Is the explanation of X the deduction of X from postulated necessity?
For long time now I've been interested in just what we mean by "explanation." In other thread I assumed the notion of explanation that appeals most to me and argued that explanation must therefore be "shallow." Here I just want to explore this notion and see whether others find it convincing and/or can offer better analyses of the concept of explanation. I think the DN model is more or less what I'm defending, though I'm looking at it in a broader context than physical science. We have a "folk science" of human nature that we use to navigate social situations, for instance. And metaphysicians also seem to explain things this way or mean something like this by "explanation."
[quote=Wiki]
The deductive-nomological model (DN model)... is a formal view of scientifically answering questions asking, "Why...?". The DN model poses scientific explanation as a deductive structure—that is, one where truth of its premises entails truth of its conclusion—hinged on accurate prediction or postdiction of the phenomenon to be explained.
[/quote]
[quote=IEP]
According to Hempel, an explanation is:
...an argument to the effect that the phenomenon to be explained ...was to be expected in virtue of certain explanatory facts. (1965 p. 336)
[/quote]
These explanatory facts are (seemingly) either explained by still other facts to be explained or just bare, postulated necessities. We just assume that "this is a nature of things." Is this a primitive sort of ability of ours? We used to think whatever goes up must come down. No one could throw a stone fast enough to shatter this postulate.
A view that I can't embrace is:
[quote=IEP]
Duhem claimed that:
To explain is to strip the reality of the appearances covering it like a veil, in order to see the bare reality itself. (op.cit.: p19)
[/quote]
We can find the "cash value" in this idea by noting that it is useful to "throw away" information sometimes in order to deduce that which is to be expected -- or to explain what was observed. The veil that is stripped is just everything in the totality that isn't relevant to our purpose. The face beneath the veil would be a "skeleton" of postulated necessities that we might in theory use to reconstruct the veil, given some initial conditions.
Any thoughts?
[quote=Wiki]
The deductive-nomological model (DN model)... is a formal view of scientifically answering questions asking, "Why...?". The DN model poses scientific explanation as a deductive structure—that is, one where truth of its premises entails truth of its conclusion—hinged on accurate prediction or postdiction of the phenomenon to be explained.
[/quote]
[quote=IEP]
According to Hempel, an explanation is:
...an argument to the effect that the phenomenon to be explained ...was to be expected in virtue of certain explanatory facts. (1965 p. 336)
[/quote]
These explanatory facts are (seemingly) either explained by still other facts to be explained or just bare, postulated necessities. We just assume that "this is a nature of things." Is this a primitive sort of ability of ours? We used to think whatever goes up must come down. No one could throw a stone fast enough to shatter this postulate.
A view that I can't embrace is:
[quote=IEP]
Duhem claimed that:
To explain is to strip the reality of the appearances covering it like a veil, in order to see the bare reality itself. (op.cit.: p19)
[/quote]
We can find the "cash value" in this idea by noting that it is useful to "throw away" information sometimes in order to deduce that which is to be expected -- or to explain what was observed. The veil that is stripped is just everything in the totality that isn't relevant to our purpose. The face beneath the veil would be a "skeleton" of postulated necessities that we might in theory use to reconstruct the veil, given some initial conditions.
Any thoughts?
Comments (41)
I like it. I'm a big fan of Popper, btw. Something I didn't mention in the OP was the postulation of unseen entities. That's very important. But I thought I'd focus on the "projection" of necessity. Of course the assumed uniformity of nature figures into this.
Things are explained by pointing to the constraints that bound possibility. This view has the advantage of starting with the idea that anything could be the case. But then limits arise for various reasons to specify what actually is. And yet in so bounding possibility, possibility still remains.
If nature makes a horse, it could be any colour, any size. If the horse is in fact white, or dwarf, then these are further constraints on possibility that explain why this colour and not that, why this size and not some other.
Then of course Aristotle came up with four kinds of "becauses". We can say a horse is what it is because of the specific constraints in terms of what it is made of, how it came to be made, for what reason it was made, and with what design it was made.
So specificity in the world arises from the extent to which there are constraints impinging on naked possibility. And explanation just has to account for those constraints to the degree it epistemically matters. Our own conception of a horse can be vague or more definite - depending on the demands of the situation, the degree to which we need to care.
