Re: Universality as warrant for relative truth value

Neil W Rickert <rickert+nn@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Haines Brown <brownh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Neil W Rickert <rickert+nn@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

I explain my position. I cannot command you to accept it.

Then we have a problem. I mean this sincerely, as I am sure you did in
your reply. You believe you are responsive, but the person to whom you
offer an answer fails to recognize that you are responding.

There can be many reasons for this. If we disregard ad hominem ones
(stupidity, ignorance, lunacy, ill will, etc.), we are left with a
simple fact: what you say is often not conveying any meaning to me; your
communication often fails.

Complicating this issue is that people classified as "postmodernists"
for systemic reasons frequently deny that they are postmodernists. So
let me substitute a simplistic definition and ask if you embrace it and
not if you call yourself a postmodernist. If I said that there is a
position that reduces the foundation of knowledge the mind alone (to
logic, semantics, etc.), would that describe your position?

Apparently you use the word otherwise. What is your definition?

Theories come in different forms, so perhaps there isn't one
definition that fits all. But, generally speaking, what constitutes
a scientific theory is a set of empirical principles that serve as a
guide to scientists in that field (or subfield).

I find the word "empirical" here odd, for it would preclude the
unobservables that scientists regularly handle, such as gluons.

I don't follow. Are you unaware that physicists carry out empirical
experiments to detect the various particles that they hypothesize?

Of course they do, which is why practicing scientists are realists. That
is, they take as real things that are not empirical (according to my
dictionary, things that are not directly observable). These things are
not themselves the cause of phenomena.

I assume there are different types of realism, which take the following
to be have truth value: a) best current theory, b) entities that are
themselves beyond the range of our instruments to detect directly c)
causal potencies, and d) process (my own preference because it does not
make an ontological distinction between observables and
unobservables). My example of gluon is the second type here.

What is meant by "real" here? Well, I suppose either that a) the
production of outcomes can only be explained by a presumption of their
reality, or b) it is a condition for the production of outcomes. I
prefer the latter ontological view to the former epistemological one. In
realist terms I suspect unobservables are contingent and exert (I prefer
"necessarily exert" to "can exert" here) an influence over observables.

Let me say that I'm imposing categories here that are not necessarily
conventional, or at least I don't encounter such neat categories in the
literature regarding realism. But I hope they are harmless rather than
contentious.

You may be suggesting here that unobservables are indirectly detectable
as having empirical effect. If so, then you have put my concern to rest,
although your phrase "empirical principle" might be taken as being
self-contradictory, depending on just what you mean by it.

While I'd not necessary object to your definition, it is significant
that you disregard the three standard definitions of theory that I
more or less copied here from a standard authority that defined what
the term means to people and that might have the odor of truth value.

I largely ignore philosophy of science, which I think of as little
more than a quaint collection of "Just So" stories.

Well, your reply explains a lot. The original question was about an
issue in the framework of the philosophy of science, and for some odd
reason you chose to respond to my points even though you consider the
philosophy of science to be fictional. Why did you presume to do that?
That is, your aim is not to criticize my arguments, but to question the
meaningfulness raising philosophy of science arguments in the first
place. No wonder there is miscommunication! Do you wonder that I felt
you were not communicating much of anything? The reason turns out to be
that you were not trying to communicate within the framework of the
philosophy of science, but representing a position in a framework
entirely unrelated and hostile to it.

This I would do only if you offer a convincing warrant for your
alternative, but for some reason you omit it.

I am presenting my viewpoint. It is not up to me to convince you.
The only thing that could convince you, would be for you to spend some
time studying the practices of scientists - not what they say they are
doing, but what they actually are doing.

I have trouble grasping this reply. If your viewpoint on an issue in the
philosophy of science is nothing more that your private feeling about a
fiction, then what relevance could your suggestion to draw inferences
from the practice of scientists possibly have? I suggested above that
practicing scientists were realists, but you dismiss my inference as my
private fiction with which you reject, not as wrong, but as not
meaningful.

My understanding of the postmodern position is that it holds the
operations of mind to represent the foundation of meaning (words or
logic the independent variable, if you will, while the world is a
dependent variable), and not the world outside the mind (as in
positivism) or the relation of mind and world (as in critical
empiricism or Marxism). Do you hold to one of these three positions,
or, if yet another, would you specify what it is?

