John Jones wrote:
> On Oct 2, 4:41?pm, sands of the hourglass
>
communitymail.net> wrote:>> John Jones wrote:
>>>Ok. My views might be called Kantian, but I held
>>> them before I ever read Kant.
>>
>> Kantians and materialists are similar to the small extent that they
>> both believe in the meta-phenomenal (see Lenin's 1908 work
>> "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism"; it's online at a couple of
>> Marxist sites). Where the two differ is regarding whether or not
>> eventual knowledge of "reality-in-itself" is possible. The
>> materialists are usually dogmatic that they either already know what
>> the nature of the metaphysical realm is or will know as science
>> progresses. It's the followers of Ernst Mach (which Lenin trashed) and
>> the neo-Kantians (generally speaking) which are the oddballs in that
>> they dropped Kant's "things-in-themselves" and were resultingly left
>> with a radical empiricism that can resemble anything from a secular
>> version of Berkeley's idealism to Hume's Bundle Theory to solipsism.
>
> An eventuality that no doubt was driven by a misprespresentation of
> Kant's 'thing in itself', at least as far as the new Kantian
> interpretation would have it. If materialists like Strawson thought
> that Kant's thing in itself was an inconsistent addition to a sort of
> Berkeleian idealism then no wonder they felt they could drop it. But
> on the new epistemological reading of Kant, it was a mistake for these
> thinkers to interpret Kantian idealism as another transcendental
> realism.
>
>>>Strawson, I think, employs a methodological
>>> naturalism, and wants to keep certain minimal
>>> metaphysical requirements such as position, matter,
>>> spatio-temporality etc. in the service of an
>>> 'intelligible' science.
>>
>> The actual term was only coined in 1983, but the spirit of
>> "methodological naturalism" existed long before. Helmhotz's 19th
>> century quote[1] at the bottom of this post is one ancestor of today's
>> version, the latter of which Kelley L. Ross expounds upon
>> afterwards[2].
>>
>>>But the problem is where to stop this process. How
>>> can we remove all traces of metaphysics as it is
>>> used in common speech?
>>
>> Such total elimination of metaphysics was arguably the agenda (at
>> times) of the Machians and the logical positivists when they ruled
>> philosophy of science, but they lost their domination back in the late
>> 1950s or early sixties.
>
> It consistently surprises me that the formalists, positivists can look
> to logic to avoid metaphysics when, as I see it, logic is a statement
> of a particular class of object behaviours.
>
>> Karl Popper held that metaphysics was not always nonsense. Grover
>> Maxwell clarified this further by pointing out that even when
>> advocates of past microphysical doctrines graciously granted that
>> their entities were undetectable, they were actually engaging in
>> groundless speculation that this would forever be the case. Their
>> opponents were likewise hasty in basing their anti-realist judgements
>> on these "unobserveability" confessions of the microphysical or
>> microbiological realists. Thus, a statement like "We admit this
>> philosophical doctrine or proto-science will never develop into a
>> testable theory" can be
meaningless.http://www.drury.edu/ess/philsci/KBGMaxwell.html
>>
>>>Can we remove ideas such as matter, time, space,
>>> etc.? As Strawson says, won't we lose contact with
>>> the real world, the everyday world if we abandon
>>> these bedrock ideas?
>>
>> If that eliminative approach produced useful results in the area of
>> research, then it could methodologically proceed "as if it were true"
>> just as Helmholtz refers to the "material world" hypothesis below.
>> This really gets into the debate that has gone on between scientific
>> realists and anti-realists since the downfall of logical empiricism
>> (in philosophy of science). IOW, one side or the other would keep
>> science's methods in check, kept from undermining the naive realism of
>> the public.
>
> And yet Science cannot extricate itself from the 'naive' ideas of the
> public. There are no methodologies employed by even the most formal of
> sciences and logics whose metaphysics are not taken from a common
> view.
>
Also the futuristic hope that Ernst Mach had, that he could unite the
sciences via phenomenalism. Eliminate "things-in-themselves" and keep
appearances as the "ground-base" of science, preventing the
mechanistic microphysics of his day from being the inferred "actual-
world" that everything else reduced to. Here's an excerpt from his
"The Analysis of Sensations" where describes his transition from
Kantianism to generic Neo-Kantianism:
I have always felt it as a stroke of special good fortune, that early
in life, at about the age of fifteen, I lighted, in the library of my
father, on a copy of Kant's "Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics".
The book made at the time a powerful and ineffaceable impression upon
me, the like of which I never afterwards experienced in any of my
philosophical reading.
Some two or three years later the superfluity of the role played by
"the thing in itself" abruptly dawned upon me. On a bright summer day
in the open air, the world with my ego suddenly appeared to me as one
coherent mass of sensations, only more strongly coherent in the ego.
Although the actual working out of this thought did not occur until a
later period, yet this moment was decisive for my whole view. . . .