A donkey is at least horse-like from some angles. Is this really a Lipizzaner stallion if it is not grey?
So what is necessary and what is accidental when it comes to explanations? Confusion arises because we tend to mix up epistemology and ontology.
There is the question of what it would take for us to create "a horse". Then the separate question of how a horse arises in nature - a question which has to include the one of is there "a mind" at work such as to care about sufficiently meeting some set of causal conditions. Is nature really specifying some constraints in terms of formal and final cause, or even material and efficient cause. When it comes to the existence of "a horse" - either as genus or individual - what is actually necessary and what is merely accident (ie: unconstrained possibility).
So an organic approach steps back far enough not to simply assume nature shares our highly epistemic and self-interested approach to forming explanations. We always end up thinking about explanation in terms of how could we replicate or control nature as if it were a machine or device that we wanted to craft. And from there a huge number of familiar philosophical confusions flow.
Quoting apokrisis
This still seems like the postulation of necessity. Horsesmust be within specific constraints. Our postulates become more specific. But how does one avoid a "If x then y" as a premise from which y can be deduced in the context of x?
It is the postulation of necessity. But it allows also for the role played by possibility or contingency. And also distinguishes between epistemic and ontic models of formal and final cause.
So horse becomes nothing but a state of constraint. It is constraints all the way down. But now we must realise how out of pure epistemic blinkeredness, we often class accidental constraints along with the actually naturally necessary. Or indeed, vice versa.
Is a horse still a horse if it is made out of pottery, and created in a factory rather than born of a mare?
Accidents and necessities may be considered quite differently when switching between a mechanical and organic notion of explanation. There may still be postulations and deductions, but within quite contrasting frameworks of thought.
Quoting apokrisis
I like this. I don't see how we could know that we have the "actually naturally necessary," but I can see that we can and do act successfully as if. I see a spectrum of intensisty. On one side the postulated necessity is just acted upon as necessity in deed. The other side is tentative, the cutting edge of the imagination.
I think this analysis of the horse is the other side of the question, which I've neglected. We need x and y before we can postulate necessity. And perhaps we can view x and y as unstable systems of constraints. Change one entity in the same and you change them all. In basic physics, we have a point mass, which in practice is just a way to use signs. So we translate signs in the manifest image into signs in the mathematical model, calculate, and translate back into the manifest image. I've neglected all of this, but I acknowledge it.
Remember also that deduction is simply a calculus of constraints. Take one premise, combine it with another, logic tells you what is necessarily the new more specified state of constraint. So deduction is the crisp addition and subtraction of identified or separable constraints. It's a maths of constraint.
And my point is that instability is the necessary flip side of this presumption of stable necessities in life. Instability stands for raw possibility. The world could be anything - if it were not regulated.
So it is not constraint that is unstable. It is fundamental instability (ie: vagueness or Apeiron) that creates some kind of "stuff" for constraints to act upon.
In nature, constraints are in reality more holistic and non-separable. Quantum physics confirms the radical metaphysical truth of this. But still we can mechanically imagine reality in terms of a composition or accumulation of separable constraints. And it is that epistemic vision of existence that standard logic - as a formal calculus of constraints - underwrites. We can imagine reality as a hierarchy of constraints that traps possibility into a particular state of substantial being.
I can relate to all of this. By the instability of "constraints" I just meant the still-in-progress image we have of the possible. Sometimes we are surprised. "What goes up must come down." Then someone figures out how to achieve escape velocity. Also, yes, logic can be viewed in terms of implicit constrains being made explicit. Also "a hierarchy of constraints that traps possibility into a particular state of substantial being" is nice.
You've just made Popper turn in his grave, and Deutsch has just banged his head on his desk. There is no assumed uniformity of nature!
I'm trying to think of a single scientific theory that does not involve unseen entities. Maybe you could help? As Deutsch points out, what we see is a spot on a photographic plate, and if you analyse that fully, we don't even *see* that. The explanation however, involves planets, the sun, and spacetime curvature.
It is interesting to note that Boltzmann killed himself in 1906 because the German scientific establishment would not accept the existence of molecules or atoms, because they could not be seen!
Anyway, I cannot find fault with Deutsch's definition of explanation - a statement about what exists in reality, how it behaves and why.
And, I think Deutsch's discovery of his "hard-to-vary" criterion is new.
