Neil Rickert was at it again attempting to ‘explain consciousness’ over at PS at the imperative-phrased invitation of Joshua Swamidass to: “Tell me how you think consciousness evolved.” https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/rickerts-ideas-on-consciousness/3684/
Neil had written this: “What it really boils down to, is that there is no such thing as metaphysical truth. There is only conventional truth. And different social groups will disagree over their social conventions.”
TSZ poster BruceS answered Neil’s challenge and addressed part of its background assumptions: “Another fan of Rorty-style pragmatism… Seems to be a cult among TSZ moderators.” So perhaps this is worth discussing here as well (though obviously the lone religious theist moderator at TSZ Mung was forgotten in BruceS’s comment).
I too reject the notion that “there is only conventional truth,” a view, however, that this site’s founder Elizabeth Liddle also seemed to hold. In the fields I have studied, this is a view held largely by social constructivists, which is often turned into a kind of ‘sociologism’ – the ideology that holds all things can be explained by appeal to societies or groups alone. This view, however, unfortunately comes at the cost of other ‘truths’.
Thus, I respectfully disagree with Neil and believe that the claim “there is no such thing as metaphysical truth” is just his own convenient fiction. It would seem that he has taken a massive detour away from ‘metaphysical truth’ and is now trying to ‘explain’ something that cannot actually be explained. Additionally, it appears that this detour has had to do largely with an attempt to create a ‘religion substitute,’ along the lines of Daniel Dennett’s evolutionistic-atheist worldview.
Rickert tells: “I was a deeply committed Christian for part of my life. But I came to doubt that, long before I started to study human cognition.” https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/rickerts-ideas-on-consciousness/3684/4 It thus seems that it was instead a reaction against YECism that had an important role in Neil leaving whatever Christian community he had been ‘deeply committed’ to, prior to taking up a pastime study of human cognition. If not for YECists, he might still believe in metaphysical truth & a Creator who loves us – all people – even Neil.
Rickert writes about his, “study of consciousness, where I have to look at how people make conscious assessments of what is true.” He admits that he holds “a view which many people – perhaps most people – will see as wrong. That’s why it is difficult to explain consciousness.” Yet, this makes the mistake of suggesting that it is merely other peoples’ fault why he can’t ‘explain consciousness,’ rather than taking responsibility for his inability or lack of success to convince others about how ‘consciousness evolved’ (implied: naturalistically, without need, use or role for a supernatural Creator) on himself. Maybe ‘consciousness’ simply can’t be ‘explained’ and hence there is little value in trying to do so (unless or even if one is trained as a PhD in the field and has made it their life’s passion). Otherwise, I don’t understand the ‘that’s why’ implied in Neil’s assessment of the professed difficulty of ‘explaining consciousness.’
I find the rejection of YECism dilemma fascinating and surely relevant for the TSZ community, most of whom reject YECism. It is not one commonly faced where I grew up, so please excuse if my questions come across as ignorant or insensitive. However, I did personally face and had to grapple with the ideology of YECism as told to me by a person who I highly respect still to this day and who has become a very successful practitioner in his chosen field of study & expertise (non-academic), which has nothing to do with the age of the earth. I even thought YECism had some glimpse of merit for a time, before realising that what had to be ignored and discounted in order to remain a YECist displayed errors too voluminous to seriously entertain.
Does rejection of YECism lead some people into a crisis of faith? How do we face or encounter YECists as still respectable and worthy human beings even though we wholeheartedly disagree with the ideology that they have embraced (as part of their consciousness)? I believe Neil is right to wonder about these things. And I believe it would be wrong to act unjustly towards or to treat people in an inhumane way simply because they hold an ideology that is damaging usually to no one other than themselves and their local religious community, as if I held any power as ultimate judge over the care for their souls by demanding that they turn away from ideological YECism.
