Thursday, February 16, 2017

The external world and the burden of proof

If both a proposition and its denial cannot be proved, what rules do we use to decide what to believe? If I say "Can you prove that the external world exists" and you can't prove it, should we then not believe that there is an external world?

340 comments:

«Oldest   ‹Older   201 – 340 of 340
StardustyPsyche said...

Reconquista Initiative said...

" any view of a human person which claims that a person has both actual mental properties (such as consciousness, intentionality, abstract thinking, ideas, etc.) and actual material properties (such as an actual material body that is extended in actual material space) is going to be a view where the human person has multiple properties, and properties which are both mental and material. "

False. Thinking is like running, a process of the material. We do not have a "running property" as an existent thing. Our material bodies act in a complicated temporal process we call "running".


"Thus, on any such view, the human person is a composite of the mental and the material in the sense that he has both mental and material properties, each of which is not reducible to the other."

False. Thinking is reducible to a brain process.


" And this fact would apply to such views as substance-dualism, property-dualism, hylomorphic-dualism, and many forms of materialism / naturalism that posit the real existence of mental phenomenon. Now, the only two views that really get away from this type of “dualism” (and I use that word with the necessary caveats in place) is either eliminative materialism (which eliminates all mental phenomena and considers them to be unreal) or eliminative mentalism (ie – immaterialism, which considers matter to be unreal)."

False. Ordinary neuroscience reduces thinking to a real process of the brain.


" Furthermore, an immaterial mind is absolutely simple (not composed of parts,"

Incoherent. My thoughts are composed of many parts. I see and hear and think in multitudes of details, yet the mind has no details, no parts, no structure?


" So, immaterialism is simpler because it can account for all human experience "

False. Immaterialism accounts for nothing. It is an incoherent assertion utterly lacking in explanatory value or power.


February 26, 2017 4:50 PM

bmiller said...

@David Brightly,

So it seems that you depart from the eliminative materialist view in that there is something distinctly human in addition to sense perception (that can be amplified with scientific instruments).

It that “something” persistent then? I mean we know that we retain none of the molecules that we started out with as a child, so we know that the material stuff we are made of is not persistent. What is it that retains the memory of the experiences and what is a memory?

David Brightly said...

Well, I'm sure there is something distinctive going on in my brain when I'm embarrassed, but apart from guessing that it's neuro-chemical activity of some sort I'm completely in the dark as to what it is. All I can do is say, It's embarrassment.

Instrumentation comes in because our ability to build an instrument to detect some phenomenon is often an indicator of how well understood and integrated it is into our scientific picture. Roughly, if we can't measure it, it ain't scientific.

StardustyPsyche said...

bmiller said...

"I mean we know that we retain none of the molecules that we started out with as a child, "
And only a tiny fraction of the details of memories of childhood as well.

" What is it that retains the memory of the experiences and what is a memory?"
A memory is retained by a physical structure that stores information. Memories fade. Details get lost. They can also be refreshed, but then they will fade again.

The overall structure can survive replacement of tiny parts of it just as the structure of a puzzle would remain after replacing every piece one piece at a time.

The immaterialist version is what? Memories are stored absent any structure at all? The mind has all these complex features in thoughts yet the mind also has no complexity in its structure? What preposterous, incoherent, babble.


February 28, 2017 5:51 AM

StardustyPsyche said...


Blogger David Brightly said...

" Roughly, if we can't measure it, it ain't scientific."
The far side of the moon was not measured prior to spaceflight. So, the far side of the moon was unscientific until spaceflight?


February 28, 2017 7:13 AM

bmiller said...

@David Brightly,


"Instrumentation comes in because our ability to build an instrument to detect some phenomenon is often an indicator of how well understood and integrated it is into our scientific picture. Roughly, if we can't measure it, it ain't scientific."


So do you allow for knowledge outside of the "scientific" I mean even in principle we can't measure many mathematical concepts but yet somehow we can understand them.

And BTW, I'm interested in your answer to the "self persistence" question.

William said...

" Roughly, if we can't measure it, it ain't scientific."
The far side of the moon was not measured prior to spaceflight. So, the far side of the moon was unscientific until spaceflight?

Distinction should be made here between:

1. scientific describing an extremely useful type of cultural practice of gathering knowledge
2. scientific as a term to classify knowledge according to source
3. scientific as a term to classify objects in the world based on how we learn about them.

I would refer you to this ebook: Scientism and its Discontents, part 2, where a similar distinction is made, as analogous to the term "healthy."

bmiller said...

@William,

Thanks for the link to the article. Both parts are excellent.

StardustyPsyche said...

Blogger William said...

" I would refer you to this ebook: Scientism and its Discontents, part 2, where a similar distinction is made, as analogous to the term "healthy.""
What an incredibly verbose, diffuse, vague, and rambling work.

Does she have a point to make? Based on what? The sheer volume of vague generalities makes the articles painfully tedious and ultimately pointless.

At one point she makes the self contradictory statement “it’s all physical, all right; but it isn’t all physics."

She continues with this muddled mess "To be sure, the human mind would be impossible without the human brain; but the brain isn’t all there is to it. Rather, it’s culture that makes mindedness possible—even as, at the same time, mindedness makes culture possible."

Sorry William, I know you meant well, but I just can't take that much muddled mush.


February 28, 2017 12:05 PM

William said...

Dustie:

We both disagree with her about culture, but for opposing reasons, it seems: I think culture isn't (only) physical, and you may, give what you said against the work about physics and physical, think culture is (only) material.

It also seems she might have hit a nerve, to get such a review from you?

David Brightly said...

Knowledge outside of the scientific? Certainly. Bob P several threads back gave us a long list of topics which figure in the human world and have to be understood in human terms and about which science has very little to say. Mathematics is tricky. It seems to be about abstract structure or pattern. The science of Aristotelian form perhaps?

What is persistent? I guess the scientific picture of living things is more of an ongoing process like a wave on the ocean or a candle flame rather than a 'substance'. Living is more doing than being. But it's not chaos. There can be stable structures within living things even if there is a slow continuous flow of matter through them. In the human picture we talk of having a mind or being a mind. The scientific picture would probably want to talk about a 'minding' process that proceeds while we are awake and ceases when we are dreamlessly sleeping, adjusting the synaptic strengths between neurons in order to represent new belief (though that is a human picture term!) So here is an immediate hard-to-resolve clash of the two viewpoints.

What counts as scientific? I'm using the term in William's sense (2) to qualify knowledge in the first instance, and then by extension to sense (3) to qualify objects. Until Lunar 3 we had no knowledge at all of the far side of the moon. A fortiori, we had no scientific knowledge of it, so it was unscientific in sense (3).

StardustyPsyche said...

William said...

" We both disagree with her about culture, but for opposing reasons, it seems: I think culture isn't (only) physical, and you may, give what you said against the work about physics and physical, think culture is (only) material."
If, as she says, it's all physical than culture would have to be only physical. But how are we to make a transfer function equation set from the standard model to our cultural observations? We can't. We never will. It is vastly too complex for any hope of such a thing.

Scientists and scientifically minded people know that.

Also, science is provisional by its nature, we know that too.

What is this so called "scientism"?

I think it is a strawman made up by theists and philosophers. An over simplified view of how scientists and scientifically minded people think that attributes a sort of blind, almost childish view to us, as though we are not ourselves keenly aware of what science is and is not.


" It also seems she might have hit a nerve, to get such a review from you?"
*I've only got one nerve left and you're getting on it!!!*

Well, it's not as bad as all that :-)


March 01, 2017 12:12 AM

bmiller said...

@David Brightly,

"I guess the scientific picture of living things is more of an ongoing process like a wave on the ocean or a candle flame rather than a 'substance'."

Wouldn’t you agree though that there must be an “actual something” to undergo a process? The examples of the “actual somethings” you gave that were undergoing a process were “the ocean”, “a candle” and “a mind”. Also, if I look at the dictionary, there are several different definitions of process. I’d be interested which of those you have in mind.

I can conclude from my own experience that I have been a persistent being at least as long as I’ve been alive. I also know that I can’t be just the material that presently makes me up since none of it has persisted the entire time of my life. So something has persisted that entire time and that something cannot be just the material that presently makes (or made) me up although it may presently be part of it.

bmiller said...

@Hal,

I can't tell if you agree or disagree with what I posted, although I think you agree.

I'm interested in what David has to say about what about me persists over time. He mentioned that perhaps the scientific picture would call it a "minding" process but not chaos.

So two things then:
1) If the process is not chaotic, then it must be ordered toward a particular effect or a range of effects rather than others.
2) It seems to me that process can just mean change, but change cannot exist independent of an "actual something" that is changing but somehow remains essentially the same.

Just exploring what he has in mind.

bmiller said...

@Hal,

" I disagree with your earlier claim that because there are changes in the stuff of which our bodies are made this shows that materialism is false."

I did not merely claim that the material stuff of which our bodies were made of changes, I claimed that all of the original material stuff is gone (as far as our bodies are concerned). Not a single original quark(or the fundamental particle of your choice) is bodily present now. So if we are made up only of quarks we are not persistent.

So what is persistent if it's not made of fundamental particles?

William said...

"I claimed that all of the original material stuff is gone (as far as our bodies are concerned)."

What evidence do you have for this assertion? This is in fact a philosophical urban legend where everyone vaguely quotes stuff that was published as speculation in the 1950's after there was study of the longevity of nuclear fallout in the body, and body water turnover was measured with radioactive water.

It is likely true that most of the body is water, and this water flows in and through us. However, bone turnover is far slower, and some tissues, such as tendons, turn over even less. Brain tissue contains some neurons which have not divided since we were born. DNA repair in those cells is not pervasive enough to turn over much of it over our lifespan: see, in the mouse, this old study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4421229

So not all the atoms of the human body turn over during life, though perhaps over 99% do. Sort of like an old city: there are usually a often a few buildings that do not change much over centuries, though almost all do.

Does it matter? Probably not, if you think that the material stuff is not all there is to it :)

bmiller said...

@William,

Ha! "Does it matter?" :-)

I didn't verify this quote, but Dawkins is quoted here as saying:


"not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place
when referring to your atoms over your lifetime.

I know he has street cred here :-)

William said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
StardustyPsyche said...

David Brightly said...

" What counts as scientific? "
An important question with a fairly complex set of answers.

I'm using the term in William's sense (2) to qualify knowledge in the first instance, and then by extension to sense (3) to qualify objects. Until Lunar 3 we had no knowledge at all of the far side of the moon. A fortiori, we had no scientific knowledge of it, so it was unscientific in sense (3)."
But then, not in a sense scientists would generally agree with.

Science uses the cosmological principle. Without this principle we could not do science. It just means that principles are the same wherever conditions are the same. On the cosmological principle no place in the observable universe is special.

For example, if I learn that hydrogen of a particular temperature and pressure has certain properties over here, then I also have scientific knowledge of hydrogen over there, and everyplace else, even if I cannot directly observe hydrogen in all those other places.

Now, one might complain that is inductive and therefore uncertain, fair enough, but science is not absolutely certain. Science doesn't do absolute proof. Science is inherently provisional.

So, a very great deal was scientifically known about the far side of the moon before spaceflight because scientists applied inductive reasoning in keeping with the cosmological principle.


March 01, 2017 6:11 AM

StardustyPsyche said...

bmiller said...


" I can conclude from my own experience that I have been a persistent being at least as long as I’ve been alive."
Have you? Are you the same now as when you were 1 minute old? 1 year old? 5 years old? 10? 15? 20?

Can you remember now all the things in all the details that you could remember when you were 10? Is your hair the same? Your face the same? Your lungs the same? Your arteries the same? Your brain the same?

Where did all those details you use to know so well vanish to? Unless your name is Dorian Gray you are so entirely persistent over the years.


" I also know that I can’t be just the material that presently makes me up since none of it has persisted the entire time of my life. "
Non-sequitur. You neglect to understand that a structure can remain intact if small elements of it are replaces one at a time over a long period of time.

"So something has persisted that entire time "
Indeed, a great deal of the structure of your brain and your body has persisted. It has morphed as well.

"and that something cannot be just the material"
Wrong.

Suppose you put together a puzzle. But you didn't buy just 1 puzzle, you bought 10,000 puzzles, all from the same manufacturing lot as the 1. Then you dumped all those pieces into a great big bin.