I'm not quite sure you are asking. However, I do see meaning as
inherently subjective.

Generally people would agree, but the real issue is whether there is
also an objective component. I crudely offered three positions; only the
first denies an objective component.

In reviewing my reply, I omitted a fourth possibility - one which which
I'm inclined to support, and that is that the ontological distinction of
mind and world may be unnecessary and pernicious, for both might better
be considered merely aspects of one process: our action in the world. To
be more explicit: in their activity, humans have a causal potency that
is constrained by the world and by the mind, and what emerges is the
effect of that action on both world and mind.

Now it is true that philosophers have have developed some tenuous
theories about meaning and reference. And it does seem to be true
that philosophers use these tenous ideas so much, that they have
become part of the philosopher's common experience. It seems that
philosophers have lost track of how tenuous those ideas are.

Agreed, although I'd not go so far as to suggest that "tenuous" means
fictional.

Incidentally I was careful to say "engage" the world rather than
observe the world. To posit a person as gaining knowledge from passive
observation seems an artifact of Cartesian ontology. Our aim is not
just to understand, but to change it (Marx, roughly).

I don't have a problem with "engage". I'm not sure that the idea of
knowledge from passive observation is just an artifact of Cartesian
ontology. It also seems to be widely assumed in empiricist writings,
and in the AI literature.

I am assuming that a Cartesian ontology that makes world and mind
ontologically and modally distinct entities rather than aspects
(properties) of one process, underlies much of Western thought,
including empiricism.

I suspect your point might really be that knowledge based on passive
observation is not peculiar to the post 17th century West, and if so I'd
have to agree. I suspect the difference I was hinting at was that the
mind-body distinction that characterizes the West is not just
ontological, but also distinct in terms of modal logic, and it is the
latter that makes their interaction problematic.

Cartesianism is often taken to characterize the foundation Western
scientific thought (until now), and might suggest that his ontological
categories characterize Western thought. In any case, he broke with the
traditional ontological distinction of mind/body/spirit or matter/form
and substituted body/mind, with mind being ontologically autonomous. The
problem, I believe, lies in this autonomy. Mind makes sense in its own
terms and doesn't depend on its relation to the world. I'm speculating
here, and if you can offer corrections in terms of intellectual history,
I'd appreciate it.

It is this ontological autonomy and modality that I suspect is what
distinguishes the Cartesian tradition from those that are older or
non-Western, and it is this autonomy that I believe has proved to be
problematic in the course of western thought, not just recently, but
from the beginning.

What I was getting at was that action is the mechanism from which
knowledge emerges. We act first, and as a result acquire truthful
knowledge.

I would change that.

Why? If I speak fictions and your proposed change had the same status,
why would your alternative representation be at all compelling (produce
a "change") rather than represent merely an alternative private view?

I am not a dualist. However, there may be more problems with
materialistic monism than with Cartesian dualism.

I did not mean to imply you were. On the contrary, I suspect you
respond to the Cartesian contradiction by a reduction of world to
mind. But since you don't state your position, that's only a guess.

Actually, that's a bad guess.

OK, and so my guess is wrong. So what is right? You still don't define
your position. But I'm beginning to suspect your point is that you make
a virtue of not taking a position and therefore that your comments on or
criticisms of my points are not meant to be meaningful or have truth
value.

Monism is the metaphysical view that all reality is subsumed under one
fundamental category of being or existence.

I am a skeptic of metaphysics.

A materialist monism is the basis of science

I am not convinced of that.

Again, I'm frustrated. My statement here about the basis of science I
assumed was the conventional view. Yes, there are other possible views,
and one might assume that you prefer one of them. But you don't tell me
a) what alternative you prefer, or b) justify it in any way. That is
what I original pointed out in this message was a failure to
communicate. It is impossible to make meaningful statements or offer
constructive criticism from a vacuous position; I suspect you are not
actually speaking from a vacuous position, but you seem to make a virtue
of appearing so.

Now I could play the schoolboy and say that your typing is an illusion
in the mind of a god on Mt. Olympus, just as is your computer, the
newsgroup and the rest of the world.

As long as it all works for me, that's good enough.

Yes, my point exactly.

--

Haines Brown, KB1GRM



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