“We can, of course, sit back smugly knowing that we are right and that the YECs are wrong. But, at the same time, the YECs can sit back smugly knowing that they are right and that we are wrong.” … “People do not like explanations of what they already take for granted. They don’t believe that an explanation is needed, since they already take it for granted. And, if pointing out that what they take for granted depends, in part, on social conventions, then they are likely to see that as questioning what they take for granted. / This is why it is hard to explain consciousness.” – Neil Rickert https://nwrickert.wordpress.com/2019/02/21/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness/
My concern with the social constructivist and ‘social convention’ approach to ‘truth’ is that it places the utmost difficulty on the doorsteps of other people, rather than accepting responsibility on one’s own doorstep by insisting that one *can* ‘explain consciousness.’ It is surely unfortunate, however, because Neil may not have had to face this dilemma in a different Christian community, given that YECists constitute a rather large minority view among Christians worldwide (despite what R. Byers says). Indeed, most Christians don’t get upset with each other about ‘evolution’ or ‘consciousness’ as they go about their regular lives of prayer and worship and aren’t upset by it in their beliefs or relationships with others at their local churches.
Another option, one that Rickert might like to consider, is that consciousness is something that can’t actually be explained, certainly not ‘scientifically’. It may even be a God-given reflection of human beings as ‘ensouled’ creatures. Consciousness may thus simply be always something greater than what can be grasped by highly limited, finite human minds, rather than a temptation toward trying to become god-like in our self-understanding; a topic not meant for full comprehension. At some point, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Bahai’s and others must simply admit we don’t have all of the answers and consciousness, as well as some ‘metaphysical truths,’ are surely strong candidates for such an admission.
Leaving the Church because one can’t understand/explain why YECists couldn’t change their minds when faced with a huge amount of ‘strictly scientific’ evidence for an ‘old earth’ may indeed be felt by some as a very difficult but necessary situation to face. It is not one that perplexes me and I have never faced any pressure from a religious person inside a ‘house of worship’ to adopt their hypothesis about the age of the Earth. I have been calmly told about their views, but never with insistence. There is help, however, for those who have experienced pressure or insistence. Indeed, this is precisely what the BioLogos Foundation was built to encounter, as it is made up largely of former YECists who didn’t turn away from religious faith but found a way to embrace theology without accepting YECism, i.e. while rejecting YECist ideology.
Please consider this as an attempt at understanding and simply offering an answer to Rickert’s dilemma, rather than at dictating any particular solution to the problem. As it involves his own personal history that he has volunteered on the internet on this extremely sensitive topic, I certainly do not wish to put any words in Neil’s mouth or to misrepresent him or his view. I do not wish to ‘out’ his thoughts or character about anything he wishes to keep private. Please do forgive my inability to ‘explain’ these things more clearly, as I’m just trying to understand what if any link there might be between rejecting ‘metaphysical truth,’ trying to ‘explain consciousness’ and leaving a church due to what might appear as YECist fanaticism and refusal to accept scientific knowledge about the Earth, creatures and people on it.
C. I. Lewis’s pragmatic a priori claims aren’t analytic, in his sense of analyticity (“true by meaning alone”). I don’t know about Stump, or Neil. I suspect that Neil is taking the constitutive a priori rules that form the framework of scientific theories as analytic.
I guess my thinking here is too deeply Sellarsian to be helpful, but I think of the analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions to be orthogonal. The first is semantic and the second is epistemic. In the a/s distinction we’re talking about conceptual content, and in the second we’re talking about justification.
Kant was right about that much, even if he was wrong about much else!
walto:
keiths:
walto:
Heh.
Well, if the paper were on moral values, I’m sure I’d find plenty to disagree with, given our past conversations on the topic. I’m not as clear on your views regarding prudential values, though, so maybe we’ll find more to agree on in that area.
Anyway, I look forward to reading and discussing it.
Thanks for that long response.
I understand your view of oginary language as saying we each have our private conceptual structures and meanings, but because we are social creatures, we adjust them so that they are close enough so that we can communicate well enough to successfully cooperate.
If so, that’s the linguistic view started by Chomsky; he ended up mainly studying syntax but Jackendoff and others have continued to apply that approach to meaning and language.
I agree with that linguistic approach. The externalism distinction is philosophical. The people who study linguistics don’t think philosophy should matter until the linguistics is settled. So externalism involves not following the linguists on that view but instead taking the philosophical arguments for externalism seriously, ie those from Kripke, Putnam, and Burge. As I’ve said upthread, I’ve no more to say on those arguments for externalism
What I would add to what you have said is that we have an evolutionary heritage which constrains our internal conceptual schemes, making it possible for us to learn our first language from very limited input, what Chomsky called a “poverty of stimulus”. We need much less info to learn languages than Deep Learning algorithms do. Furthermore, we do not learn our first languages language by being taught social conventions. We learn by participating in language use, by correction from parents, and so building our conceptual schemes subconsciously.