So, once per day, you pull out 1 piece from the assembled puzzle and you throw it away, gone forever. Then you dig around in the bin, find just the right replacement piece, and put it back into the puzzle.

Suppose you do this replacement of 1 piece every day. Would the puzzle ever change its picture? Would the puzzle ever change its arrangement? How many years until 99% of the pieces were 99% likely to have been replaced at least 1 time?

Has the structure of the puzzle persisted? Is the puzzle somehow immaterial because its structure has persisted even though almost none or perhaps none of the original parts remain?

That's how people are. We regenerate ourselves 1 cell at a time, but our overall structure, is a continual morph of the previous structure, and still very largely the same as it has been for many years, yet changed in many ways also.


March 01, 2017 8:33 AM

StardustyPsyche said...

bmiller said...

" but change cannot exist independent of an "actual something" that is changing "
Right, which of course renders any sort of immaterialism illusory.


March 01, 2017 10:41 AM

bmiller said...

@Hal, @David Brightly,

I'll wait for your replies.

David Brightly said...

I agree that our ordinary human view of ourselves as persistent beings is somewhat at odds with the view from science. For me the question is not so much to ask, Well, which one is right? but to see if by making some adjustments we can pull the views into alignment and have them sit together more comfortably.

First, I think that to a first approximation what persists in us is not the stuff we are made of but the form it takes. Wikipedia tells us that the average lifetime of a human red blood cell is 120 days. But the structure of such cells, which determines their functionality, maybe doesn't change very much at all over a human lifetime. This is plausible if said structure is largely dependent on the DNA in our bone marrow cells where the erythrocytes are made, and this is not normally subject to change. So, extrapolating from this single case, our form is much longer-lived than the stuff that makes us up. But we know this can't be entirely right because we grow from babies to children to adults and then slowly decay towards death. Also, and important for present purposes, our form presumably changes as we learn new things and lay down memories of events.

Second, I'm impressed that my mindfulness, though it does seem continuous from moment to moment, is also subject to regular eight hour long gaps every night. Why do I think that the mindfulness that awakes every morning is the 'same' mindfulness that went to sleep the previous night? The answer has to be that the morning mindfulness has access to the memories laid down previously. The face in the mirror looks just like the one I remember seeing yesterday. The pain in my left knee has the same qualities as the pain I remember I took to the doctor yesterday. The feelings I have for, and my behaviour towards the people and things around me are just like yesterday's, and so on. There are no surprises. Except perhaps when I wake up on my first day of vacation. None of this requires anything more persistent than my form.

To conclude: There are reasons for thinking that there is something rather more persistent in the scientific image of ourselves than there might seem before reflection. Likewise there maybe something less persistent in the human picture of ourselves than we find at first sight. If these degrees of persistence are now comparable we might start to think that the scientific image and the human image are just different viewpoints on to the same reality.

bmiller said...

@Hal, @David Brightly,

Hal said:
”You are confusing two kinds of substance: things and stuff. What is persistent is the kind of thing your are: a living animal with the capacity to reason and act for reasons. The change of the kind of stuff you are made of does not negate that persistence”.

David Brightly said:
”First, I think that to a first approximation what persists in us is not the stuff we are made of but the form it takes.”

Thanks for the responses gentlemen. I picked these 2 quotes out because I think they refer to the same concept.

Hal, could you agree to substituting “form” for “thing”? I ask this because if an entity consists of “things” and “stuff” we may run into equivocation issues since in your view an entity consists of 2 substances and most people would call the combination of those 2 substances a “thing”. We should probably find a different word for “stuff” also for the same reason. I’m open for suggestions.

In any event it looks like both of you agree that something exists and persists in addition to “stuff” (quarks or whatever fundamental material particles). But if form is not made of “stuff”, what is it’s nature?

bmiller said...

@Hal,

Thanks for the reply.

”By the way, I would suggest dropping the term "entity" in this discussion and simply use the term "thing". In this context, their meaning are exactly the same.”

Fair enough. I agree that using that word could add confusion and I missed that substance was what there were 2 of.

”The concept of substance is a complex one. We can use it to refer to the thing a substance is as well as to the stuff a thing is made of. That doesn't mean there are two different "things". There is only one thing.”

So before you mentioned that there are 2 kinds of substance, “things” and “stuff” with “stuff” substance being quarks etc. The other kind of substance is a “thing” which sounds to me something I would call human nature. Is “stuff” substance a necessary partial constituent of “thing” substance then?

bmiller said...

@Hal,

Thanks for the detail so far. I'll wait for the rest of your explanation before I ask any more questions.

David Brightly said...

Though they have a mind, they are not identical with the mind they have. Though they have a body, they are not identical with the body they have.

So there are three things: my body ≠ me ≠ my mind? Can this be right?

David Brightly said...

Yes, if you aren't identical with your temper.

William said...

Going back to the burden of proof discussion, I found an interesting and coherent if not all that agreeable take on the burden of proof from a "leftist feminist" point of view, here, calling it something intriguing, Epistemic Exploitation:

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ergo/12405314.0003.022?view=text;rgn=main

bmiller said...

@Hal, @David Brightly,

It seems to me from both of your responses that what persists in us is "form" in one case and "human nature" in the other case.

Are these 2 the same thing?

bmiller said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
bmiller said...

@William,

The article kind of boils down to how frustrating it is to argue with ignorant people doesn't it.

William said...

bmiller,

The analogy to burden of proof with a phrase like "the need for additional labor created by the default skepticism of the privileged" seems pretty clear.

bmiller said...

@William,

If you recall, the "Aswedenism" post, it was a parody of a typical atheist tactic of not having to defend their position while being able to attack their opponent by claiming that only those making an "affirmative claim" have a burden of proof.

Eve Keneinan has a series of posts exploring the origin of that position linked here: burden of proof. You may be interested.

bmiller said...

@Hal,

Thanks for the answer.

I don't think your position and mine are that far apart in the end.

But this part of your answer is interesting"
" the mind is not a thing at all. It is not a substance in the sense of a thing or of stuff. However, it is true that humans have a mind: that is we have intellectual powers by which we can reason and act for reasons."

Can I take it then that you think that "mind" actually exists, even though it does not fall into either of the 2 categories of substance you listed. Is it a second category that is different than substance? Are there other members of this other category?

David Brightly said...

I think we have all seen, heard, and felt someone else's temper and we know from a first person point of view what it is to have a temper. But does this make a temper a thing? It's not obvious to me that our use of the noun 'temper' is more than a manner of speaking. Likewise words like 'self' and 'mind' which are also nouns and have both first and third person aspects. Something I find interesting about these terms is that we can learn to use them at all. After all, they don't denote obviously physical bodies like, say, a bar of chocolate, that can be laid on the table, looked at, handled, and talked about. Instead, people will say that they are 'immaterial' things. For me this is too easy a conclusion that if followed leads us into strange places. Is there an alternative?

Start with a smile or a blink or a laugh. These are 'things' that we do with our bodies that we readily recognise. They aren't objects as such but they are surely physical motions of bodies. Animals do these things too. What about singing, farming, and cooking? Apart perhaps from singing we are now exclusively in human territory. Again physical motions of bodies, if more complicated. Lastly, consider teaching, caring, loving. Still physical motions of bodies, or has something more crept in? I say this sequence of behaviours is increasing in complexity and hence in the sophistication of the neural machinery needed to recognise them. If you want to introduce any 'immateriality' at all you have to put it in right back at the beginning where what is being recognised is pattern of motion rather than pattern of matter.

Extrapolating this line of thought once again we arrive at the idea that 'self', 'person', 'mind' aren't names of things material or immaterial, but names of complex motions. In our ordinary conception of ourselves they are nouns because that conception is inherently dualistic. Our ancestors were unable to think that these complex motions could be produced in matter alone. So for them there just had to be obviously immaterial entities that animated their bodies. But I'm not suggesting that these terms lack meaning or reality. Rather they should be seen as verbs. Thus my body 'selfs', 'persons', and 'minds' from time to time.

Why do we care so about persons rather than bodies? Obviously looks and strength are important to some extent. But humans differ from animals in the enormous variety of what they can do and evolution has tuned us to be exquisitely sensitive to behaviour. So we care foremost for what people do rather than what they are, and we label this doing 'being a person'. Ironically, what underlies being a person is precisely a material thing, namely, a specific neural architecture.

bmiller said...

@Hal,

OK, thanks for sharing.

bmiller said...

@David Brightly,

"Our ancestors were unable to think that these complex motions could be produced in matter alone. So for them there just had to be obviously immaterial entities that animated their bodies. But I'm not suggesting that these terms lack meaning or reality. Rather they should be seen as verbs. Thus my body 'selfs', 'persons', and 'minds' from time to time."

So can I conclude that you equate these "complex motions" with what you referred to as "form" previously? And it is these sequence of "complex motions" that persist? If that is so, how is memory involved as part of these "complex motions"? Is memory also a "complex motion"? How would that work?

William said...

@bmiller:

I didn't verify this quote, but Dawkins is quoted here as saying:


"not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place when referring to your atoms over your lifetime.

I know he has street cred here :-)

----------------------------

I found you were right, Dawkins was another one to fall for that old canard :)

I decided this merited an essay, posted here:

http://tropicalsynapses.blogspot.com/2017/03/is-human-body-ship-of-theseus-comments.html

David Brightly said...

Form = Motion? No. Animal form is structure or arrangement of matter. But such arrangements aren't rigid like rocks. They allow for relative movement of parts great and small, and hence movement of the whole. Such movements are the complex motions. Some motions, like my breathing and heart beating, are persistent. Others, like sneezing, are transient. The continuous replacement of bodily matter with equivalent matter I don't regard as a motion. It's just the maintenance of form in the face of entropy. Memory I imagine must be encoded as subtle changes of form. Remembering must be a transient motion involving such changed form.

bmiller said...

@David Brightly,

"Some motions, like my breathing and heart beating, are persistent. Others, like sneezing, are transient. The continuous replacement of bodily matter with equivalent matter I don't regard as a motion."

But doesn't "replacement" involve movement also? It seems to me that just as it is natural for one to breath it is also natural for one to slough off dead cells. Aren't both part of the "complex motion" of a person?

"Extrapolating this line of thought once again we arrive at the idea that 'self', 'person', 'mind' aren't names of things material or immaterial, but names of complex motions. In our ordinary conception of ourselves they are nouns because that conception is inherently dualistic. Our ancestors were unable to think that these complex motions could be produced in matter alone. So for them there just had to be obviously immaterial entities that animated their bodies. But I'm not suggesting that these terms lack meaning or reality. Rather they should be seen as verbs. Thus my body 'selfs', 'persons', and 'minds' from time to time."

Does this mean you are positing a third category in addition to material and immaterial? But how could something be both "not material" (which is the definition of immaterial) and "not immaterial" (which due to double negative is the definition of material)?

bmiller said...

@William,

Nice blog post (and site). Yes, the "Ship of Theseus" thought experiment gets us to think about what things really are regardless of how much of the original remains.

"Not if, like most of the world's population, you know that a ship is not just deadwood, and that matter is not all there is to living."

I think that you're right that this is the way that people actually live their lives, but I wonder how many would actually proclaim either a materialist or immaterialist philosophy if you asked them.

David Brightly said...

Replacement versus non-replacement motion Hmmm. Maybe this distinction is not sustainable. Has intuitive appeal though, especially if we see things in terms of a persistent 'it' that does stuff yet needs maintenance.

A third category? Gosh, I hope not! I have always struggled to grasp what people mean by 'immaterial' in the context of philosophy of mind. This is an attempt to understand it in terms of form (itself abstract) and patterned change in form (second order abstract, as it were), though all this is firmly grounded in material stuff and recognisable by material stuff.

bmiller said...

@David Brightly,

"Has intuitive appeal though, especially if we see things in terms of a persistent 'it' that does stuff yet needs maintenance."

Both body and mind need maintenance don't you think and aren't both part of the "form"?

" I have always struggled to grasp what people mean by 'immaterial' in the context of philosophy of mind."

What you think they mean by "immaterial" in this context. Maybe a better question is "what do you think immaterial means"? Can anything(in any sense) "immaterial" exist?