Quoting tom
OK, but will there be assumed uniformity of nature in 5 minutes?
But you claim to be interested in the meaning of "explanation" while promoting the compete absence of one!
How does the "assumed uniformity of nature" constitute an explanation for anything?
And, if you are interested in Popper, relying on such an assumption is a fundamental mistake.
I didn't say I worshiped or followed Popper. I've just really enjoyed reading him. Here's something I find interesting:
[quote = link below]
Suppose that Hume is right about how we actually think. So far all we have is a fact about human cognitive psychology. And this fact, however interesting, does not settle the normative question: Is it legitimate for us to proceed in this way? Are the conclusions we reach as a result of inductive inference really justified?
A first pass suggests a negative answer. After all, the inference pattern
(DATA) In my experience, all Fs are Gs
(THEORY) Therefore, in general all Fs are Gs, (or at least, the next F I examine will be G).
is not deductively valid. It is logically possible for the conclusion to be false when the premise is true. So a skeptic might say: In so-called inductive reasoning, human beings commit a fallacy. They accept a general proposition on the basis of an invalid argument. And this means that their acceptance of that general proposition is unjustified.
Now this is not exactly Hume's way of raising skeptical worries. Hume rather takes the invalidity of the inference from DATA to THEORY as evidence that we have failed to make our method fully explicit. That we unheasitatingly pass from DATA to THEORY shows that we accept a principle connecting the two, a principle that normally passes unnoticed because we take it so completely for granted, but which figures implicitly in every instance of inductive reasoning.
Hume formulates this missing premise as the claim that the future will resemble the past. But for our purposes it will be useful to work with a somewhat more precise formulation. What we need to make the inverence from DATA to THEORY valid is a premise of the form:
(UN) For the most part, if a regularity R (e.g., All Fs are Gs) holds in my experience, then it holds in nature generally, or at least in the next instance.
"UN" stands for the "Uniformity of Nature". This is a traditional (post-Humean) label for the missing premise, though in fact it is misleading. For UN is not simply the claim that nature exhibits regularities. It is the claim that the regularities that have emerged in my experience are among the regularities that hold throughout nature. It might better be called a principle or representativeness, for its central message is that my experience, though limited in time and space to a tiny fraction of the universe, is nonetheless a representative sample of the universe.
The inference from DATA + UN to THEORY is valid. Moreover, there is no question for now about our right to accept the DATA. So if we want to know whether we ever have a right to accept a generalization like THEORY, we must ask whether we have reason to believe UN.
[/quote]
https://www.princeton.edu/~grosen/puc/phi203/induction.html
Now I suspect you will argue around this via Popper. But I wonder if the assumption UN isn't going to be hiding somewhere. I like the notion that the mind is an expectation machine and that violations of expectation in particular come to our attention. We expect the future to resemble the past (in very complex and torturous and indirect ways as we tame the cruder forms of this expectation). I'd the prestige of science itself is founded on the tools it provides. We use technology. It gives us what we want. We value it because we expect this utility to endure. I don't see how we can deduce this "illogical" expectation without UN. I'm not saying we live by pure deduction, of course. I think we creatively posit necessity and then deduce. But any postulation is sustained first and foremost by a utility that we project from the past and present into the future...
I would say rather that we expect the past to be a constraint on future freedoms. The past can lock the free flow of events into restricted possibility.
Both Popper and Peirce took a propensity view of probability in this fashion. It has the advantage of recognising chance and spontaneity (or vagueness) as ontically real. And hence the determinism of existence is balanced by indertiminsm.
So far as logic goes, that makes induction more realistic and fundamental than deduction. Deduction depends on ontic determinism. But induction is happy to talk about the development of propensities which only constrain the space of the future possible and don't absolutely determine if t.
That's a good point. I haven't really addressed probability densities, etc. That was sort of under the hood in the "complex and indirect and torturous ways." Yes, a constraint on the future (or rather our image in the present thereof), not its strict determination. I completely agree. Even if we had a strictly deterministic model that earned our trust, we can only do finitely many calculations. Uncertainty will always be with us, I think, but so will the projection of constraints on our (genuine, living) expectations.
So, you have completely abandoned the idea of explanation. That's a shame.