Those two facts — poverty of stimulus, subconscious learning — imply there are some assumptions built into our language learning mechanisms. For example, it is likely there is some kind of “whole object” presupposition mechanism built in, which is one reason that people understand the whole rabbit is being pointed at, not some part of it. There is also likely a presupposition from evolution of rationality/consistency of language use (which is Davidson’s idea).
I think that discovery of those types of structural constraints on our conceptual schemes will be the solution to your individualized brain theory issue.
I agree with that; I think is is standard usage (and one can add necessary/contingent as being ontological).
But, roughly here is what I take the pragmatic a priori (and Neil’s) position to be.
We start by taking a some key concepts (and terms for those concepts) as core to current scientific research. Then under that approach, statements using those terms are both analytic and also a priori.
For an example, for Newton, “simultaneity is absolute, regardless of reference frame” would be an example but after Einstein that would change to “simultaneity is relative to reference frame”.
(ETA: this is a rough, English translation of demanding Lorentz invariance in theories of physics).
There is no aversion. Instead, I am trying to understand which statements in science are analytic for you
.
Arbitrary, public convention is not enough for science as I understand it. Some of that convention has to be linked to reality: we have to be able to perform experiments and there has to be fallibilism based on the results of those experiments. To me that implies that there also have to be synthetic statements and that our knowledge claims about such statements has to be a posteriori. Science cannot consist solely of analytic statements; some meanings have to be synthetic.
I am not saying that all statements have to be synthetic. See above reply to KN for what I mean. ETA: And even within that approach of taking certain key statements as analytic, there are further research issues where statements are synthetic and knowledge is a posteriori.
I do not understand if you are making that separation, and if so how you do so. I have expressed an opinion that you are only taking some statements as analytic (and a priori) but that once that is done, you take others as synthetic and also a posteriori. But I am not sure about that understanding.
Yes, that’s a fair summary.
That was Chomsky’s mistake (in my opinion). A natural language is not a syntactic structure; it is a semantic structure. The syntax is peripheral. You can get by with badly mangled syntax, but you cannot get by with mangled semantics.
I see this as a serious flaw in philosophy. It is too much tied to language. And that distorts everything.
I agree with the first part, but not the second.
I don’t see myself as a social constructivist, though I am often accused of being one. But social constructivism is all about how social biases affect how we see the world. However, as you suggest, it is biological biases from our evolutionary heritage that are most important here. I don’t doubt that there is some social construction, but it is minor compared to what could perhaps be called biological construction (based on biases that derive from our biology).
But I disagree with Chomsky on “poverty of stimulus”. There is far more input available for language acquisition than Chomsky admits. That’s because Chomsky is only looking at syntax, and he misses all of the semantic clues.
Yes, I agree. “Gavagai” means rabbit, not undetached rabbit parts, because of biases from our biology. An Uber self-driving car struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, because the AI system it use does not have the biases that are needed to avoid that accident.
However, if we are trying to understand human cognition and consciousness, it is important to recognize that those biases exist and that they affect our conscious experience.
I think that’s right, and it’s definitely my view as well. The only question I struggle with — and it’s really a quibble more than anything else — is whether there’s a single, stable use of the word ‘concept’ such that we can definitely say that concepts belong with cognitive representations implemented on neurophysiological processes (which is Neil’s view) or if concepts belong with socio-linguistic practices that facilitate cooperation (which is my more Brandomian view).
I suppose my considered view these days is that there’s no obviously clear, stable, shared meaning of “concept” that would allow us to resolve this question. We might as well just stipulate a distinction between non-linguistic concepts and linguistic concepts.