David Brightly said...

What would 'mind maintenance' be? Reading, writing, thinking, mental exercise (itself a metaphor from bodily exercise)? It seems to me that despite bodily aches and pains and infections my mind reliably pops up every morning. As long as I keep it supplied with protein and vitamins and oxygen it seems my brain looks after itself. Except we know there are degenerative diseases of the brain that affect the working of the mind. And anaesthetics. I regard the mind as something the body does by virtue of its form.

What is meant by 'immaterial'? I don't know. There are whole categories regarded as immaterial: numbers, abstractions, sensations, beliefs, attitudes, obligations, meanings, thoughts, reason. The only unity here is that nobody can see any material foundations for these categories. The naturalist's task is to find piecemeal ways to achieve exactly that.

bmiller said...

"What is meant by 'immaterial'? I don't know. There are whole categories regarded as immaterial: numbers, abstractions, sensations, beliefs, attitudes, obligations, meanings, thoughts, reason. The only unity here is that nobody can see any material foundations for these categories. The naturalist's task is to find piecemeal ways to achieve exactly that."

Hmm. If nobody can find any material foundations for these things, then does it make sense to continue to try to fit a square peg into a round hole? Especially when one recognizes that the peg is square and the hole is round?

StardustyPsyche said...

David Brightly said...

" What is meant by 'immaterial'? I don't know."
That's because the notion is incoherent, meaningless, and absurd.

" There are whole categories regarded as immaterial: numbers, abstractions, sensations, beliefs, attitudes, obligations, meanings, thoughts, reason. "
Regarded by who? Surly not any rational thinker.

"The only unity here is that nobody can see any material foundations for these categories. "
Wrong, the foundation is obvious. What you list are merely processes of the brain.


March 08, 2017 5:20 AM

William said...

dustie:

"The only unity here is that nobody can see any material foundations for these categories. "
Wrong, the foundation is obvious. What you list are merely processes of the brain.

====

“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

--Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis

-----------------------------

Well, it has all been said earlier and better, but this sort of thing remains a basic category mistake.

David Brightly said...

Well, it may be that the peg isn't quite as square as it seems and the hole not so round, as I suggested above at March 02, 2017 6:51 AM.

Another example: I missed intentionality, often seen as 'the mark of the mental' from my list. It's clear to me that there is 'animal intentionality' in an animal chasing down prey or plucking a fruit from a tree. Information from the senses leads to appropriate movement in the muscles. Why can't this be a basis for human intentionality expressed in language? I don't see a sharp dividing line between the one as purely material and the other as immaterial.

bmiller said...

@David Brightly,

Well, if one redefines the "material" to include anything and everything, including everything on your list, then of course the "material" is all there is.

However, it seems that the generally accepted definition of a material object since Descartes has been an object that has extension in 3 dimensional space. If one includes the items on your list as material objects, one needs to explain where in 3 dimensional space they reside. For instance where does 42 reside?

David Brightly said...

I haven't offered a definition of 'the material'. I take it to be understood. I say that the items on my list simply aren't objects, so the question of their materiality or otherwise does not arise. Regarding 42, my suggestion is that it should be seen as a movement. A vector in the jargon. Choose any line in space; choose an arbitrary point on the line; call this 0; choose a direction away from 0 and a unit of length; call 1 a movement of the unit length in the chosen direction; call 2 the movement 1 followed by another such movement; call 3 the movement 2 followed by 1; and so on; eventually we get to 42; addition is composition of movements. Is 42 material? Is it immaterial? It has extension in space, sort of. Does it matter?

bmiller said...

" I say that the items on my list simply aren't objects, so the question of their materiality or otherwise does not arise."

Well of course, the real question is whether the items on the list exist at all. If they exist then I do think the question arises. I'm curious why you think it does not.

Regarding 42 being a vector. It seems you are measuring in "Brightly" units. In "bmiller" units that vector is not 42, but 21 :-). But if 42 is a vector, can there be 42 apples? 42 ideas? 42, the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything?

StardustyPsyche said...

William said...


"The only unity here is that nobody can see any material foundations for these categories. "
SP Wrong, the foundation is obvious. What you list are merely processes of the brain.

====

" Well, it has all been said earlier and better, but this sort of thing remains a basic category mistake.

Right, the word "immaterial" is in the catagory of vague, confused, and ultimately meaningless words.

Francis Crick said it well indeed, and said it very meaningfully.

So, the word "material" is in the catagory of meaningful words.
The word "immaterial" is in the catagory of meaningless words.


March 09, 2017 3:31 AM

StardustyPsyche said...

David Brightly said...
" the items on my list simply aren't objects,"
Is "running" and object? Is "running" material or immaterial?

" Is 42 material? "
Numbers do not exist as objects, they are a brain process.


March 09, 2017 4:08 PM

David Brightly said...

We've already said the line and origin can be arbitrary. So can the unit length. We can also abandon the requirement that the line be straight and the steps equal sized. What are we left with? A sequence of points in space. Switch to a sequence of moments in time. What have we got? A child learning to count. What's 42? The place between 41 and 43. That's all it has to be. An element of a possible patterning of matter or of change in matter, or of change in change in matter,..., that we have the neural equipment to recognise. Is this material or immaterial? Kind of both. This suggests that the material/immaterial dichotomy is too coarse to capture reality, despite its apparent grammatical or indeed logical completeness. Think of a wave on water again. A wave doesn't transport a chunk of matter from one side of the lake to another. So it's not exactly a material object. Yet it does consist of matter transiently in motion, in a patterned way. Perhaps we should just say that it's a phenomenon based in or made possible by matter and space and time.

StardustyPsyche said...

David Brightly said...

" Is this material or immaterial? Kind of both."
No, numbers are a brain process. The word "immaterial" is meaningless.

" This suggests that the material/immaterial dichotomy is too coarse to capture reality,"
Right, reality is not captured by a choice between a meaningful word "material" and a meaningless word "immaterial". To capture reality we omit the meaningless word and use only the meaningful word "material".

" Think of a wave on water again. A wave doesn't transport a chunk of matter from one side of the lake to another. So it's not exactly a material object. Yet it does consist of matter transiently in motion, in a patterned way. Perhaps we should just say that it's a phenomenon based in or made possible by matter and space and time."
A water wave is a material process, like a thought, a number, an abstraction, a dance, or any sort of motion.


March 11, 2017 9:34 AM

bmiller said...

@David Brightly,

A couple of things.

We can think of 42 as a sequence of anything including, points that are not material objects at all. So although 42 may be instantiated in a collection of material or immaterial objects, how could it exist as a collection of both classes if it was purely material?

" Is this material or immaterial? Kind of both."
So maybe you are saying that at the deepest level, it is difficult to determine the material from the immaterial?

StardustyPsyche said...

bmiller said...

" So maybe you are saying that at the deepest level, it is difficult to determine the material from the immaterial?"

Distinguishing between the 2 is a simple matter of realizing that "material" is a meaningful word, whereas "immaterial" is a nonsense term.

Throw away the nonsense term as being useless and you will have succeeded in making the determination.


March 11, 2017 11:28 AM

StardustyPsyche said...

Hal said...

" "Immaterial" means not material. If is certainly not a nonsense term."

That's what makes it a nonsense term.

"immaterial" = "non-stuff stuff"

How could anything exist that was not material? If it is not made of something then it is absolutely nothing at all and there is no "it". No sort of "it" can be absolutely nothing at all. It some thing exists it is a thing, some thing, something. Else it is no thing, nothing, and does not exist, and there is no "it" to speak of.

The very word "immaterial" is incoherent and utterly meaningless.


" Dammit stardusty but you make atheists look like idiots. :-("
In what way? What are you even trying to say?

I am an idiot then? Ok, fine, Hal, please do give me a definition and an example of an "immaterial" thing, or existence, or object, or stuff, or whatever.


March 11, 2017 2:34 PM

David Brightly said...

Is it difficult to determine the material from the immaterial? No, that's starting to look like panpsychism, which surely can't be right. Surveying the gamut of living things it seems you must have a complicated nervous system to have mindedness, not just more of it.

One of the problems we face is that our language forces the noun-verb structure on us. If the nouns denote things, and some of these things are clearly not material objects, then it seems there is a prima facie case for the category of 'immaterial things'. I reject this as too simplistic and ultimately a claim I can't make sense of. What can I offer instead? Well, I keep harping on about movement and patterns of movement. Movements and patterns aren't material things. Are they immaterial things then? No, they just aren't things at all! They don't, as it were, lie anywhere along the material--immaterial dimension. Trouble is, just to talk about movement and pattern it's very hard to avoid the very general category of 'thing'. I say this is a linguistic business, not an ontological issue. Surely the world can be regular and patterned without there being objects called 'regularity' and 'pattern' in some Platonic heaven? This is the old, old debate between realists and nominalists with regard to universals. No point in going there, but suffice it to say that nominalism is an open option. What I'm asking everyone to do is to allow that there can be pattern and regularity in material nature that we as material things can recognise, and that an account of this recognition might be given in the terms of the physical sciences without reference to any realm of 'immaterial objects'.

StardustyPsyche said...

Hal said...

" You are confusing the meaning of a word with its referent."

You are confusing an inherently self contradictory word with a meaningful word.

Is the word "stufflessstuff" meaningful? If so, what does it mean?

At least with a mythological term such as "god" or "unicorn" we can hold out the sliver of hope that perhaps someplace out in the universe there is some creature made of some as yet undiscovered stuff that can do things we did not think possible, just as we cannot disprove Russel's teapot in orbit.

Not so with "immaterial" or "stufflessstuff". These are simply self contradictory terms, and thus incoherent. The only meaning they have is that humans sometimes speak gibberish from time to time.


March 12, 2017 6:51 AM

bmiller said...

@David Brightly,

"Surely the world can be regular and patterned without there being objects called 'regularity' and 'pattern' in some Platonic heaven?"

Of course there are more options to a "Platonic heaven" that preserve the existence of universals. Moderate or immanent realism is one such option.

It seems odd for all of us to recognize that there are really patterns/forms that exist, are not made of matter ("They don't, as it were, lie anywhere along the material--immaterial dimension.") and for us to "say this is a linguistic business, not an ontological issue."

I realize that you also said they weren't "immaterial", but aren't you then positing something like a "Brightly heaven"? A realm of "linguistic business" in which neither the material or immaterial reside.

David Brightly said...

This is a familiar problem with universals, isn't it? Does 'justice exists' mean there are instances of justice, or does it mean there is some thing called 'justice'? This is an ambiguity of language. My interpretation is always the first option.

The 'linguistic business' is the noun--verb Procrustean bed which forces us to think in terms of things. I think it's significant that the physical sciences take off when they abandon natural language as a descriptive medium and turn to mathematics.

bmiller said...

@David Brightly,

"Does 'justice exists' mean there are instances of justice, or does it mean there is some thing called 'justice'? This is an ambiguity of language. My interpretation is always the first option."

Not sure what you mean here. If there are instances of 'justice' they are just instantiations of the same idea of 'justice'. But if they are truly unique unrelated instances then they should not all be called 'justice', right?

"I think it's significant that the physical sciences take off when they abandon natural language as a descriptive medium and turn to mathematics."

I disagree that the physical sciences abandon natural language as a descriptive medium. Do mathematics abandon natural language?

David Brightly said...

I'm afraid the nominalism is part and parcel with this line of thought. It has no room for contact with immaterial entities. The key claim is the one given above: there can be pattern and regularity in material nature that we as material things can recognise, and that an account of this recognition might be given in the terms of the physical sciences without reference to any realm of 'immaterial objects'.

Well, I don't see a noun--verb or noun--adjective structure in the sentences (if they be sentences) of mathematical physics, eg, Maxwell's equations.

StardustyPsyche said...

David Brightly said...

" I'm afraid the nominalism is part and parcel with this line of thought. It has no room for contact with immaterial entities. "

Immaterial entity is an oxymoronic term, thus meaningless, merely a fuzzy headed foggy notion of something that is not some thing.


March 13, 2017 4:23 AM

bmiller said...

"The key claim is the one given above: there can be pattern and regularity in material nature that we as material things can recognise, and that an account of this recognition might be given in the terms of the physical sciences without reference to any realm of 'immaterial objects'."