UN is one of the fundamental misconceptions of inductivism. It is a principle in that no one has ever been able to properly formulate, beyond vague notions such as "the future will resemble the past" or "the seen resembles the unseen". Your suggestion that it might be formulated "the regularities of experience are universal regularities"?
Let's assume that such a principle exists - the PUN, to give it its full acronym, and let's try to use it to infer a scientific theory from some data. Would you like to pick a theory?
The thesis is that explanation of X is deduction of X from postulated necessity. Now this postulation is the creative act, the myth or element of rationalism. So it's not what I'd call "inductivism." I'm lazy, so here's Wiki:
[quote=W]
Popper coined the term "critical rationalism" to describe his philosophy. Concerning the method of science, the term indicates his rejection of classical empiricism, and the classical observationalist-inductivist account of science that had grown out of it. Popper argued strongly against the latter, holding that scientific theories are abstract in nature, and can be tested only indirectly, by reference to their implications. He also held that scientific theory, and human knowledge generally, is irreducibly conjectural or hypothetical, and is generated by the creative imagination to solve problems that have arisen in specific historico-cultural settings.
[/quote]
Theories (postulations of necessity that allow for the generations of implications that can be falsified) are seemingly going to be stronger and more falsifiable as they are projected across time and space.
[quote=W]
Popper and David Hume agreed that there is often a psychological belief that the sun will rise tomorrow, but both denied that there is logical justification for the supposition that it will, simply because it always has in the past. Popper writes, "I approached the problem of induction through Hume. Hume, I felt, was perfectly right in pointing out that induction cannot be logically justified." (Conjectures and Refutations, p. 55)
[/quote]
This is also my starting point.
[quote=W]
Nor is it rational according to Popper to make instead the more complex assumption that the sun will rise until a given day, but will stop doing so the day after, or similar statements with additional conditions.
Such a theory would be true with higher probability, because it cannot be attacked so easily: to falsify the first one, it is sufficient to find that the sun has stopped rising; to falsify the second one, one additionally needs the assumption that the given day has not yet been reached.
[/quote]
This "probability" seems to reduce to economy. Popper prefers more uniformity. Hence it is "irrational" to project "extra conditions." He tries to milk this from convenience of falsification (ease of attack.) But of course we also want a stronger theory for its greater utility (we want our technology to work everywhere and everywhen.) As far as the use of PUN, it looks to be at the heart of any theory worth suggesting. If we can't infer from the past and present to the future, we are lost. We trust theories because they have worked for us and because we assume that this utility will continue. Wh
I also get the feeling that you want to narrow what I mean by explanation to some ideal scientific explanation. But I'm interested in what folks are generally "really doing" when they explain.
Quoting Hoo
It is hard to know what you are driving at but science is comfortable with the cosmological principle for good reason.
That is utterly incompatible with the assumption of the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature, and what you were claiming about inducing THEORY from DATA, which is impossible.
I'm going to quibble about your thesis. A scientific theory *is* a conjectured explanation of some aspect of reality - the explicanda of the theory. The explanation takes the form of a statement of what exists in reality, how it behaves, and how it accounts for the explicanda. So yes, the eXplicanda can be deduced from the claim about what exists in reality, but what is this "postulated necessity"?
Quoting Hoo
I'm losing track of this, maybe it was another thread, but I have definitely mentioned the Quine-Duhem Thesis several times somewhere. There is no such thing as an experimental test that can logically falsify a theory, if that is what you mean.
Quoting Hoo
You can't use probability calculus with explanations.
This is particularly important, because so many arguments hinge on whether there is an explanation of something or not. If it's not clear just what would count as an explanation and why it would or should count as an explanation, then that seriously undermines arguments that hinge on explanation requirements.
I suspect that demarcation criteria for what counts as an explanation, criteria that are both (a) intuitively satisfactory to most people and (b) specific enough to be useful and exclude some things, yet general enough to cover most things that people intuitively count as explanations, are likely to be as problematic as demarcation criteria for cleaving science and non-science or pseudoscience.
And for example, a deduction combined with prediction requirement is probably both not specific enough to rule out explanation constructions that are essentially trivial, and too specific to be able to include phenomena that are unpredictable but nevertheless real.