I think the contrast between Newton and Einstein on simultaneity is a nice way of clarifying the constitutive or pragmatic a priori. However, I don’t think that this is analytic, if we’re going to go with a “narrow” sense of analyticity according to which analytic propositions are those that are expressed in formal logic. We could go with a “broad” sense of analyticity according to which sentences are analytic if they are “true by meaning alone” or “true by definition”. But since we need something that retains a close connection between analyticity and logic, I’d rather use analytic in the narrow sense.
By the way, Friedman writes about this in the course of talking about Poincare, Carnap, and Reichenbach; Stump draws on Poincare, C. I. Lewis, and Arthur Pap. I’d have to look closely at Stump’s work to see where he disagrees with Friedman.
Most of the core scientific laws are analytic, as I see it.
Oh, absolutely. But that’s where I see philosophy of science going wrong.
Philosophers of science tend to see laws of physics as linguistic statements connecting concepts that already exist. But that’s surely a mistake. Those laws are often the very definition of the concepts. The laws themselves, at least as understood by the scientists, define the connection to reality.
The measurements made, under a theory, are synthetic statements.
As for knowledge claims — that’s where I disagree with epistemology and it’s “knowledge is justified true belief.” The knowledge is in the concepts, not in the linguistic statements. Newton’s laws should not be seen as beliefs, because they are trivially obvious once you understand the concepts.
Belief is the opposite of knowledge. If you depend on belief for Newton’s laws, then you really have not fully grasped the concepts. And your belief is a cheap substitute for the real knowledge involved. (I mention Newton rather than Einstein, because Newton’s laws are more widely known).
Relativity required serious conceptual change. It was not simply a change of belief. It was a change of concepts. And that’s why there was initial resistance. It is harder to change concepts than to modify belief.
Locke’s version of empiricism made more sense, because he seemed to tie it to concepts rather than to beliefs. But Hume presented empiricism in terms of belief, and I see that as a mistake.
You connect “analytic” to “meanings” there. And I’m not sure what that is saying.
As for statements: Boyle’s law is my go-to example. I see Boyle’s law as a true analytic statement about ideal gases. But it false, known to be false, and synthetic about actual real gases. And that’s because it is a law about already existing concepts. Boyle’s law does not create any new concepts (apart from the concept of an ideal gas). It is a statement about already defined concepts, and that’s why it is synthetic.
As another example, laws about relative humidity are synthetic, and they are often described by scientists as “empirical laws” rather than “analytical laws”.
In so far as you don’t say it is, we agree that it’s not. Could it be? Not under a godless naturalistic worldview. That’s the rather significant point.
As I said, I don’t see why it would be significant even if it were true that Neil’s theory is “uninspiring.”
As for my own take, I’m pretty easily inspired, so maybe it shouldn’t count for much.
For whatever it may be worth, this epistemological dabbler has no idea what you’re saying here.
I think Neil is saying that you cannot learn about external reality other than by exploring it. If your beliefs don’t coincide with reality, you must reject them.
Let’s see if I’m at all accurate.
With a different way to saying it: I see knowledge as part of what Searle describes as “the background”. I do not see knowledge as beliefs. Knowledge is what connects our beliefs to reality.
OK, that’s helpful. I take it, on your view, the “knowledge” is what others call the “conceptual scheme” one is operating under? And I infer that the idea behind this (what is surely something of a) redefinition is that the individual pieces of “knowledge” (on traditional views) are not the sort of things that on your view can actually be true, because they’re basically stipulative definitions?
Yes, close enough.
Something like that, but perhaps not as formalized. I see it more as causal connections with reality, which is roughly how I see Searle’s background.
Yes, pretty much.
If what Alan said is close, then I’m back to not understanding. I don’t see any connection between those two statements at all–other than maybe you agreeing with both of them.
walto,
Exploring reality is how we build the needed causal connections (or Searle’s background). The “belief” part of Alan’s post is not the way I would talk about it.
What does “coincide” mean? Perhaps” correspond”?
I don’t think anyone would argue that scientific beliefs have to be subject to correction from reality as part of the process of scientific inquiry. The devil (of philosophy) is in the details of the nature of that process and its outcomes. Etc.
Neil Rickert,
Neil: Thanks again for this long reply.
In general, am trying to understand your views in the context of the standard philosophical arguments. If I can situate them there, then I can see the various positions philosophers have taken on the arguments you raise have taken and their pros and cons.