So do the patterns and regularity we perceive in nature really exist, or are they nothing more than a mental organization and have no necessary correspondence the world of reality? I believe this is one form of nominalism.


From your link:
Maxwell–Faraday equation (Faraday's law of induction)
This listed under the header "Meaning"
"The voltage induced in a closed circuit is proportional to the rate of change of the magnetic flux it encloses."

So isn't mathematical notation merely a shorthand for natural language?

David Brightly said...

Sometimes one, sometimes the other. We think we have two eyes and it seems that we do. At least, we get an explanation of depth of vision from two-ness of eyes. On the other hand, I can see a tree root in poor light and think it's a snake. Pattern recognition can make mistakes. But perhaps that's a scientific answer to a philosophical question.

What are voltage in a circuit and magnetic flux enclosed by it? The circuit can be an arbitrary closed loop in space, not necessarily a physical conductor. So though physical, these aren't objects. But that's the interpretation of the integral equation. I'd be interested to know what you make of the differential equation!

StardustyPsyche said...

David Brightly said...

"The circuit can be an arbitrary closed loop in space, not necessarily a physical conductor."
Wrong, an electrical circuit of moving charged particles is a physical process necessarily.


" So though physical, these aren't objects. "
Oxymoronic language.


"But that's the interpretation of the integral equation."
Maxwell's equations are useful approximations, sometimes called the classical model. Modern physics shows that Maxwell was wrong, in a similar way that Einstein showed Newton was wrong.

" I'd be interested to know what you make of the differential equation!"
The differential versus the integral forms of Maxwell's equations are inverse functions of each other.


March 16, 2017 3:03 AM

bmiller said...

@David Brightly,

"On the other hand, I can see a tree root in poor light and think it's a snake. Pattern recognition can make mistakes. But perhaps that's a scientific answer to a philosophical question."

Not if you had your night vision goggles on :-). But it seems you've answered the philosophical question too, right? One could have faulty perception and therefore a false view of reality, but the mental state reflects reality when the perception is not faulty if I read you correctly. Doesn't nominalism hold that "tree roots" are only a mental classification in our mind that doesn't reflect reality?

I don't think 'the curl of the electric field is proportional to the rate of change of the magnetic field.' abandons natural language. But perhaps you mean that many physicists mistake the mathematics they use in their craft for reality itself. I don't doubt that.

David Brightly said...

I think a nominalist would say that there are tree roots without 'tree root' denoting some thing that all tree roots have in common.  That alone makes a tree root more than a purely mental phenomenon.

Well,  that would be natural language augmented with the term 'the electric field'  denoting a very strange natural 'object'  pervading all space and time that nobody who ever spoke a natural language had ever encountered before.

bmiller said...

I think a nominalist would say that there are tree roots without 'tree root' denoting some thing that all tree roots have in common. That alone makes a tree root more than a purely mental phenomenon.

Yes perhaps, but that still makes each one unintelligible in the end. I think we are extremely fortunate that science didn't take nominalist philosophy seriously until perhaps recently.


Well, that would be natural language augmented with the term 'the electric field' denoting a very strange natural 'object' pervading all space and time that nobody who ever spoke a natural language had ever encountered before.

I guess Maxwell considered it at least something real. It does account for some physical phenomenon if indeed material reality exists. But tomorrow we may have a different theory of electromagnetism and electric fields will go the way of aether.

StardustyPsyche said...

bmiller said...

" I guess Maxwell considered it at least something real. It does account for some physical phenomenon if indeed material reality exists. But tomorrow we may have a different theory of electromagnetism and electric fields will go the way of aether."

We don't have to wait until tomorrow, since the follow on theories to Maxwell can be found in ordinary college textbooks, relativity and quantum mechanics.

Maxwell used continuous wave models (unlike QM) and he had no solution for the constancy of the speed of light irrespective of the velocity of the source or observer (Einstein later provided a model to solve that problem).

I am not here to slam your obvious lack of science education, since there are many who know more than I, and even if I were somehow the most knowledgeable that alone would not guarantee I was correct. Besides, it would be ungracious to do so in any event.

However, given your obvious lack of education it becomes incumbent upon you to follow arguments carefully and methodically, researching the scientific and logical claims made at each step. So far you have displayed precious little inclination to do so.


March 19, 2017 1:45 PM

bmiller said...

@David Brightly,

Well perhaps we can chat again sometime when the trolls aren't watching.

It is too bad though that Quantum Field Theory did away with electric and magnetic fields.
Maybe someone should tell these guys.

David Brightly said...

That still makes each one unintelligible in the end I kind of agree with you. I'd say something like this: The starting point for Aristotelian science is the everyday, common sense, human picture of the world. To make the classification of ordinary things intelligible it invents essences. Democritean science, on the other hand, starts with atoms. Pattern in arrangement of atoms is an explanatory resource available to the Democritean that the Aristotelian lacks. Of course, there is a kind of essentialism inherent in there being 90-odd types of atom. This gets explained by the essential properties of protons, neutrons, and electrons, say. I like to think of the progress of natural science as explanation through increasing numbers of individuals of decreasing numbers of kinds.

Fear not! The EM field is still with us in the Standard Model of particle physics, in the form of the photon.

bmiller said...

@David Brightly,

"This gets explained by the essential properties of protons, neutrons, and electrons, say. I like to think of the progress of natural science as explanation through increasing numbers of individuals of decreasing numbers of kinds."

This is kind of what I'm getting at. A scientist conceives of classes of things that have the same essential properties. A nominalist would deny there are classes of things wouldn't he?

Also, wouldn't a pure Democritean run into trouble when antimatter is introduced and matter transforms to energy?


"Fear not! The EM field is still with us in the Standard Model of particle physics, in the form of the photon.

Yes, I guess my attempt to subtley poke fun at the resident crank was a bit too subtle. The link in that comment was to an invention that allows wireless charging of electronic devices by use of a magnetic field. After all the subject of Quantum field theory is electromagnetic fields.

David Brightly said...

Regarding classes, sets, bunches, groups, etc. My view is that these terms are linguistic plural referencing devices. At any rate, that seems to be how 'set' is used in mathematics, outside of set theory itself, that is. If I have some kids' toys in a box it makes sense to say that the box contains a set of toys, but this says no more than that there are some toys in the box. If the box contains this toy, that toy, and another toy, the set of toys in the box certainly isn't a fourth thing over and above the three toys. It's just this toy, that toy, and the other toy. Granted some nominalists baulk at talk of sets altogether, but I regard it has harmless, indeed useful, and within the spirit of nominalism when understood as above.

Again, if we think of 'class' in the sense of 'kind', then the Democritean can think in terms of similarity of arrangement of microscopic parts rather than in terms of possession of essential properties. The latter gives a very black and white picture of things whereas we know there can be hard to classify borderline cases. These the Democritean can assimilate to the vagueness of 'similarity'.

However, my scheme appears to have a residual essentialism. How can I get rid of it? One way is simply to say that there is a brute essentialism at some fundamental level. But physics points us another way. We know that our ordinary ideas about matter derived from our encounters with macroscopic objects run into the sands when we reach the very small. We can say that whatever fundamental particles are, they don't have properties in the same sense that macroscopic objects do. Quarks and leptons don't even have extension in space! Admittedly they fit into a classificatory scheme involving mass, charge, spin, strangeness, anti-ness, etc, But to put it in a quasi-Aristotelian way, the fundamental particles are less like substances in their own right, and more like accidents of something larger, viz, a quantum field.

bmiller said...

@David Brightly,

It seems you favor a form of resemblance nominalism then? Things are not really of a particular class, but look similar enough to a standard that they can be grouped together mentally? But as you say, that standard is a kind of essential thing.

"But to put it in a quasi-Aristotelian way, the fundamental particles are less like substances in their own right, and more like accidents of something larger, viz, a quantum field."

I still see science as classifying things. You just listed a class of properties of fundamental particles. Quantum fields also have a list of properties that we can use to identify them, right? It seems to me that just about the time nominalism came to be popular in philosophy was the time that the "scientists" of the day stopped paying attention to philosophy. It seems that if they had taken the philosophy of the day seriously, the scientific progress of the West would have stopped.

I think you can still see this division as the "hard" scientists dismiss philosophy and the "soft" sciences as a waste of time.

David Brightly said...

In general, yes.  And in the case of living things we begin to see why they look rather alike.

Regarding natural philosophers ceasing to be philosophers,  what period do you have in mind?

bmiller said...

Robert Pasnau has a book out "Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671" where he explores the history of philosophy during that time frame. You can see the table of contents and selected samples online.

He has as section where he says that reviewing the literature of the era right before Descartes there is not really much of what we would call philosophical investigation in natural philosophy going on. In fact he has a chapter titled "How Descartes Saved Philosophy".

There seems to be new studies about the history of nominalism the debates with realism, but it seems to have started around the time of William of Ockham.

I'm interested in how nominalism can be reconciled with what we today consider "science". It seems to me that one of the axioms of science is that the external world really exists and is intelligible, while nominalism seems to deny that we can really know the external world.




https://vimeo.com/136831994

David Brightly said...

I'm a nominalist yet I know I can be crushed by a bus crossing the road. Isn't that real knowledge of the external world? And it's in a way independent of questions regarding universals. We might see the scientific project as in part an ongoing analysis of the denotation of 'bus', though I accept that the understanding we gain by this seems more tentative and conceptual the deeper we go.

I managed to find Pasnau's Contents and Introduction online. Very helpful. I can see why he says Descartes rejuvenated philosophy.

Here is a short paper by Michael Devitt on the contemporary nominalism/realism debate. Why do you think this sort of view limits our knowledge of the world?

bmiller said...

But what really ran you over was a particular thing that you assigned the name 'bus' to right? It merely resembled (in your mind) other things that you assigned a similar name to.

Thank you for the article. I see how the 2 sides get frustrated with each other more clearly now. I admit I have a bias toward a form of realism, so I have to work harder to understand the nominalist perspective.

I'm really interested in how people came to believe the things they believe. By that I mean the history of ideas. That's why I'm puzzled how nominalism gained such a wide following around the same time of the scientific revolution which was all about mathematics and coming to know physical reality.


While I was researching more on that debate, I came across this article. It's fairly short and perhaps you've heard it all before, but I'd be interested in your response. John Burgess: Why I am not a Nominalist

David Brightly said...

I think a nominalist can go a bit further and say that resemblance is objective and something we can recognise rather than something purely concocted by the mind. The problem is to give an account of this that doesn't bring in universals or abstract objects. I'm not sure this has been done satisfactorily.

I have often thought that the early moderns' use of mathematics was an advance that made concrete the scholastics' airy talk of 'form' which hadn't progressed in centuries. Key to this was Descartes' invention of coordinate geometry.

Burgess's argument is analogous to Armstrong's as recounted by Devitt: Nominalism can be of type A, B, or C. Type A fails, type B fails, and so does type C. Ergo, nominalism is untenable. Armstrong is concerned with universals, ie, entities thought to underlie predicates; Burgess with abstract objects as entities we are thought to grasp when we do mathematics. I'm not convinced. We can just 'see' that the symmetry group, D3, of an equilateral triangle is the same as the permutation group, S3, of three symbols, without finding some third, abstract entity, that they are both equivalent to. There is a common pattern here for sure, but do we need to elevate it to the status of 'abstract object'? Again, there isn't a satisfactory nominalist account here, as far as I know, just as there isn't a good account of how 'cat' denotes cats.

bmiller said...

Some nominalists may agree that the resemblance of things is permanently objective, while others seem to argue that what we call objective is just due to social construction. We can see that play out in Western society today. If we can get enough people to call a bus an airplane, then what is it really?

It seems the early moderns simply wanted to reject formal causes and focus exclusively on efficient causes rather than to help explain "form". Maybe they denied "form" (ahem) formally, but it seems they couldn't really escape the concept.

Thanks for pointing me to Devitt. I read the article from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Nominalism and it from it I found that Quine, Devitt and Armstrong were/are all nominalists. Quine and Devitt rejecting universals, but kind of accepting abstracts, while Armstrong is just the opposite.

I've read that nominalism started with Ockham and his view that will is prior to intellect (the opposite of Aquinas). If God willed the law of non-contradiction to be overruled, then it would be, even if that would render things unintelligible. That should make us skeptical that we can really know how the universe works. This of course would make science ultimately unintelligible also don't you think?