I never mentioned induction. I'm basically saying that we postulate uniformity. Now the concepts are related. The caveman sees things go up and then come down, but that whatever goes up must come down adds an extra something. And the caveman projects this onto the past. Whatever went up must have come back down. So stories to the contrary are doubted. Similarly, the caveman makes plans for the future with this "must" in mind. Perhaps you are misunderstanding me, because what you claim is impossible is something that (by my meaning) we do all of the time. The keyword is expectation. We can probably reduce this necessity to strong expectation, but it is also projected backwards. Sort of like this:
[quote= Rescher]
I recall well how the key ideas of my idealistic theory of natural laws - of “lawfulness as imputation” - came to me in 1968 during work on this project while awaiting the delivery of Arabic manuscripts in the Oriental Reading Room of the British Museum. It struck me that what a law states is a mere generalization, but what marks this generalization as something special in our sight -- and renders it something we see as a genuine law of nature -- is the role that we assign to it in inference. Lawfulness is thus not a matter of what the law-statement says, but how it is used in the systematization of knowledge -- the sort of role we impute to it. These ideas provided an impetus to idealist lines of thought and marked the onset of my commitment to a philosophical idealism which teaches that the mind is itself involved in the conceptual constitution of the objects of our knowledge. (Instructive Journey: An Essay in Autobiography, pages 172-173)
[/quote]Quoting tom
The postulated necessity is there in the fixed nature of "what exists in reality and how it behaves." An electron is the sort of thing that "must" be repelled by another electron. We can allow for "motion" within the nature of an object, but the law of this notion is fixed to the degree that we have knowledge about it. Prediction implies expectation implies something like necessity. As I said, maybe we can boil it down to intensity of expectation.
Quoting tom
I just assumed you were into the falsifiability criterion, with your talk of Popper turning in his grave. I'd say that the epistmology we live by is "irrational" in the sense that it is shaped by pleasure and pain as as consequence of acting as if a given myth is true. Beliefs (postulated necessities, expectations) are "falsified" when they lead to pain and failure. There is also the pleasure of coherence and the pain of cognitive dissonance, so we can sit in an armchair and "improve" our belief system. Call it "radical instrumentalism." Systems of beliefs as a whole are tools in the "hands" of "irrational" feeling. From this perspective, philosophy of science is largely just a "false" foundation, since I think the prestige of science mostly rests on its technological "miracles." Similarly, real analysis can be described as tidying up the cognitive dissonance of a calculus that was already working to satisfy less abstract desires. Quoting tom
Perhaps according to your definition thereof. I think we can project constrains on the future, fit probability densities to data, etc.
I suppose I was aiming at the nature of non-trivial explanations. I can agree that many are satisfied by an explanation of X in terms of a familiar but ultimately unexplained Y. There's a very different path if we are looking into meaning-as-use, but I'd really like to look at the best conceptions of explanation.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Many are satisfied by a connection of the unfamiliar to the familiar. But I became interested in this issue as I contemplated theological issues and theories of everything in science. It seems to me that the "totality" must remain unexplained, at least if my concept of explanation is intended.
Some examples of successful scientific explanations:
In all these cases, the explanation not only was intellectually pleasing, but also had numerous practical consequences, and furthermore could be born out by any number of further observations, all based on principles.
But if you start to ask 'why those principles' or 'why do Newton's laws obtain and not some other laws', then I think you're going beyond the bounds of what might reasonably be explained.
Incidentally, a piece which McDoodle linked to some time back, might be of relevance here, No God, No Laws, Nancy Cartwright.
Quoting Wayfarer
You're preaching to the choir, brother. That's why I find this issue fascinating. I think Plank is on the right track. We try to contemplate the totality, but that is exactly like trying to see it from the outside. To explain it would be to put it in a relationship with some other object of thought. So we have a triangle. We have the totality, its proposed explanation, and then the "being" of both or our "consciousnes" or awareness of this relation. This is probably where we differ. Any reasonable/conceptual theology looks problematic for the same reason --and indeed, like a sort of science or an extension of nature as a system of necessary relationships between objects in the manifest image and unseen theoretical objects (like quarks).
I once had the idea 'you couldn't have a "theory of everything" because "the theory" would have to be included in the "everything" that is the subject of the explanation'. So there would always be a problem of recursiveness, that your explanation includes the explainer. And that seems very close to what Planck was driving at.
One of my axioms is the famous quote from the Upanishads: 'the eye can see another, but not itself; the hand can grasp another, but not itself' 1. This is one of the seminal texts of non-duality, in my opinion, and also an apodictic truth.
