordinary objects of the human and natural worlds are any more fundamental or determinative than other equally significant (in point both of definition and behavioral determination) formal and relational features of them.

The last time things became degenerative, physicists rushed to the new paradigm. — Frederick KOH

It's mostly the young folks with open (and also unformed and naïve) minds who readily embrace emerging paradigms. Scientists who already have been trained, and have been successfully operating within, the older paradigm often stick to it until they die (as Max Planck famously observed). Lorentz came close to develop the special theory of relativity bet never embraced it. Einstein pioneered some key aspects of the new QM but never relinquished the degenerative quest for hidden variables. Fields like biology, medicine, geology, cognitive and social sciences, etc., of course furnish plenty of examples of die hard degenerative research programs that linger on for decades and stubborn advocates of the status quo. Philosophy is, of course, no exception even though is has a built in anti-dogmatic character. I am not lamenting any of this. It seems to be a necessary consequence of the fact that access to uninterpreted empirical reality is impossible.

I am very sure ornithologists agree with chemists and physicists about what birds are made out of. — Frederick KOH

Physicists can't agree among themselves what atoms are made out of, let alone what birds are. "...Being made out of..." is a relational predicate of restricted scope that has furthermore variable, contextually determined, interpretations. A lump of coal is 'made of' carbon atoms in a different way than a sport team is 'constituted of' individual players (at a given time) or a bird is 'made of' living organs. That's because things that are "made out of" distinctive parts also are characterized by form, and not just matter. Furthermore, what kind of form (or functional organization) they exemplify contributes to the specification of the "...made out of..." relational predicate that relates the whole object to its significant parts (in addition to defining what sort of object it is). Consider also, a computer being 'made out of' elementary logical gates, a governments being 'made out of' agencies, etc. etc.

Even if one conceded that, in a sense, most every "thing" (i.e. broadly "material" things) are made out of atoms (or "physical matter", whatever that turns out to be), material constitution just is one among many of the defining features that most material things have. So, this allegedly broad agreement among different sorts of scientists, regarding the ultimate material composition of empirical entities, would be agreement about very little that is of significance to the understanding of the empirical world (unless one is a rather naive and uncritical reductionist).

As long as we don't call all of it (the interpretation) "philosophy", which was my original point. — Frederick KOH

Yes, sure. Scientist sometimes tend to be dogmatic and philistine, especially when they are faithful to the religions of scientism and reductionism. In that case, when they specialize in the science of hammers, they are happy to proclaim that the whole world is made up of nails and nothing else. This needs not hamper their professional abilities so long as they are operating within productive research programs (as often happens within episodes of Kuhnian "normal science") and there is lots of fruitful "puzzle solving" to be accomplished within the prevailing scientific paradigm. When those research programs become "degenerative" (Imre Lakatos), then those scientists often are happy to ignore more productive areas of research, and they keep on hammering screws with a sledgehammer.

Why limit your assertion to formalisms and quantum theory?
Why would your assertion not apply as well to plain prose in a less mathematical endeavor?
In fact why would it not apply to doing washing machine settings based on what the manual says? — Frederick KOH

My assertion wasn't limited to quantum theory. Quite the contrary, it purports to apply to all domains of empirical discourse, scientific or not. This may have seem to be surprising to early discoverers of QM (or contemporary thinkers who haven't assimilated its lessons) since classical particle mechanics (and classical field theories) would have seem to offer clear paradigms of "uninterpreted" (or "purely objective") mathematical description of fundamental "material" reality. Prior to QM, physics had been viewed as the science of the "primary qualities" of objects, in the sense of Locke (as distinguished from "secondary qualities" that aren't intrinsic to objects but merely characterize their propensities to affect our sense organs and our minds in specific ways).

But QM turned out to display the mechanics of the smallest bits of mere "matter" not to constitute an exceptions to the case of the "high level" sciences that can't abstract from concepts essentially pegged to human interests. The indispensability of human interpretation in the cognitive apprehension of empirical objets turns out to apply across the board, as Kant had already seen it to be the case even concerning Locke's "primary quality" concepts (including, notoriously, spatial and temporal relationships).

The difference is that you cannot "take out the formal and empirical parts of your enquiry" except in abstracto. And it is the in concreto that really matters. — John

Yes, I quite agree. This is especially true when the "formal part" of the inquiry is being identified with some abstract and uninterpreted formalism, as the earlier mention to the "shut up and calculate" approach to empirical science suggested. In actual cases of scientific practice -- i.e. "in concreto" -- a specific interpretation always is either tacitly assumed or agreed upon (but always only partially rendered explicit) by scientists who work within a shared theoretical or technological paradigm. Such a background understanding is required if the formalism is to be brought to bear determinately to specific experimental setups or domains of empirical observation.

It is paradoxical that the "shut up and calculate" approach has come to be associated with the so called Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics while the actual intent of Bohr and Heisenberg was to stress the ineliminability of the background "classical" features of the experimental conditions (and thus also of the agency of the observers) in the definitions of quantum "observables". One thing that the formalism of QM (be it Heisenberg's, Schrödinger's, Dirac's or any other picture) can't achieve on its own is defining the nature of the observables. There is no self-sufficient and uninterpreted use of the formalism of quantum theory that can be of any use in making predictions of empirical observations. The "shut up and calculate" approach to empirical science is a total non-starter.

So the issue here, appears to be that since there are such objects, black holes, whose mass is contained within the Schwartzchild radius, doesn't this indicate that GR is inadequate for understanding some aspects of the universe? — Metaphysician Undercover

It's merely a theory of gravitation. It is adequate for the very restricted purpose of understanding the phenomenon of gravitation as a manifestation of the metric of space-time (and what it is that determines this metric: spatial distributions of energy and momentum). But it is also limited in scope since it is a "classical" theory that becomes inadequate for energy and density scales where quantum fluctuations become relevant. Hence, we can't really know, within the general relativity framework, what happens to the metric of space-time near singularities or in the very early universe.

That doesn't indicate that there is anything inherent within GR which would make you expect to find a black hole, it indicates that certain types of stars when understood under GR make you expect to find a black hole. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course. General relativity is a deterministic theory. It only tells you what to expect given some empirically realized initial conditions. Likewise, there isn't anything inherent to Newtonian mechanics which would make you expect to find a billiard ball in a pocket. But, given that some billiard balls are subjected to impacts thus and so and then let roll freely, then they are expected to end up in a pocket. Likewise, given that some stars naturally evolve in such a way that they contract within their Schwartzschild radii, then they are expected to become black holes.

I don't see how this could be true. What is it inherent within GR which would make you expect to see a black hole? — Metaphysician Undercover

General Relativity is a theory of gravitation that lawfully relates the distribution of energy and momentum in space-time with the metric of space-time (thus specifying its "curvature"). It follows from this lawful relation (i.e. Einstein's field equations) that whenever a spherical distribution of mass achieves a density such that it is contained within its Schwarzschild radius, then the escape velocity at the surface attains the speed of light. Past this point, the mass can't possibly not collapse into a singularity (and there can't possibly not occur the formation of an event horizon at the Schwarzschild radius) consistently with Einstein's field equations.

It also is the case that for a stellar mass to achieve a density such that it is contained within its Schwartzschild radius is a very common occurrence with dying stars only slightly more massive than our Sun, or with dense galactic cores.