David Brightly said...

Truth is often a narrow and difficult path between wide and easy mistakes. The easy mistakes here are that resemblance has either nothing to do with the mind or has everything to do with the mind.

I think I'm already rather sceptical that we can know how the universe works. The sense of 'know' in what we call scientific knowledge is rather different from knowing in the everyday life world, being a kind of as yet unrefuted inspired guesswork. At best we have a system of ideas that for the time being seems to hang together.

bmiller said...

I'm also skeptical that we can know everything about how the universe works, but surely we can 'know' some things. At least we act like we believe we do.

We live our lives as if we really believe that we can reach out grab that apple and eat it. We may argue with others that "apples" aren't 'really' there, but we sure live our lives like we do. To me, how people live their lives is evidence of what they truly believe regardless of what philosophical position they're arguing about.

Perhaps that's why "natural science" just stopped asking the why questions and focused on the how. The "why" questions were getting to be unbelievable.

David Brightly said...

I quite agree. We know what apples are, how to distinguish them from other fruits, that they are edible, etc, largely through the senses. In addition to this knowledge by acquaintance we have knowledge by description: the apple in cookery, history, mythology, plant-breeding, cider-making, etc, that we have learned through speech and writing rather than direct experience, although all of it has been direct experience for somebody. Compare our ‘knowledge’ (note scare quotes) of atoms and molecules. Nobody has ever had direct experience of these. Does this connect up with your why/how distinction?

bmiller said...

What I'm getting at is that the branch of philosophy called "natural philosophy" that is now called "science" used to ask "why are there apples?" Now the question is "what are apples made of and how can they be used?"

It seems that nominalism posits a barrier to understanding the "why" questions of the external world. Scientists may perform all sorts of experiments with identical results and come up with theories of atoms, electrons, quarks etc, but it seems under nominalism that tomorrow the experiments could all turn out differently since at the bottom, we really can't know why any of this stuff works in the first place.

David Brightly said...

I think a nominalist might say something like this. The word 'cat' denotes cats. It doesn't help in accounting for the existence of cats to say that 'cat' denotes some intangible further entity. And this further entity would need an explanation too.

Many 'why' questions about the existence of things can answered with historical 'how' accounts. Why are there apples? Over the millennia people have selectively bred trees bearing apple-like fruits starting with some ur-apple whose origins are lost to us, although we can perhaps offer a general account involving natural selection. Note that as we look back in time the meaning of 'apple' seems to change. In medieval times 'apple' didn't denote Granny Smiths, for example.

I agree with you that explanations eventually run into the sands with some very basic 'why' questions. Sometimes new theories answer some of these 'why's with 'how's, but other 'why's remain. This seems to happen independently of whether one takes a generally nominalist or realist position.

I think there is an important difference between 'why' questions in the life-world view and 'why' questions in the scientific view. In the life-world we ask a 'why' question when we are puzzled because we lack information. We want the answer to dispel our puzzlement by reducing the problem to the familiar, often by an appeal to what we know of persons. But science proceeds by forever postulating the unfamiliar and justifying this by the unification it achieves. This process is potentially open-ended.

bmiller said...

I wonder (sorry) why you see a difference in the "life-world" and "scientific" views.
Aren't they both after the same answers?

Perhaps you are thinking of them in a Cartesian dualistic sense. There are the mechanical workings of the material external world, and there is the immaterial workings of the human mind. Both are separate and the chasm cannot be crossed between them.

bmiller said...

BTW, I may have mentioned that I'm interested in how we have come to think and believe in the things we do. I found this article that traces how we originally thought of certain diseases, electricity and tides and how we progressed to our present understanding. It's relevant to our discussion since it has to do with universals.

I hope you find it interesting:
http://www.johnmccaskey.com/generalizations/

David Brightly said...

Because the world-picture revealed by science is radically different from that of common sense. According to common sense Eddington's table is solid but physics tells us it's mostly empty space. Common sense says that time and space are sui generis but physics tells us they are in some sense interconvertible. For me the central philosophical questions are How do we reconcile these apparently diverging truths? How do we fit mind and consciousness and the rest of the person-centred world-view into the scientific picture of whirling atoms? Or vice versa?

I enjoyed McCaskey's account of conceptual evolution. I think it supports my nominalism. If the meanings of 'cholera', 'tide', and 'resistance' can evolve doesn't that suggest that these words are not 'reaching out' and 'latching on' to certain intangible individuals, as realism with respect to universals would have it?

bmiller said...

I guess I don't share the feeling that science contradicts common sense. Science uses models and mathematics to make predictions of the material world so we can manipulate nature for useful purposes. It doesn't account for everything and since the advent of the mechanical philosophy it has explicitly stated that it does not. It's useful for it's stated purpose, but since that time "the person-centered world-view" has not been it's purpose. For just one instance, the study of whirling atoms has no interest and cannot account for human agency.

McCaskey has 3 other articles grouped together meant to address "the problem of induction" from a historical point of view. You might enjoy them also.

Regarding nominalism and the examples in the article:
I also enjoy looking at the etymology of words and tracing how they are used historically. I wonder if a nominalist holds that there were many causes of "cholera" before scientists agreed that the comma bacillus should be considered the cause of the disease named "cholera". Did reality change because names changed?

A realist would say that we now know the essence of a certain disease. There may be other diseases that have symptoms similar to it, but the presence of this particular bacterium is essential to the disease, which we now call "cholera" to the exclusion of others with similar symptoms.

From the article"
"A symptomatic definition that allowed many general but few universal statements got replaced by a causal, essential definition."

But I am interested in your interpretation and explanation about how it supports nominalism.

David Brightly said...

I first came to these ideas from Lewis Wolpert's The Unnatural Nature of Science (which is a scientist's point of view) and subsequently from Wilfred Sellars's href="http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/percep/SellarsPhilSciImage.pdf">Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.

I grant that physics the discipline has nothing to say about human agency. But I find it hard to see scientific knowledge as purely instrumental, being much more of a realist. And if the postulated entities of science are real, then I have a problem, as Sellars allows, of connecting these up to the real things of everyday life. I can't isolate science in a box, as it were, and see it as just a useful way of making predictions.

The name 'cholera' stayed the same but its meaning changed. A realist with respect to universals thinks there are distinct individual intangible entities that 'red', 'cat', and 'cholera' denote, analogous to the way that proper names and definite descriptions denote distinct individual things. This is what Devitt calls the 'Fido-fido' theory. Now that 'cholera' just denotes that disease caused by the Vibrio cholerae bacterium the realist has an easy ride. But what distinct individual used it to denote before the concept became refined through investigation and the inductive process? That's not so easy to say.

A nominalist would agree with what you say about knowing the essence of a certain disease, though he would be quick to point out that there is a strongstipulative element in the specification of that disease. But this doesn't commit him to intangible individuals. And he would not read too much into the use of the term 'essence'. He would say that in this case 'knowing the essence' just means knowing how to define.

bmiller said...

Thanks for the link to Sellars's paper. I see there is also an article on him at SEP as well as some other papers of his that will take me a little time to read and absorb.

I agree with you that scientific knowledge should not be divorced from our mental life, but unfortunately it been has since the time of Bacon and Descartes. Once the split was made, and we were on the way to become "masters and possessors of nature" the success of the scientific enterprise started us on a path to ignore and minimize how science related to everyday human life. Mathematical abstractions could solve problems of how to power cities and help us communicate over immense distances. Perhaps scientists are now led to believe that things like imaginary numbers really exist as part of reality and so there is a real separation between "science knowledge" and "ordinary human knowledge".

It seems to me that Sellars has seen Humpty Dumpty on the ground and wonders how to put him back together again.

Regarding cholera: People used to use the word to denote a person with the symptom of diarrhea. There is still the general (genus) condition of "having diarrhea" of which we now use the word cholera as one type (species) of that general condition. So do you think there is a difference between "knowing the essence" and "knowing how to define"?

David Brightly said...

I don't quite understand your saying that we are on a path to ignore and minimize how science relates to everyday human life. Science, or at least its products, clearly permeates our daily lives. And it has had a significant impact on our metaphysical and religious beliefs. I'm sure the early modern investigators thought they were uncovering God's workmanship in fashioning the world, and this understanding could be continued right up until the end of the 19th century. It's only with the revolutions in physics in the first half of the 20th century---maybe Darwin is a foretaste fifty years earlier---that this continuity breaks down. It's no longer possible, if we are scientific realists, to see the basic structure of the material world---if that is what we have arrived at---in the terms we use for our dealings with the macroscopic world, but writ small, as it were. In particular, in my view, it cuts adrift the Aristotelian metaphysics of things that we've been carrying along for millennia. Your Humpty Dumpty metaphor is apt.

On the reality of complex numbers, have a look at this. These matrices represent transformations of the plane involving rotation and scaling. The imaginary number i corresponds to the matrix

0 -1
1 0

which represents a rotation of the plane anticlockwise by a quarter turn with no scaling. So i is no less real (oops, bad pun) than the order 'left turn!'

bmiller said...

I think the break started much earlier in the pre-modern era, although it was more of an evolution rather than a revolution (even though Aristotle was reviled by the new wave of pre-moderns).

Here is a book by E. A Burtt that develops this theory: The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science

Descartes told us that the "world of material stuff" was separate from the "world of the mind" and Bacon told natural philosophers not to worry about the "why" of things (formal and final causes) and focus on the "how" of things (material and formal causes). The enterprise was so successful, scientists forgot there was a split and assumed that science could solve the "world of the mind" problems in the same manner as they had used to solve the "world of material stuff".

So i is no less real (oops, bad pun) than the order 'left turn!'

But I suggest you actually tell me 'left turn!' while I'm driving rather than
0 -1
1 0
If you want to get to where you're going :-)

Imaginary numbers are also very useful in electrical engineering for computing phases and impedance, but lack any real physical existence (as far as engineers are concerned. Fourier transforms of signals produce both positive and negative frequencies, but only the positive frequency is manifest in the real world and so on. These mathematical manipulations allow us to more easily do the math to understand the real world, but they also produce artifacts that are not real. So if a theory of science tells some useful information about gravity but also tells us there is no such thing as time, I would use the useful info, but not live my life as if the theory was telling me the facts about time.

David Brightly said...

I tried reading the online Burtt a while back. Hard pounding. But I've just found a ten page review in JSTOR so will give that a go.

I brought in the matrices hoping you might see them as more concrete than the 'imaginary', ie, the complex numbers, and just as real as the real numbers that comprise them. The point is that if you think left turns are real then you must think i is real.

exp(iwt) is motion in a circle at constant angular frequency w. The sinusoids cos and sin are the projections onto the axes. An EE may be interested in just cos or sin to solve some problem, but that doesn't make circular motion any less real.

bmiller said...

Perhaps imaginary numbers and negative frequencies are as real as any mathematical concept, but I don't think that means that they necessarily have to exist in a material reality. Infinity is a useful concept in math also, but we don't think an actual infinity is material possible.

bmiller said...

Thanks for the JSTOR link. I think the review was critical of Burtt but fair. Burtt certainly had an opinion and let it be known and that is clear while reading it. However dramatic he makes the story he does show how the new philosophies trended away from the past toward a something new.

And yes it is long and I confess I haven't finished it myself.

David Brightly said...

Isn't it rather hard to conceive of a material reality of things that can't be counted? It's as if being individual and being countable are almost inseparable concepts. You can't have one without the other.

Any world with n things in it could possibly have had n+1 things, surely? So we need an infinity of counting numbers to express our modal intuitions, even in an actual world of strictly finitely many things.

But I'm not a mathematical platonist. Numbers aren't things.

David Brightly said...

Something new? Yes, absolutely. The passage that Daston quotes runs on to the section end as follows.