At issue is this: that naturalism must 'assume the subject'. In other words, naturalism assumes, or begins from, the fact of the intelligent subject in the domain of objects and forces.
But from the viewpoint of non-dualism (not that nondualism has or is 'a viewpoint'), this 'situatedness' can be further reduced. In other words, that sense of 'self-and-world' does not reside on the level of fundamental truth, for the simple (but extremely hard to grasp) reason that we're not actually separate from reality. But consideration of that kind of idea has already been ruled out by natural philosophy; it will only consider those factors which are available to it in the natural domain, and so it will inevitably reject such an approach as 'metaphysical'.
But that only succeeds in 'burying the metaphysics', so to speak - denying that there is any metaphysic, whilst actually being embedded in one (for which, see 'the spirituality of secularity', on pages 189-190 of this essay).
Which, I think, is the problem you're concerned with.
Let me put it this way, according to Popper there is no such thing as an experimental test that can logically falsify a theory.
He makes this point several times in his famous book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
That's all you've got? I welcome insight via Popper, but this thread is not the exegesis of scripture, is it? All the great dead philosophers are just meat for the grinder. The theme is an analysis of explanation, in the context of a thesis. Do we postulate necessities, formalize strong expectations? Does an innate trust that the future will resemble the past inform the use and postulation of such necessities-by-fiat?
Consider this:
[quote= Kojeve]
To be sure, in the end, “scientific knowledge” comes back toward itself and reveals itself to itself: its final goal is to describe itself in its nature, in its genesis, and in its development.
...
It is by following this “dialectical movement” of the Real that Knowledge is present at its own birth and contemplates its own evolution. And thus it finally attains its end, which is the adequate and complete understanding of itself — i.e., of the progressive revelation of the Real and of Being by Speech — of the Real and Being which engender, in and by their “dialectical movement,” the Speech that reveals them.
...
Taken separately, the Subject and the Object are abstractions that have neither “objective reality” (Wirklichkeit) nor “empirical existence” (Dasein). What exists in reality, as soon as there is a Reality of which one speaks — and since we in fact speak of reality, there can be for us only Reality of which one speaks what exists in reality, I say, is the Subject that knows the Object, or, what is the same thing, the Object known by the Subject.
...
The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought.
[/quote]Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah, anti-supernatural naturalism has to be embedded in a metaphysics that founds it. A generalized naturalism, for which the supernatural is not coherent, can be presented as a description of human thinking. If the supernatural is present in terms of empirical claims, objects as the cause of "natural" objects, then this looks like a revision and enlargement of nature (or the systematic conceptual image of nature.) Of course aiming at [s]Being[/s] or the eye that cannot see itself (the metaphysical subject in Wittgenstein) or in mystical passion is something else.
I browsed the essay. I find the god-shaped-hole quite manageable. I don't think we can condemn modernity but only the shallow understandings of the metaphysical/spiritual import of the scientific image. We don't have to worship this useful but necessarily reductive tool. I think one can learn to affirm one's mortality and groundlessness, but not without help from symbols that resonate "irrationally"/emotionally perhaps. "Pure" reason and objectivity-for-its-own are strange household gods.
I had the idea this is what the thread was about.
Yeah, Kojeve seems to have been quite the character, but he was one of my first paths into Hegel, nevertheless.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think we agree on our dismissal of scientism as an option, at least as a personal adjustment. I think we both have access to different non-scientific traditions that sustain us.
My position agrees fundamentally with Kojeve when he says: "Taken separately, the Subject and the Object are abstractions that have neither “objective reality” (Wirklichkeit) nor “empirical existence” (Dasein)."
But the difference is that I would say that the idea of the supernatural only arises within a naturalism lacking in sufficient generality. It is reductionist materialism - the claim that the real is just "observable matter" - which begets its equivalently strong "other" in the subjectivism and mentalism of the claim that there is then also the reality of the "immaterial observer".
So that was the point of Peircean pragmatism - to include observers in nature in a fully "material" fashion.
And now this new more fully generalised naturalism creates a foundational or ontological level distinction between matter and sign, or matter and symbol, instead of matter and mind.
It also fixes up a few basic problems in being at base an interactive perspective - a process philosophy - where matter and sign can be in causal interaction in unmysterious fashion. So you no longer have the dualism of matter and (epiphenomenal) mind, but an explicit way the two sides connect.