Most of the time I do find that your views have been engaged with by philosophy.
For example, I have skimmed the Stump book linked above and he does consider many of the issues you have raised throughout the thread:
– a priori principles which are constitutive (ie necessary presuppositions) for scientific reseach programs
– the form of those principles (eg theories or language)
– how to deal with Quine’s rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction and also with his global holism
– Poincare’s conventionalism
– whether Newton’s laws should be considered a priori (for his work) or empirical; FWIW, in both cases Stump in both cases he argues they are constitutive
– the various positions on the pragmatic a priori over the last century of philosophy
More on the details of your post later today.
As a (non-microtonal) musician friend of mine once said when accused of plagiarism: “There are only 12 frigging notes.”
I just took that to mean “fit well enough to be useful, pragmatically speaking.”
However, as I indicated in an earlier reply to walto, I’m not a “belief” kind of person. The “belief” stories don’t work.
Given 12 notes and seven durations, there are 84 one note melodies. Raised to the power of the number of notes in a theme (say eight, for a pop melody). Then there’s rhythm. I believe some techie tried to copyright all possible melodies.
Yes, agreed. Typically, they have been rejected by philosophy.
That’s about how CI Lewis describes them. And it is better than what I see in a lot of philosophy. But, of course, it is completely wrong. It is the behavior of the scientists (their interactions with reality and with each other) that are constitutive of the research program. The so-called a priori principles merely describe the behavior.
The problem with philosophy, is that it is excessively intellectualist. It comes too close to being a solipsist’s account of reality. An extreme example of this is Alex Rosenberg. He says that he is a materialist philosopher. But what does that even mean? Rosenberg’s philosophy mostly deals with immaterial things (abstract propositions). They are materialist only in the sense that they purport to be about material things. But Rosenberg advocates for elimativism. He argues against intentionality. He argues that propositions are not about anything. So in what sense can he say that he is a materialist?
I think Carnap might have seen laws as linguistic and perhaps other positivists of the 40s and 50s as well. But is is not the common view today — see SEP on scientific theories. I like the pragmatic approach discussed there; it looks to scientific practice to provide the many different ways theories can be expressed.
Further, I think many, likely most of, contemporary philosophers agree with you that the terms/concepts in theories are defined by their roles in the theories and that these definitions do not precede the theories themselves.
How do the laws definite that connections? Is it just through the observation predictions they generate? If the view is that theories do not themselves connect to reality except by the predictions, then that view is instrumentalism.
For you, do theories connect to the world in any way other than through the observations they predict? In particular, do theoretical terms or concepts refer to the world? If I say “there are electrons” does that refer to the world in the same way as “there are cows” refers?
Like you, Quine dismissed philosophical epistemology entirely (he says psychology suffices). But the even the basic JTB view has been challenged by philosophers in various ways for some time. Gettier cases challenge the nature of justification. A significant number of philosophers think knowledge is more basic than belief.
However, I believe all philosophers think truth is required for knowledge.
I see Walt is also interrogating your view of knowledge as well, so I will leave further discussion for you and Walt.
I’m using analytic and synthetic according to standard philosophical definitions. The standard definition: Analytic truths are true by definition. Their truth is guaranteed by the meanings of the words used to state them.
What does ‘analytic’ mean for you?
Similarly, synthetic means that it is not enough to know only the meaning of the words in a statement to assess the truth of a statement; instead, you must inquire into the world. What does the word mean for you?
Under the standard meanings, you can argue that a statement is analytic if and only if the corresponding knowledge assertion is a priori (ie, known regardless of the world). For if it is analytic, we know it without inquiring into the world. And conversely, how can we know something without inquiring into the world unless the statement is analytically true? (That argument assumes Kant was wrong about the existence of the synthetic a priori.)
So that is how I got from my understanding of your claims about the analyticity of scientific statements to the examination of the a priori in Stump. But since you seem to not be using standard philosophical definitions for analytic or knowledge, I was wrong to link that argument to your views. So I won’t pursue it.
There have been almost 100 years since CI Lewis in which have considered and refined his views, including Stump.
‘Constitutive” is used in this work as a term of art to mean “necessary presupposition” for carrying out a scientific research program. So for example Kuhn’s paradigms are considered in the Stump book.