The gloriously romantic
universe of Dante and Milton, that set no bounds to
the imagination of man as it played over space and
time, had now been swept away. Space was identified
with the realm of geometry, time with the continuity
of number. The world that people had thought
themselves living in a world rich with colour and
sound, redolent with fragrance, filled with gladness,
love and beauty, speaking everywhere of purposive
harmony and creative ideals was crowded now into
minute corners in the brains of scattered organic
beings. The really important world outside was a
world hard, cold, colourless, silent, and dead ; a
world of quantity, a world of mathematically compu-
table motions in mechanical regularity. The world
of qualities as immediately perceived by man became
just a curious and quite minor effect of that infinite
machine beyond. In Newton the Cartesian metaphy-
sics, ambiguously interpreted and stripped of its
distinctive claim for serious philosophical consider-
ation, finally overthrew Aristotelianism and became
the predominant world-view of modern times.

Here is a suggestion: Why not regard 'that infinite machine beyond' as God? Not the Christian God, perhaps, that, through revelation, carries an overlay of personhood, but the God of the Philosophers. That prime moving, rationally understandable, and necessary being revealed by the five ways which creates and sustains the world of the manifest image.

bmiller said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
bmiller said...

If things take up space, then you can't have an infinite number of things because you run out of space. Even if the universe had infinite space, an infinite number of things would fill up that space leaving no room for anything to move. But yes, we can still imagine adding one more thing even if it's not physically realizable.

Why not regard 'that infinite machine beyond' as God?

The classical idea of God is not a thing among other things much less a "machine", but as the Unmoved Mover, occupying a category of it's own. As such God does not exist, but is existence itself which all other things merely participate in and could not possibly exist without God's constantly willing that existence.

The God of the philosophers of the Enlightenment indeed considered God a craftsman that made the universe, wound it up and might just as well walked away from it. Indeed, why not just think of the machine as the ultimate explanation since there is no need of a God to run it?

I think your question made sense to the Enlightenment thinkers, but I think they ignored the gist of the five ways.

Ed Feser does a pretty good job of describing the evolution here.

David Brightly said...

The Cambridge theoretical physicist David Tong here gives an excellent introduction to Quantum Field Theory. This is the nearest I have ever got to finding a meaning for the otherwise empty phrases 'unmoved mover', 'necessary being', and 'being itself'.

As you might imagine, I disagree with Ed Feser on so much that it's hard to find a place to begin a critique of any of his writings. Here is one of his paras:

Thus, to raise considerations from physics, chemistry, biology, etc. as if they cast doubt on arguments like Aquinas’s Five Ways is simply to make a fundamental category mistake. For such arguments are not addressing the same sorts of questions addressed by natural science in the first place, but rest instead on premises derived from the philosophy of nature. Nor is the point merely that empirical science is different from the philosophy of nature. Natural science is less comprehensive and fundamental than the philosophy of nature. Physics in particular confines itself to those aspects of material reality susceptible of rigorous prediction and control, and thus susceptible of mathematical modelling. It deals with abstractions from concrete reality, not concrete reality itself. It does not tell us anything about the deeper nature of the substances and processes that bear the mathematically definable properties it identifies. But that deeper nature is precisely what the philosophy of nature is concerned with.

I actually think the Five Ways are tolerably good arguments. But they work from within the manifest image and point us towards the scientific image. And it's rank chutzpah to claim that something called the 'philosophy of nature', dreamed up in a stoa and endlessly debated in medieval cloisters, can tell us anything about the 'deeper nature of substances and processes'. Necessarily, all one arrives at is superficiality dressed in arcane language.

bmiller said...

This is the nearest I have ever got to finding a meaning for the otherwise empty phrases 'unmoved mover', 'necessary being', and 'being itself'.

I agree that Professor Tong gave and excellent talk on the latest in quantum field theory. I also agreed with his ending that physicists need to reinvestigate some foundational ideas to understand why the LHC is not producing what they thought it should. However, the 3 items you mention above are more foundational than the subject of his talk. Why do quantum fields fluctuate? Do quantum fields necessarily exist? And what is existence? relate to those questions.

Of course I expect you'd have much to disagree with Professor Feser about, but I thought he summarized pretty well how we got to the present popular understanding of philosophy and science of today and why we have the split.

But I'm interested in your criticism of the 'philosophy of nature'. What do you think the proper path to understanding the 'deeper nature of substances and processes'? Don't you think there is such a thing that can be studied? Do you think today's 'philosophy of science' is a waste? Or just Feser's particular commitments?

One other thing. In case you haven't noticed, philosophical ideas being endlessly debated is not just a 'medieval cloisters' pastime and neither is 'arcane language' :-)

David Brightly said...

Well, I guess my beef with Feserian philosophy of nature is that it is an armchair activity, at best a strolling in the cloister activity. I cannot believe that this can tell us anything interesting let alone important about the world. The modern era has given us science---both a method and a body of knowledge---that tells us that the world is a whole lot stranger than we thought and we have to try to make sense of this, which is the job of philosophy---Sellars's 'seeing how things hang together'. I see PofN purely as a metaphysical theory of the manifest image of persons and things. For historical reasons, it just doesn't address this new problem, though Ed labours mightily to convince us that it does. He rightly identifies the putting to one side of the secondary qualities at the start of the modern period as what allowed science to progress, only for it to come back to bite us with the qualia problem. He writes as if this is a pseudo puzzle of our own making, and one that doesn't arise in his own philosophy, in which, correct me if I'm wrong, minds are somehow in direct contact with said qualities. I'm happy for him to regard this as axiomatic within his theory; I just find it deeply unsatisfying in the light of what we now think we know.

Sometimes arcane language is necessary---I have been doing my fair share of it---and sometimes it can merely disguise vacuity.

bmiller said...

If a philosophy were to ignore what happens in the real world or claim what happens is an illusion, then I would call that an "armchair" philosophy. So for instance the philosophy of Parmenides claimed that all change is an illusion, so no need to study how things change. Likewise Heraclitus' philosophy claimed that there are really no static "things" to study since everything is in a state of flux. AT philosophy actually postulates that the world changes and we can study how it works. It's not like people didn't study projectile motion before Galileo and Newton (they called it impetus before it was called inertia). I don't see AT philosophy as doing something different from Sellars's 'seeing how things hang together'.

As I mentioned, I don't see physicists, who live in the world of the 'scientific image' asking the questions that philosophers would ask or when they do, they look pretty clueless. Those types of questions are asked in the branch of philosophy known as Philosophy of Science. How do you think that is different than PofN?

You ask if AT philosophy holds that minds are directly in contact with the real world. The answer from the AT perspective is that we come to knowledge by way of our senses. Please forgive my brief and perhaps inadequate description. Our sensations are presented to the mind in the form of phantasms. Phantasms are what the mind directly perceives, so no, the mind does not directly perceive the material world. The intellect then makes sense of the external world by way of those phantasms and intellectual activities.
I see scientific instruments: telescopes, microscopes, scales, spectrum analyzers, particle accelerators etc as merely extending the boundaries of our senses. However, the AT philosopher would say that the senses give us an accurate account of material reality and we can use that information to accurately describe how reality really is. As I understand, some nominalists would say that no, the barrier between the mind and external world is a solid wall. We cannot ever understand how material reality really is, only how our mind behaves to reality. Like we can never escape Plato's cave and the shadows on the wall.

It seems to me that it would be unsatisfying for a philosopher to realize that no matter what he could do, he would never be able to get to an understanding of how the world really is.

David Brightly said...

Going back to yours of April 28, 2017 7:53 PM You suggest that the terms 'unmoved mover', 'necessary being', and 'being itself' make reference to realities more fundamental than QFT. Ed Feser puts it as 'Natural science is less comprehensive and fundamental than the philosophy of nature. ' One backs this up by asking seemingly more basic questions of QFT: Why do fields fluctuate? Do they necessarily exist? What is their existence? My reply is that these questions have no greater or lesser force than the same questions asked of God. The fields of QFT play the same conceptual role with respect to the manifest image as does God. Are they necessary? Yes. Whatever possible world we consider, whatever the number of particles it contains, their kinds and their distribution, underlying it, sustaining it, are the fields of QFT. To the schoolboy question, What caused QFT? one answers that QFT lies outside the domain of cause and effect. It is that by which the domain of causation, ie, the reality depicted in the manifest image, is sustained.


How does PofS differ from PofN? I would say that PofS is philosophy. PofN is inchoate science. But I'm not clear where the boundary---if there is one---between pre-modern metaphysics and PofN lies. More importantly, perhaps, by chronological accident PofS has more things to try to hang together than PofN.

How is reality really? I think we have to stop asking ourselves this question. Trouble is, we know we can be deceived by both our senses and other people. Inevitably we ask ourselves, Are we somehow completely deceived? But radical scepticism is an absurd position that cannot be lived. The manifest image, on the other hand, can be lived, though it gets a bit frayed the further we depart from the objects of the senses. Are there really souls? Are there really atoms? It depends how these are conceptualised---and they have to be conceptualised because they aren't evident to the senses. I am happy to say I have or am a soul, but will it survive death? Not so sure. Are there atoms? Well, yes, but they aren't the miniature planetary systems I was told they were in my childhood encyclopaedia. The two instances of 'real' in the question should make us think.

bmiller said...

My reply is that these questions have no greater or lesser force than the same questions asked of God.

Well, my objective was to point out that Professor Tong did not address those 3 questions in his talk and I'm guessing he would say that his field of expertise is 'how does physics work?' and not 'why do physics work?'. Those types of questions belong to the study of PofN or PofS. Wikipedia has these 2 articles, first PofN and next PofS. Neither discusses God.

But I do disagree that the question addressed by the by the argument of the "unmoved mover" is answered by QFT. Quantum fields change as do all other materially existent things. As such they require an explanation for what causes them to change. If you want to, you can claim that is a unique brute fact, but there are a number of problems with that position including; violation of "ex nihilo nihil fit", special pleading since all other material things do not move themselves and it arbitrarily establishes limits on scientific inquiry.

How is reality really?

You mention that we should stop asking ourselves this question, but I think that is impossible. A nominalist may think that all he can really know are the thoughts in his head, but that is what he thinks reality really is. I happen to disagree about that, and I don't think I am living an in an illusion. It seems pretty pointless to me to assume that nothing is as it appears to be but then to actually live your life as if everything actually is as it appears to be. It seems to me that 'true believers' that we live in an illusion and act out their beliefs are either dead or locked up so they don't hurt themselves or others (or perhaps are politicians :-))

David Brightly said...

I'm not sure Why does physics work? is an interesting or particularly deep question. Why do you think the kinetic theory of gases works? I think there can be just one answer to this.

We arrive at the unmoved mover by postulating something that lies outside the causal order. Quantum fields themselves are not material. But they offer us a rational (mathematical) explanation of the probabilities of material events. They also lie outside the causal order, being in a sense the source of the causal order. This is my interpretation of QFT, of course, but the analogies are striking, I think.

I agree that we are not living in an illusion. If we are right then the things we find around us are real. Full stop. I don't see what 'really' can add to 'real', as it were.

bmiller said...

"I'm not sure Why does physics work? is an interesting or particularly deep question."

Well, it's a philosophical question and we are on a philosopher's blog aren't we :-)?
Since you think there can be just one answer to the kinetic theory of gases theory, what is it?

"Quantum fields themselves are not material."

This is interesting. Are they immaterial then?
My understanding is that they are extended in space, differ across space and change and are changed. This is not a description of an unchanged changer.

Here is the gist of the argument for an unchanged changer:
If something changes, it passes from being what it is to what it will be. Parmenides held that it is impossible something to come into existence unless something else caused it. Since the universe exists and there is nothing outside the universe, then there is nothing that can cause any change ("ex nihilo nihil fit") so change must be an illusion. Aristotle came up with a way to account for real change and not violate causality by theorizing things naturally consist of potency and act. Change is just when a thing moves from a potential state of existence to an actual state. So an acorn's potential to become a tree is actualized by water, sun, soil, etc. But still nothing can materially change itself so when we see something changing, there must be something else changing it. This is the basis of modern science. However, when we observe something changing, there cannot be an infinite series of immediate changers since each in the series would need to be in the act of being changed itself. This infinite regress is impossible. Therefore, there must ultimately be something that causes change but is not changed itself. This preserves causality and prevents an infinite regress.

Now since in QFT, quantum fields change, they cannot fulfill the role as "unmoved mover". This is a distinction that I often see missed by even famous philosophers including Bertrand Russell and the younger Anthony Flew.

David Brightly said...

Surely KTG works because the account of gases given in the KTG is tolerably accurate?