With the valuable parts of physical theories we necessarily absorb a
good dose of false metaphysics, which it is very difficult to sift out
from what deserves to be preserved, especially when those theories
have become very familiar to us.....
I make no pretensions to the title of philosopher. I only seek to
adopt in physics a point of view that need not be changed the moment
our glance is carried over into the domain of another science; for,
ultimately, all must form one whole. The molecular physics of today
certainly does not meet this requirement. What I say I have probably
not been the first to say. I also do not wish to offer this exposition
of mine as a special achievement. It is rather my belief that every
one will be led to a similar view, who makes a careful survey of any
extensive body of knowledge.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/mach.htm
>
>>>Some quantum physicists of course will claim that we
>>> can abandon all everyday ideas, and that
>>> mathematics or some other formal mode is the route
>>> to understanding the inner workings of the world.
>>> There are three problems with this idea. The first
>>> is that mathematics itself is riddled through with
>>> metaphysics of the most common sort. Second, even
>>> if mathematics could rid itself of its metaphysics,
>>> it could be argued that it would then serve no
>>> greater purpose then experimental prediction. This
>>> would not count as explanation of the world any
>>> more than a precise description of how to bang the
>>> tele to make it work would give insight into its
>>> inner workings, even less so as to its 'nature'.
>>> Third, mathematics cannot, of its own efforts,
>>> create or destroy the metaphysics that historically
>>> it has been credited with.
>>
>> Particle physicists are confronted with the trend toward emergentism
>> and non-reductive materialism. That is, the old idea of uniting the
>> science disciplines by reducing them all to physics has fallen to
>> wayside, so that the measurements and abstractions of physics are just
>> one of the multiple ways of usefully describing the world rather than
>> the ultimate one (or, that's how other science disciplines that feel
>> slighted by the past "egotism" of particle physics desire to see it,
>> anyway).
>
>
> Yes, 'usefully describing the world' seems to change the way in which
> a metaphysical term is employed. Rather than being associated with a
> common view of the world, in this new austere view it is merely a
> semantically empty sign that is employed in the promotion of a
> particular set of exploratory directives.
>
>> [1] Hermann Helmholtz: Even if we take the idealistic position, we can
>> hardly talk about the lawful regularity of our sensations other than
>> by saying: "Perceptions occur as if the things of the material world
>> referred to in the realistic hypothesis actually did exist." We cannot
>> eliminate the "as if" construction completely, however, for we cannot
>> consider the realistic interpretation to be more than an exceedingly
>> useful and practical hypothesis. We cannot assert that it is
>> necessarily true, for opposed to it there is always the possibility of
>> other irrefutable idealistic hypotheses. It is always well to keep
>> this in mind in order not to infer from the facts more than can
>> rightly be inferred from them. The various idealistic and realistic
>> interpretations are metaphysical hypotheses which, as long as they are
>> recognised as such, are scientifically completely justified. They may
>> become dangerous, however, if they are presented as dogmas or as
>> alleged necessities of thought. Science must consider thoroughly all
>> admissible hypotheses in order to obtain a complete picture of all
>> possible modes of explanation. Furthermore, hypotheses are necessary
>> to someone doing research, for one cannot always wait until a reliable
>> scientific conclusion has been reached; one must sometimes make
>> judgments according to either probability or aesthetic or moral
>> feelings. Metaphysical hypotheses are not to be objected to here
>> either. A thinker is unworthy of science, however, if he forgets the
>> hypothetical origin of his assertions. The arrogance and vehemence
>> with which such hidden hypotheses are sometimes defended are usually
>> the result of a lack of confidence which their advocates feel in the
>> hidden depths of their minds about the qualifications of their claims.
>> What we unquestionably can find as a fact, without any hypothetical
>> element whatsoever, is the lawful regularity of phenomena. (from a
>> lecture back in the later 1800s)
>>
>>
>>
>> [2] Kelley L. Ross: It must then be asked, "Is science
>> 'materialistic'?" The answer to that is "no," because, although many
>> scientists may in fact be materialists, materialism is a metaphysical
>> doctrine and is both inessential to science and independent of its
>> method. We then must ask, "Is science 'naturalistic'?" The answer to
>> that is "yes," because naturalism, properly understood, is a method,
>> an empirical method, which is the very essence of modern science ever
>> since Galileo. .... The naturalistic method of science involves one
>> fundamental procedure, the use of observation and experiment to
>> confirm or falsify hypotheses. This is "naturalistic" for two reasons:
>> ?(1) the observations and experiments are done in nature, i.e. on
>> empirical and phenomenal objects; and (2) the hypotheses are about the
>> laws of nature. Thus, phenomena are observed, a theory is proposed to
>> explain the phenomena, and the theory is tested by predictions that
>> can be proven by observation or experiment. ("Scientific Naturalism &
>> Intelligent Design")- Hide quoted text -
>>