I take you as saying that science is just what scientists do, and that is why their practices are constitutive of science, where you using the word in a different sense. Many would agree with you under that meaning.
I don’t agree with that. It make science too abstract.
In mathematics, the mathematical terms are defined by their roles in the theories. But when we get to science, the terms are defined by their roles in the practices of the scientists. The theories are just descriptive of those practices.
In many cases, the laws describe the measuring procedures. Newton’s
defines how to measure force. Ampere’s law defines how to measure electrical current. Ohm’s law defines how to measure electrical resistance.
Yes.
That works for me.
Again, that works for me.
That has always seemed wrong to me. But I go with it, since that’s how philosophers talk.
For me, knowledge is really knowledge of concepts. And we develop those concepts based on our experience interacting with the world. So it doesn’t seem right to me, to say that they are a priori. Personally, I would have been inclined to say that
is a posteriori analytic. We came by that as a result of a lot of experience with the best way of accounting for motion. But it is still our way of defining force, so it is analytic.
But philosophers don’t talk that way, so I go along with calling it a priori, even though I disagree. And, as a side note, if I were on Twin Earth, I would go along with using “water” for XYZ, even though I disagreed.
Yes, that’s about right.
Talk of “necessary presuppositions” seems to disconnect the scientific research program from reality, and instead place it in a world of abstractions.
Hasok Change has a nice paper where he draws on C. I. Lewis and Michael Friedman to argue that constitutive a priori principles are just ways of describing what scientists do when they engage in the behaviors of scientific practices.
One could put this in a Brandomian way: the principles are a semantic metalanguage in which one says what one must do in order to count as conforming the norms of that practice.
Notice, then, that framework-constitutive a priori principles are not prior to the practice and do not explain or justify it: they merely explicate in language what is already implicit and immanent to the practice.
I disagree. Theories are not descriptions of practices.
Scientific practices align with norms (as KN points out), not theories. Kuhn characterized those norms as paradigms. The acceptance of a theory by the scientific community is also based on those norms. Paradigm changes reflect changes in those norms, among other things due to adoption of new theory and its associated conceptual scheme. That then leads to new norms for practices, which Kuhn characterized as doing “problem solving” science under the accepted set of norms (which align to presupposed theories, among other things).
Theories have more and different content from practices and observations from experimental practices.:
– Einstein’s derivation of GR was not based on existing scientific practices
– Theories are richer than a list of observations that scientists routinely make in their practices: for example, theories predict novel, unexpected situations and they cover counterfactuals
– Practices of measurement are not obvious from theories. It takes work in scientific phenomenology to translate theories into practices of measurement and experimentation
– There are theories that predict things we do not know how to measure, eg Einstein predicted gravitational waves but thought they would always be unmeasurable
My different understanding of the nature of theories, norms, and practices lies at the heart of my disagreement with your views. I suspect we’ve reached an impasse in the discussion because of that.
You seem to have a bias against abstractions, which is especially strange when coming from a mathematician!
For me, studying phenomena and then abstracting from them to form generalizations is the whole point of science. If it were not, then science would really just be “stamp-collecting”, that is nothign more listing observations and the methods used to obtain them. But science is much more than that.
Philosophy (and sociology and history) of science do the same as science itself; reason: that is, they try to understand a phenomenon, namely scientific practice and its outcomes, by abstracting from observations of that process and its outcomes.
You complained about Rosenberg working with abstractions and seem to imply there was a contradiction there with his materialism. I do see a need to understand abstractions naturally. I do not see a need to avoid them.
“There are around 82,500,000,000,000,000,000 melodies that are 10 notes long.”
https://plus.maths.org/content/how-many-melodies-are-there
That’s just a random Google search — I have hazy memories of coming across even more detailed analyses of the number of possible melodies.
But I don’t know how your comment was related to my post on the Stump book. Nor do I understand some of the music you have said you enjoyed. Perhaps the two are related?
The Stump book I linked does describe that disagreement in detail. A lot of the book consists of Stump summarizing other views in order to contrast them with his own.
I do not understand why you think the connection with logic is more important.
I was working with the broad definition of analyticity, and then taking scientific practice relative to the presuppositions being fixed. That’s more like Carnap then Quine, very roughly speaking.