Well, quantum fields are not as clearly material as the scalar field representing the density of matter or the vector field representing its velocity would be considered. Also, I'm claiming they lie outside the causal nexus so that should cast doubt on their materiality.

They are not static but being outside the causal nexus they are unmoved. I don't see why the unmoved mover needs to be static. If it's outside the causal nexus arguments about change appropriate to things within it need not apply.

bmiller said...

Surely KTG works because the account of gases given in the KTG is tolerably accurate?

Yes, it is a model for how gases behave and its tolerably accurate. That is a good instance of a scientist making a hypothesis, testing it, adjusting it etc. The underlying assumption of the scientist is that ideal gases have a particular nature that cause them to behave in predictable ways when subjected to changes in the environment. That ideal gases have particular natures and will behave predictably is a question postulated by the philosopher of science. You should read the short Wiki article on PofN. Things may have moved on since you last read about it. Aristotle isn't a four letter word anymore among a lot of scholars.

They are not static but being outside the causal nexus they are unmoved. I don't see why the unmoved mover needs to be static. If it's outside the causal nexus arguments about change appropriate to things within it need not apply.

You seem to find a distinction between static and unmoved that I don't. The original meaning of the word Aristotle used was more like 'change' than movement, although it ended up being translated that way. How is 'static' different that 'unchanging'? Why should this changing thing be beyond the causal nexus and other moving things be within it?

David Brightly said...

I'm happy to allow that Aristotle's conception of natural things set us on the right track---as opposed to earlier beliefs, say, that things are animated by spirits akin to persons. What I don't understand is why there is a hiatus of two millennia before scientific inquiry takes off. Perhaps it's due to technological limitations. Galileo resorted to using his pulse as a clock.

And I do struggle with the seemingly grand claims made for pre-modern philosophy of nature. Here's Ed Feser again:

Empirical science seeks to uncover the physical causes that happen to exist, or the chemical structure of the material substances that happen to exist, or what have you. The philosophy of nature is concerned with deeper questions -- for example, with what has to be true if there is to be any causality at all, or any material substances at all.

Wow! And you can figure all this out from ordinary experience and pure thought it seems. Sadly, the answers we get turn out to be pretty thin gruel. The theory of prime matter and form says that things are made of stuff and have shape. The theory of act and potency says that things change by virtue of hidden internal properties and interactions with other things. Sure. This is restating in somewhat high-falutin language what has been taken on board for centuries. If you like it's a generalisation over what specific sciences say, a bit like a law couched in terms of 'vehicles' that's aimed at cars, buses, trucks, etc. Contrary to Ed I don't think this is any more comprehensive or fundamental. Furthermore, there is a danger attached to thinking in generalisations, namely that we reify them. This happens in physics too. We are inclined to think there is energy over and above gravitational energy, kinetic energy, electrical energy, chemical energy, etc.

More to follow.

bmiller said...

What I don't understand is why there is a hiatus of two millennia before scientific inquiry takes off.

This is a question of not only of the history of thought but the history of culture and the history of Western civilization.
What conditions in the West allowed the 'scientific revolution' to take off while the East and the rest of the world never had one. Something about the confluence of culture, relative peace, wealth and health, establishment of universities all probably contributed. Some have proposed that although both Islam and Greek Christianity both had access to the same base of knowledge, it was the concept based on Aristotle that things repeated in eternal cycles and so the there was an underlying fatalism thus dampening the study of altering nature. I'm not sure, but there must be some explanation.

Wow! And you can figure all this out from ordinary experience and pure thought it seems.

Well as you are aware, whether causality or material substances exist are still live philosophical questions.
If you ask a typical scientist about act/potency or matter/form I suspect you would get a blank look. I'm not sure whether your complaint is that they are too obvious or are obviously wrong.

Furthermore, there is a danger attached to thinking in generalizations, namely that we reify them. This happens in physics too. We are inclined to think there is energy over and above gravitational energy, kinetic energy, electrical energy, chemical energy, etc.

Well scientists would say that all of those things you listed are all energy but manifested in various forms. For instance kinetic energy is trans-formed to electrical energy at electrical generation plants at the foot of dams. Do you hold they are not?

bmiller said...

Sorry, that should be:
Do you hold that the list you provided are not merely various forms of the same thing?

David Brightly said...

The distinction I'm making is between 'unmoving' (='unchanging') and 'unmoved' (='unchanged') where the latter has the passive sense we find in 'moved to tears'. So the unmoved mover could be compared to a play---something that can move but is itself not the kind of thing that can be moved, though it is in time and changes from moment to moment. Turning to QFT, the idea is that the fields 'underlie' or 'sustain' the material. The relation between them isn't causal because the causal operates only within the material. Nor is it exactly like supervenience though it has the asymmetric 'upward dependence' of supervenience. Perhaps more like occasionalism.

David Brightly said...

Too obvious or obviously wrong Both! If you see these terms as denoting abstractions then, in the light of what we now know, there is a lot that is obviously right about what is being said. On the other hand, if you are educated in the natural sciences then you tend to see the claims as concrete and either obviously wrong---no such stuff as prime matter---or explanatorily vacuous----dormitive power, etc. Readers like me are confused because writers like Ed F don't make it clear where they stand on this.

Energy Oh, when called upon I can talk the 'energy transformation' talk alright! And it appeals to our intuitive understanding of conservation principles like volumes and masses of fluids. But energy isn't stuff. Then what is it? Causal oomph, or a measure of potency!

bmiller said...

On the other hand, if you are educated in the natural sciences then you tend to see the claims as concrete and either obviously wrong---no such stuff as prime matter---or explanatorily vacuous----dormitive power, etc.

It is true that if scientists reject the form/matter distinction then they consider both of them fiction. And indeed the moderns proclaimed that only 2 of Aristotle's 4 causes were proper areas of study for them. They claimed to study only material and efficient causes while ignoring formal and final causes. I'm still trying to figure out why they would reject formal causes. Maybe because it is entertwined so closely with final causes which they considered a distraction from getting on with the business of making technology to improve human conditions. So yes, if science rejects form/matter, then prime matter would be rejected.

But it seems science actually does rely on formal causes when they describe things as having certain predictable properties and study how they behave. But regarding your concept of QFT as being the basis for everything isn't that bordering on the very concept of prime matter? Prime matter is supposed to be the basic stuff of all material things just like your concept of QFT. So maybe you believe prime matter exists, but just call it something different :-)

Also, if all you read are Enlightenment era criticisms of Scholaticicism then sure one could think a lot of it vacuous. In fact modern AT defenders acknowledge that. However, Enlightenment critics were not interested in criticizing the Aristotlean tradition dialectically, but rather rhetorically. So the "dormative power" meme lives on.

But energy isn't stuff. Then what is it? Causal oomph, or a measure of potency!

Well I'd have to know what your definition of "stuff" is. Leibniz, is considered one who originated the present concept of energy from Aristotle's term energeia, which Aristotle used as "act" in his act/potency dichotomy.

Apparently later physicists developed the concept further and borrowed the act/potency concept to theorize kinetic and potential energy that is used in modern science. But this concept is obviously different from Aristotle's more general concept.

I think if you asked Professor Tong, he would say everything is stuff so he wouldn't understand the question.

David Brightly said...

If the early moderns rejected formal causes what did they think 'formal cause' meant? After all, what are Hooke's meticuluous drawings of fleas etc other than investigations into formal causes? Or Harvey on the circulation of blood. On the other hand, a piece of knowledge like Boyle's Law doesn't really fit into the Aristotelian picture, does it? OK, it's formal in the sense of being expressed in a formula, but it doesn't say anything about the form or structure or plan of gases. If we know something of the latter we can account for BL---that's the kinetic theory as mentioned earlier. Ditto Hooke's law of springs and Galilean kinematics. Even the much earlier (but post-Aristotle) Archimedean mechanics of levers and pulleys. They seem to be new kinds of knowledge outside the Aristotelian framework.

BTW, I looked at the WP 'History of Energy' article. The link to the Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics text regarding 'energeia' was broken. On the article's Talk page another reader had suggested a correction which I edited in. But the section of NE he recommended, though it has the word 'energeia' in it, doesn't seem connected to the modern sense at all. At least in the English translation at Perseus. Afraid I don't read Greek!

bmiller said...

Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics can be found here

I agree with you that rejection of the 'formal cause' by the early moderns doesn't make sense and it seems they went merrily on their way using the concept, while denying it.

OK, it's formal in the sense of being expressed in a formula, but it doesn't say anything about the form or structure or plan of gases.

Form according to AT is the essential nature of a substance that accounts for how it naturally behaves. If a gas naturally behaves in a predictable way or a range of predictable ways to a stimulus, then it is the gas's form that accounts for that behavior. So since Boyle's law describe how gases naturally behave, then yes, it is in line with AT philosophy.


bmiller said...

Oops. Let me fix the link

Nicomachean Ethics
Here is the English for the Wiki Link

David Brightly said...

Here is more from that Ed Feser post, with some comments of mine in bold.

Hence, when the Aristotelian says (for example) that natural objects must have substantial forms, he is not trying to give an explanation of the sort that the modern chemist is giving. He is not claiming that we can say everything we need to know about opium simply by noting that whatever it does it does by virtue of its substantial form, and that no further chemical analysis is needed. Rather, he is saying that, whatever the specific chemical details of opium (or water, or lead, or whatever) turn out to be, if these really are natural substances about which we can have scientific knowledge, then there must be some intrinsic principle that grounds the properties that chemistry uncovers and that gives them the regularity that chemistry shows them to have.

A chemist could agree with this, for the sake of argument, though he would want to inquire further into what is meant by 'intrinsic principle'. And he'd want to know what sort of explanation the Aristotelian is offering, if it isn't the same kind as his own.

That is to say, it cannot be that a tendency toward such-and-such effects is to be found only in this or that sample of opium, but must derive from opium as such, from something common to any instance of opium; it cannot be that opium’s typical behavior derives from something extrinsic to it, but must be grounded in an inherent source; if it has causal properties that are irreducible to those of its parts, then there is a sense in which opium itself is irreducible to its parts; and so forth.

He could agree with this too. But he would also say the there is a sense in which the whole just is the parts (material cause) put together (efficient cause) in the right arrangement (formal cause). There is nothing in addition to this.

Naturally we still have to do chemical analysis in order to discover the specific means by which opium brings about its characteristic effects. The Aristotelian does not deny this because he is not making a claim that is in competition with chemistry. He is rather approaching the phenomenon from a different and more fundamental level of analysis, and asking a different sort of question about it. (This is one reason Moliere-style “dormitive virtue” objections to substantial forms are puerile. I have discussed that objection in more detail in The Last Superstition and Aquinas.)

The chemist has a hard time understanding this. He would want to identify Ed's intrinsic principle with the parts themselves together with their spatial arrangement, just as a table is legs and top correctly assembled. He doesn't see the need for any deeper analysis. The only further questions he might want to ask would be directed to a physicist, not a philosopher.

bmiller said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
bmiller said...

The only further questions he might want to ask would be directed to a physicist, not a philosopher.

I agree with you that a chemist, operating as a chemist, has no interest in philosophy nor does a physicist. They are no longer trained in philosophy and make a muddle of it when they make philosophical pronouncements. That doesn't mean philosophers cannot examine the question using tools that chemists are not trained in using for a purpose they are not trained in.

Also, strictly speaking, an orthodox modern or post modern philosopher would deny the formal cause although a chemist would agree that the whole has an intrinsic principle different than the parts. This is where I see that a disconnect occurs between the modern's philosophy of science and science as it it practiced.

He could agree with this too. But he would also say the there is a sense in which the whole just is the parts (material cause) put together (efficient cause) in the right arrangement (formal cause). There is nothing in addition to this.

So I would put this question to the chemist. I see that you've combined (efficient cause) sodium and chlorine (material cause) and produced a substance you call salt that tastes good (formal cause). Can you do it a second time? Why should you expect the same result? Why not a sweet substance next time? There seems to be a need to explain the regularity right?

And sorry, I can see in a previous comment that I had attributed regularity to the formal cause whereas regularity is part of the formal cause and structure and behavior is attributed to the formal cause.

David Brightly said...