And even the "immaterial" aspect of sign is self-explained. The possibility of a symbol arises as material dimensionality gets maximally constrained. When the number of dimensions for action is shrunk towards the zero dimensions of a point, then a mark or sign is born - the mark or sign, the bare difference, that can now freely stand for anything. As a bit of information, it is no longer (or as little as possible) part of the material world, and so free to act as a part of a play of symbols.
So through semiosis - as a fully general naturalism - you lose "the mental" or "the observer" as a particular kind of realm standing in disjunction to "the material" or "the observables". And folk find it really hard to give up trying to explain the "other" to the material in terms of (equally substantial) notions of mentality, or experience, or dasein, or whatever.
But replacing mental substance/res cogitans/thinking and feeling stuff with a more abstract dualism - one of matter and sign - is what it would mean to actually start explaining the particularity of the observing human mind in cosmically generalised fashion.
So yes, there is still the third thing out of which either matter~mind, or matter~sign, must logically emerge - Hegel's geist or Peirce's firstness, maybe even Heidegger's dasein. But this primal ground can't be a form of pan-psychic proto-mind in standard idealist fashion. For matter and sign to be the sharp contrast that emerges, the primal ground has to be also talked about as itself a third kind of abstract.
In talking of geist, firstness, dasein, apeiron, vagueness, ungrund, ein soft, or whatever, we are trying to speak of the unspeakable - which is tricky, yet also do-able, in being now the "other" to the othered. The equally-abstractly described origin of the dialectic distinction.
Where in the world can that happen? What are instances of that?
I wrote that PF post about the nanoscale convergence zone where this has just been discovered to be the case for biology.
But take again another example I have mentioned to you many times. Speaking words is an action that lacks material constraints. It is physical action shrunk to have zero physical dimension because the same expelled breath could be used to mention "the universe" or "that cat".
Articulating a word has some cost of course. But hardly any cost for an able-bodied human. And importantly, what cost there is is always the same. So its physical dimensionality is zeroed. A word takes up space and energy in the world, yet the world is exerting no constraint on what just got said. And that is the new possibility - existence's hidden dimension - which is the source of "mindfulness" in the world. Now ideas and memories can form in another place, take shape in ways that then seek to regulate the world.
I agree. Our most general image of nature-life is not the scientific image. That's just a piece of it. All of our talk in the interior is part of our model, and the scientific image can only be constructed and fathomed in a larger context. At the same time, reducing the totality to relationships between measurements, for instance, is extremely useful. It's just bad when it plays as "truest" image.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes indeed. There is a Platonic-enough realm under a different law. We live in a "vortext" of signs and signs' other (feeling-sensation?---but this is already a trespass).
Quoting apokrisis
I personally can't see how we get out of the system of signs. We can use signs to create a generalized science of the relationships between signs, certainly. The non-sign matter threatens to be an empty negation like the thing-in-itself --though admittedly there's some common sense grounding it nevertheless.)
Quoting apokrisis
I agree. If we are pursuing the emergent distinction seriously, we can't favor either of the children. So maybe "matter" for you is just the signs we use in physical science? Or how is it approached?
I guess this is where semiosis becomes close to idealism in that the "material world" feels like that which we can know the least. We only have the play of our own signs, never direct access to the thing-in-itself.
And we see this in science. We only have our representations in terms of theories and measurements. The structure or form of things is there in our formal descriptions, but the materiality is imputed largely as an act of imagination. We talk about force and action because we can see a structure of change in our models. But then the one thing we don't actually see in any real sense is this force, this action. They are off-stage and their existence only appealed to on logical grounds.
There's a notion of the real as "that which resists." We can bump into things in the dark. Of course if we never interacted with a thing (it never opposed our will), it might as well not be real. There's something like primitive science that we learn as children. Push some things they will move. If somethings getting bigger and bigger and louder and louder, it's coming to get you, or you're coming to get it. We fear and desire these its only to the degree that they "exceed" the sign or are "actually there." We can contemplate things in their absence. Then imagine gluing this idea back on to the "resistance"-in-itself. It's hard to let go of tactile thinking. To pass through solid objects like the Kool-aid man. That would be "magic." That would excite an animal who loves straight lines to the goal.