I understand that using the true-by-meaning-alone approach to analytic is best suited to natural language and it takes work to relate that approach to logic and even more work to align it with math. Most importantly, it’s not clear how to align that approach to analytic with scientific theories when I also say theories can be expressed in many ways (not just using math or logic). I did ignore all of that in order to argue with Neil!
I think all agree that language allow humans to form qualitatively different forms of concepts than were available from a shared evolutionary history with other animals. I’m not sure whether that is enough to cover what you want to stipulate.
As I have already pontificated about, I think that linguistics is a better way to link that difference to neuroscience than is a philosophy of language which studies language independently of the nature of the humans who use it.
That and the rest of your post are very helpful. As I said in my post to Neil, I see that kind of description as not just listing the practices, but rather studying them to build abstractions which capture the “norms” underlying the practices.
But those norms are implicitly part of the theories. Without that, the theories don’t make sense.
Einstein’s GR was proposing new practices.
But perhaps I was not clear enough. I mentioned “practices of the scientists”. I should have been clearer that I was referring to the scientists who proposed the theory. The introduction of a new theory is an attempt to change practices. And the theory itself is, to some extent, a marketing tool for the new practices. But those proposing the theory have already been working and pragmatically testing the new practices.
Well, of course. The theory is defining how observations should be made. So it has to cover observations that have not yet been made and potential observations that may never be made.
And, again, of course. Actual measurement is a technology that can be improved with experience and with new instrumentation. The theory covers the principles, but those can often be unwieldy if applied directly.
No, not at all. But I try to be observant about how abstraction is used. I am not a fan of abstraction for the sake of abstraction.
You are expressing a deeply entrenched view of science. But it is a view of science that I see as mistaken. It amounts to a theistic view, in that it sees science as discovering the intentions (or design plans) of God. But makes science seem magical, and it leads to the kind of science that is being criticized by people like Peter Woit and Sabine Hossenfelder.
Yes, science depends on generalization. But generalization in science is not induction. It is more like generalization in mathematics, which is also not induction. Generalization in mathematics is very creative. And science is similarly creative (or inventive). And that inventiveness is why science is not at all like stamp collecting.
No, they don’t do the same as science itself. They follow roughly what you describe as how science works, but what I see as a mistaken account of science. And that’s why philosophy is failing.
BruceS,
Haha. I just meant that the same issues and solutions come up in philosophy generation after generation, just as the same tunes come up in music.
Neil Rickert:
OK, thanks for your thoughts.
ETA: But I am going to stay with the views of the philosophers who study this field. Just like I stay with the biologists on evolution and the cosmologists on BBs.
I think this comment is really quite unfair to Bruce. You and Bruce are having an interesting discussion about how to be a pragmatist about science. The criticism that Bruce has somehow a “theistic” view of science relies entirely on attributing to Bruce views that he clearly does not.
Philosophy is failing? News to me!
I’m pretty sure that BruceS is not a theist. But his view of science is about what one would expect from a theist.
That’s what I am hearing. Philosophy departments are closing. Some philosophers are troubled.
Making that characterization jumps the shark from my viewpoint (which is definitely not God’s-eye).
I don’t see how abstracting relates to theism. Abstracting is leaving things out. All scientific theories do that — even fundamental physics; eg QM leaves out gravity. Maybe you would prefer ‘fictions’ to ‘abstractions’?
I don’t see any relation to attributing a Purpose in how I described theories. That’s seems to be pulling in the Cosmological argument for no reason I can see.
I have not looked at what Woit is doing these days, but Hossenfelder is making a specific complaint about how some fundamental physicists build theories: namely, that too much emphasis is placed on naturalness (using the word in the technical sense she describes). She is saying nothing how scientific theories in general.
ETA: Here is a paper by Godfrey Smith on abstraction and idealization in biology; I’ve only skimmed it to date. Of course, he is a philosopher of science. So in a way it is pointless for me to post it — sort of a Catch-22 there, I suspect.
http://petergodfreysmith.com/PGSAbstractnIdealizn06.pdf
There are lots of complicated social, economic, and political motivations for why the humanities generally (not just philosophy) are in trouble in the United States, but none of them have anything to do with the idea that philosophers are dogmatically committed to a positivistic conception of scientific theories.