Here is something else I noticed. Ed also says (in the first excerpt),

He [the Aristotelian] is not claiming that we can say everything we need to know about opium by noting that whatever it does it does by virtue of its substantial form , …

Really? Why not? Is there another principle operative besides the substantial form? Oddly enough, isn’t what Ed says the Aristotelian denies exactly what the chemist would say, if his interpretation of ‘substantial form’ as parts and structure is the right one?

My tentative conclusion on this is that Ed's talk of 'a different and more fundamental level of analysis' and 'asking a different sort of question' is somewhat misleading. The analysis isn't more fundamental, it's just more general/less specific. This is understandable given the state of physicochemical knowledge in ancient times. Indeed, to attribute powers to unseen internal 'principles' is in retrospect decidedly insightful given that there would have been no idea as to how these principles brought about their effects. The scientific revolution of the 17th century marks the start of their elucidation.

I can't at the moment make sense of what Ed says in any other way.

Regarding regularity, the chemist would say that a very basic process like the reaction between sodium and chlorine is time independent and always gives the same result. There is insufficient structure in their atoms to allow internal states that reflect or 'record' the time or their history. Contrast this with macroscopic bodies, such as plants, which do have enough structure to get into time-dependent states----more growth hormone in spring than in winter, say, and tree growth rings accumulating year by year.

bmiller said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
bmiller said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
bmiller said...

Really? Why not? Is there another principle operative besides the substantial form?

Yes, I see what you mean. If you knew everything there was to know about a thing, then what is left to know?
But form is only 1 of the 4 AT 'causes'. We also need to know the material, efficient and final causes to know everything about a thing. A thing is not *just* a substantial form as we need the others too.

The analysis isn't more fundamental, it's just more general/less specific.

I think this may be where you can help me understand nominalism better. I see science as attempting to uncover ever fewer general principles to explain how the material universe changes. To my mind basic general principles are more fundamental than particular instances that exhibit the principles.

The scientific revolution did indeed give us more information about how material things work in greater detail. Today's Western science follows some basic assumptions as Aristotle's such as: material things really exist, material things really change, the universe is intelligble, we can cause changes etc. Those assumptions are not debated by chemists since that's not in their job description. It is in Ed's job description to debate those assumptions. He is trying to make a point that it is a category mistake to conflate the 2 jobs.

Regarding regularity, the chemist would say that a very basic process like the reaction between sodium and chlorine is time independent and always gives the same result. There is insufficient structure in their atoms to allow internal states that reflect or 'record' the time or their history.

My point regarding regularity is not that it exists but why does it exist? (even if you move it down through material levels from salt to atoms to quantum fields). From an AT perspective regularity demands an explanation that is not answered by the material cause, the efficient cause nor the formal cause. Your answer assigns it to the formal cause. Aristotle was challenged that his formal cause did not account for regularity, so he accounted for it by the final cause. Things naturally and regularly tend to behave the same.

David Brightly said...

We may have a terminological disagreement here. I can see that a realist regarding universals might regard a universal, redness, say, as more fundamental in some ontological sense than its instances, particular red things. But I tend to think of 'fundamental' as denoting an ordering on explanations or theories and the entities they involve. Thus explanation A is more fundamental then explanation B if A can account for B but not vice versa. This seems to be the sense in which the term is used in the sciences. Ed F seems to accept something like this when he says, Naturally we still have to do chemical analysis in order to discover the specific means by which opium brings about its characteristic effects. The specific explanation accounts for and justifies the more general claim that there is some unspecified principle at work.

I looked up Andrea Falcon's SEP article Aristotle on Causality. She points out that, understandably enough, Aristotle does not seem to be able to specify what material processes are involved in the growth of the teeth. Hence he looks for an explanation of the regularity of animal jaw arrangements elsewhere. I think he would be impressed by what we can now offer by way of material and efficient explanations of animal physiology.

bmiller said...

Thus explanation A is more fundamental then explanation B if A can account for B but not vice versa.

So you consider that the specific fact that Na and Cl combine to make salt a more basic explanation of how chemistry works than the explanation that 2 substances are needed along with a catalyst to produce a 3rd substance. Yes, I think we do disagree on the definition.

To my mind, Na and Cl can account for how salt is made, but not how H2O is made. But the fact that 2 substances and a catalyst are needed to produce a 3rd substance accounts for both. So I would consider the later more fundamental, while you would say that since there are no specifics, then the later is less fundamental in both cases. Merriam Webster has this series of definitions of fundamental. Can you point to one of these or another that you feel phrases your idea the way you conceive it? I'm thinking of 2a as my concept.

Thanks for the link. It's a very good summary. Here is more of the quote:

Aristotle does not seem to be able to specify what material processes are involved in the growth of the teeth, but he is willing to recognize that certain material processes have to take place for the teeth to grow in the particular way they do. In other words, there is more to the formation of the teeth than these material processes, but this formation does not occur unless the relevant material processes take place.

I take this to mean that regardless of what a material process turn to be in detail if it is regular the fact of regularity still needs an explanation. Likewise there is no regularity without a material process.

The article also mentions correctly that he offers the final cause as the best explanation for the observation of regularity, not something that can be deductively proven.

David Brightly said...

Not quite. I wouldn’t say that an instance of a generalisation was more fundamental than the generalisation itself. Or vice versa. In my view, instances and generalisations don’t fall under the kind of ordering implied by ‘more/less fundamental’. That’s my beef with Ed F: He claims that the properties and operations of opium stem from its ‘substantial form’. I don’t quite know what he means by this term, but he seems to admit that chemical investigation can reveal more about it, and yet talk of the substantial form is more fundamental than the chemical findings. So here is an analogy: I get around quickly because I possess a vehicle. Inspection of my garage reveals the vehicle to be a car. But Ed would say it’s a more fundamental account of my speedy movement to say I have a vehicle than to say I have a car.

I agree MW definition 2a gets closest. But Ed is using ‘fundamental’ in a comparative sense, whereas MW uses the absolute term ‘essential’ and it’s difficult to make sense of ‘more or less essential’.

I think you have put your finger on it. Final causation was indeed the best hypothesis in the fourth century BC.

bmiller said...

Can you please help me understand what you do consider the proper ordering of 'more/less fundamental' then? Perhaps you consider there is no way to order things in this way.

I think you get the form/matter distinction right? But something can be part of the form of a thing but not essential to it. For instance the car in your garage may be red. If your car was blue, it would still be a car. So in this case the color of the car would be considered an accident and not part of the car's essence or substantial form.

Regarding your analogy. I think in general a philosopher would ask different types of questions like: What is a vehicle? What is a car? How are they the same/different? What do they do? What are their causes and effects? etc. For instance Aristotle used the analogy of a statue to illustrate his concept of the 4 causes. It was incidental and less relevant to what he was trying to convey whether the statue was one of Apollo or Aphrodite. I take Ed to have this in mind with the quote you refer to.

I realize that you reject final cause. I was just discussing where it came from.
How do you account for the apparent regularity of how things work? Does it even need an explanation?

David Brightly said...

From the mid 19th century much basic chemical knowledge of what elements formed compounds with others and in what proportions was summarised by a whole number property of each element called its valence. Hydrogen had valence 1, oxygen 2, and carbon 4, so compounds like H20, CO2, and CH4 were possible. School chemistry still goes like this. In the mid 20th century the quantum mechanical understanding of the electron distribution in discrete 'shells' inside atoms showed how valence was connected with the number of electrons in the outermost shell, which became known as the valence shell. It also explained where the valence theory broke down and why 'multi-valency' had sometimes to be introduced. Since the electron shell theory accounts for the valence theory we say it's more fundamental. It gets closer to 'the bottom of things', as it were.

I think it's clear Ed doesn't mean anything like this. Rather, I suspect he is emphasising the a priori aspect of the Aristotelian analysis. Even when we know next to nothing about opium we can argue from very general considerations that its properties derive from some intrinsic principle. Perhaps this is why he says, The philosophy of nature is concerned with deeper questions -- for example, with what has to be true if there is to be any causality at all, or any material substances at all. Unfortunately, my intuitions regarding spatial metaphors for degrees of knowledge or understanding go the opposite way! I see Ed's as a 'top-down' approach which yields very general, but shallow results---they do not tell us much about the world in detail. The chemist, on the other hand, gives us an empirical, bottom-up, as it were, account, which goes more deeply into things. Do you see how we use 'deep' in opposite senses? Though we both think deeper is better! So I'm inclined to put this disagreement down to a clash of metaphors.

Incidentally, I'm not really sure how to read that quoted claim above. The position of the 'if' suggests he's after necessary conditions---if there is causality etc then there must be such-and-such. On the other hand the 'to be' suggests sufficient conditions---if such-and-such holds there will be causality etc. The latter, I think, would be a much bigger claim.

Interesting that little nuances of language can be so misleading.

bmiller said...

Thanks. I think that's an excellent summary of the different perspectives, top down or bottom up but unfortunately using the same word. I can see how its confusing from your perspective.....Its worse than Brits and Yanks talking about the car's boot, or more correctly trunk :-)



Here is how I read the quote:
If there is causality, then what has to be true and what has to be false? Maybe there really isn't such a thing.
But the claim is more of what type of questions the philosophy of nature asks as opposed to those of a scientist who just assumes causality.

David Brightly said...

Yes, this is a theme in Ed's writings. He seeks to isolate his metaphysics and philosophy of nature from the findings of science. The former are in some sense 'prior' and the latter are their detailed working out, as it were. Nothing in science can possibly cast doubt on this division. You won't be surprised when I say I think this position is doomed, though I can see why Ed would want to defend it. It's not difficult to find criticisms of the arguments for priority in his Scholastic Metaphysics, for example, which he doesn't counter in the text. He seems to think it's enough to rebut Ockham and Buridan and the arch-enemy Hume to which, in his view, the former inevitably lead. But more significantly he doesn't acknowledge the extent to which developments in science and mathematics, which have occurred as natural growths within their disciplines, have thrown up new philosophical puzzles. That's why we have phil of science and phil of maths. His project doesn't recognise the Popperian unpredictability of the growth of knowledge. He'd say it was all down to the mistakes of the early moderns of course!

bmiller said...

David,

I'm glad to see that you're writing which means you're safe. I hope that none of your family or acquaintances were harmed from the Manchester event.

It's not difficult to find criticisms of the arguments for priority in his Scholastic Metaphysics, for example, which he doesn't counter in the text.

I haven't read the book so I have no context for the assertions or criticisms. Do you have specific criticisms in mind or can you point me to something to read?

I agree that new developments or discoveries in the practice of science raise questions of how they fit into the philosophy of science. But it seems you think present day Thomism has not just failed to address those questions adequately, but has not even attempted to address those questions. While it's true that Feser paints the early moderns as the villains in his narrative, I have seen him address General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and classical objections, so I don't think its true that Thomists are locked into defending the 4 elements.

Thanks for mentioning Popper's growth of knowledge theory. I'll read up on it.

I've always had an interest in why people think the way they do and why they thought the way they did. It's also interesting to see how I came to be taught what I was taught. I found it interesting that the history of scientific thought was not an orderly evolution from one logical thought to another as you would assume merely taking physics courses. Seems there was plenty of loud disagreements, name calling and politics. Surprise :-)

David Brightly said...

Thank you for your thoughts. We live in relative safety on the edge of rural north-east Hampshire. But I was living just south of Warrington town centre at the time of the IRA bomb in 1993 that killed two children. Also the massive 1996 IRA bomb in Corporation street, Manchester, which killed no-one. The IRA weren't so much interested in killing mainland Brits as showing that they could cause havoc if they wanted, so they would issue warnings. But I well remember the distinct unease one felt travelling on the London tube when bomb alerts were frequent and one eyed people's bags with suspicion.

I invested in the Kindle version of Scholastic Metaphysics a while back (half the price of the paperback in the UK) and have been peppering it with Notes. It's not so simple to cut and paste bits out of the online Kindle reader but I'll see what I can do. We may yet get this thread to 400 comments.

bmiller said...

I can only imagine the constant concern of going about your business during the IRA bombings. But you Brits have a reputation for carrying on...the Blitz for instance.

What do you think finally ended the IRA bombings? Is there more power sharing now in Northern Ireland between the 2 parties?

«Oldest ‹Older   201 – 340 of 340   Newer› Newest»