Is this Quentin Meillassoux's argument?
I read After Finitude but could not understand it fully.
This is what I gather his argument is.
Q:
How do we know absolute reality exists?
E.g How do we know tennis balls actually exists?
A:
a. It's wrong to ask whether stuff exist?
b. What is more paramount is that possibilities (Contingencies ?) exist.
c. It's possible that tennis balls can get destroyed by fire etc. i.e. possibility
d. Since possibilities exist for sure (how do we know this for sure?), the things that make up those possibilities (i.e tennis balls) have to exist.
e. So stuff (tennis balls) exist.
Is this his argument??
On face-value this looks circular reasoning because one cannot think of "possibilities" without thinking about the stuff that make up those possibilities. I.e You cannot think of tennis balls getting destroyed by fire without thinking about tennis balls. So it's circular reasoning which is wrong.
Is this what Quentin Meillassoux's argument or have I got it all wrong??
This is what I gather his argument is.
Q:
How do we know absolute reality exists?
E.g How do we know tennis balls actually exists?
A:
a. It's wrong to ask whether stuff exist?
b. What is more paramount is that possibilities (Contingencies ?) exist.
c. It's possible that tennis balls can get destroyed by fire etc. i.e. possibility
d. Since possibilities exist for sure (how do we know this for sure?), the things that make up those possibilities (i.e tennis balls) have to exist.
e. So stuff (tennis balls) exist.
Is this his argument??
On face-value this looks circular reasoning because one cannot think of "possibilities" without thinking about the stuff that make up those possibilities. I.e You cannot think of tennis balls getting destroyed by fire without thinking about tennis balls. So it's circular reasoning which is wrong.
Is this what Quentin Meillassoux's argument or have I got it all wrong??
Comments (12)
Thus evolution happened [Not Really].
The thing that makes it very convincing to me is "where" that "limit" is located; within a presupposition of the correlationist circle. I go into why I find it persuasive here.
I am reading the stuff you pointed out. Will get back when I understand it.
Thanks again..
Isn't solipsism saying something similar like "the world is generated by our mind and disappear when I die"???
I think the line is:
Solipsism says that worldly objects are existentially dependent upon the solipsist's mind. As in, if there wasn't that mind, there would be no objects.
Correlationisms says that worldly objects are not existentially dependent upon a correlationist's mind, but their forms of worldly manifestations are dependent in some sense upon the action of minds/subjects/humans in general.
They both share a certain "anthropocentrism" - putting the human at the centre of metaphysics -, which Meillassoux is also explicitly criticising in After Finitude.
Kant is the archetypal correlationist (of Meillassoux' weak form), you might find keeping his transcendental idealism + empirical realism in mind as the doctrine Meillassoux is reacting against.
But I am wondering this question. For the solipsist it's quite clear that when the mind does not exist objects don't exist.
But what about the correlationist??? What is his view on objects when no minds exist??? Do objects still exist but in a different form than what we measure them to be?? Or do they not exist? But then this is solipsism.
That place of ambiguity is where the arche-fossil argument works.
I believe they take basically an anti-realist stance regarding ontology. Yeah, the world exists without us, but no, we can't say anything about that world independent of how we're correlated with it. What I've been told in the past concerning dinosaurs and what not is that if you could time travel back then, you would see that the world was full of dinosaurs, because that's how it would looks to us. That still doesn't tell us what the world is like independent of human observers.
So they take science to be a correlational exercise based on the empirical world, which is the world as it appears to human beings. It's not a realist enterprise.
It also seems to me that most of the Witty fans also think something like the above. I agree with correlationism when it comes to everyday experience, but I do think science takes us beyond that. We can know something about the real world, it just takes a lot of work. Which does mean that not everything in experience is merely correlational. Like dinosaur bones.
However, at first we didn't know they were dinosaur bones from ancestors living millions of years ago before a massive extinction event. People thought those bones belonged to dragons.