Anyway, it seems that sophisticated science (science proper) depends on this bodily, sensual "child" or "animal" science. The sense of the self, the correspondence theory of truth, the LEM, the PSR. All of this is hard to shake, though the farther reaches of abstract thought temporarily escape them. Maybe, too, it was as simple as curve fitting. Screw intuition. Fit a curve and extrapolate. Perhaps these escapes are most effectively "captured" for general use exactly by sign systems that boldly leave intuition behind (SR, GR, QM), which then are used for the machines that convince us on the "child science" or ur-science level. We also have this sort of conversation which allows us to steer our thinking at the highest level, forge the criteria for our criteria.
That is certainly right. It is the way we sort out the self from the world in terms of the actions we can freely take vs the reality which is their constraint. And this is how the image of the real manifests - either for ordinary biological consciousness, or for our "scientific" image resulting from theory and measurement. The epistemic method is fundamentally the same, even though one is neurally encoded, the other linguistic and socially evolved.
Quoting Hoo
Yes. The biology has the same logic, the same method. So science just takes what already works and makes it explicit or self-conscious. We can know the method and appreciate why it works - and why it is also in the end "just an image that is manifested", not "the thing in itself".
Quoting Hoo
If we didn't exist biologically, there wouldn't be any science happening.
And yet there is also something about science/metaphysics/maths being able to leave the realm of concrete intuitions behind. If we stay anchored in the sensuous - believing things like colour is "real" - then that becomes a hindrance to real abstract thought. Part of becoming a theoretician of any kind is being able to let go of intuitions once some useful-feeling start has been made - the abductive leap - as from there we have to get into the formality of deducing consequences and inductively bolstering hypotheses. The models and the measurements must be allowed to take over.
Quoting Hoo
I agree. But with QM in particular, that now really challenges intuition.
Now of course we should still want to have an intuitive interpretation of QM, so as to make some further abductive leap towards an even greater level of generality in theory (and measurement). But also, QM works to so many decimal places that there is not a lot of use in querying it on some prior intuitive basis (like mechanical determinism and localism). If you start wasting people's time like that, they are in their right to tell you to shut up and calculate.
That's what's called 'empiricism'. A fundamental principle is that whatever is to be considered as a datum must be able to be observed by the senses (as distinct from inferred by intuition). That extends far beyond what is directly perceivable by the unaided senses, but always must reference some visible or other sensory data (i.e. tracks in the bubble chamber etc).
It does however rule out a great deal of what has been considered valid knowledge by pre-modern philosophy.
Of course, empiricism. We can obtain consensus about this manifest image or LCD of human experience. We can measure the application of knowledge claims at least and therefore measure knowledge claims indirectly. Religion doesn't have the cleanest hands and we've all seen wishful thinking. And yet the books in the Bible are treasure. So it's a question of positioning both the traditions of religion and science appropriately on a personal level.
Anyway, there's a good starter criterion for non-empirical knowledge. "Wisdom maketh a man's face to shine." It's hard to see the unhappy man as wise or knowing. Naturally we can only smash words together on an anonymous forum, so we can't apply that here. We really don't know the flesh-and-blood beings who manifest here as streams of text. But in life we judge personalities as a whole, not only the person by their words but their words by the person.
Scroll down to the heading 'Welcome to a fuller reality' in this review.
Very nice way to put it. Fichte comes to mind.
[quote=Wiki]
In Fichte's view consciousness of the self depends upon resistance or a check by something that is understood as not part of the self yet is not immediately ascribable to a particular sensory perception.
[/quote]
Also Nietzsche's will-to-power could be read as the desire to enlarge of sphere of freedom. Quoting apokrisis
I totally agree. We clearly don't want to be bound by 'ur-science.' But we can't even support our own heads on our baby necks at first. We learn to walk, learn the names of things, learn a deep belief in selves. Our sophisticated theories can indeed double back against their intuitive, ur-science foundations. To mix space with time is of course an immense violation. Wave/particle duality and raw chance are two more. But yes the models and measurements must take over. And counter-intuitive 'radical' imagination becomes valuable indeed. I'm hardly an expert, but I can see that much.
Quoting apokrisis
This makes sense to me, which is why I think metaphor/analogy is so important. I experience it everywhere in math. The sincere formalist would have a hard time finding a proof.