Thank you for that. I found Godfrey-Smith’s paper quite helpful. I wonder how it compares with criticisms of idealization and abstraction in political theory and ethics. PGS’s criticism of “the informational gene” at the end is also helpful for getting clear about the fundamental mistake of “Intelligent Design.”
I think you are joking. If not, you have spent too much time moderating Phoodoo’s posts
Neil, to Bruce:
Neil is like Joseph McCarthy except that he sees theists, instead of communists, under every rock.
Bruce’s view isn’t theistic, Neil. Not even implicitly.
My “theism” comment wasn’t based on your reference to abstracting. It had more to do with your “stamp-collecting” remark. That suggests you see a world of things, and of science cataloging the things that are there. By contrast, and as mentioned in an earlier post, I see a world of undifferentiated stuff where we “thingify” the world by defining ways of dividing the world up into what we will consider to be things.
Let me see if I can spell out the difference:
Theistic view
We are in a world of things, and those things bear relationships to one another. What counts as a thing is fixed independent of us (therefore fixed by a presumed god). The relations are also fixed independent of us. The job of science is to catalog the things and relations. And, supposedly, induction is used for finding relations, even though induction could not possibly work.
In this view, truth is correspondence. It is based on the rules set by the presumed god. Decision making is a matter of truth and logic. That leaves us as mindless robots. Our primary decision making is based on truth, and the criteria for truth are independent of us. So we can have very little autonomy of decision making. Our ability to make autonomous decisions is limited to our ability to make mistakes.
My alternative view
We are in a world of undifferentiated stuff. We divide the world up into things. The most important relations between things are the relations that are consequences of the rules we follow to divide the world into things. There may turn out to be other apparently accidental relations, but those are less important and less certain.
In this view, pragmatism is primary for our decision making. How we divide up the world is a pragmatic. We do it in ways that work well enough for us. Truth is conformance to the rules that we ourselves, or as a community, set for dividing up the world. However, our pragmatic decisions ultimately derive from our biology and our individual situations. So that leaves us as autonomous decision makers. We are conscious of a world of objects, because we ourselves created those objects by means of our pragmatic ways of dividing up the world.
I’m sorry, but that’s ridiculous, Neil. FWIW, the only one displaying religious tendencies on this thread is you.
walto:
It really is. Where to even begin?
Neil,
Obviously not. Heliocentrists and geocentrists alike divided up the solar system into earth, moon, sun, and planets, but that did not determine the truth of either system. The observations did, which is why scientifically savvy folks, unlike you, regard geocentrism as crackpottery.
Thanks Neil.
The theistic view is not my view at all. I am not sure if you are attibuting it to me or just describing the theistic view. FWIW, your explanation of the theistic viewpoint is basically how I understood you when you used that term.
The “stamp-collecting” was not my view of science, it was a view of science that I said would result from not abstracting. The phrase is an allusion to the remark attributed to Rutherford that all science is either physics or stamp-collecting. I was trying (and failing) to make the point that if science did not generalize, then it really would be just stamp-collecting. But of course science is not just stamp-collecting.
When I say science generalizes (among other practices), I mean it builds theories and models, and theories and models idealize or abstract, as explained eg in intro to G-S paper I linked upthread.
Models and theories cover counterfactual situations. They allow predictions in novel situations.
Models and theories are tools science uses to explain and control. Prediction, explanation, and control of the world are the goals of science.
Pragmatism for me in this context means creating and following practices which are governed by the norms which have proven through action to be the best way to achieve those goals. The norms themselves are adjusted as part of those practices based on the results of action.
That sort of touches on one of my difficulties with philosophy. A friend described a Quaker business meeting at which he was present (he was providing IT services) and being amazed how that the agenda was swiftly dealt with as only disagreement was allowed, not endorsement of ideas. Nor were apologies queried, if someone required more time to complete a report, the extension was accepted without discussion.
It seems there is never a solution in philosophy that is accepted by consensus and there is (seems to me) an inability to let go of outdated ideas. Maybe it would help (me) if a clearer distinction were made between history of philosophy and philosophy itself as is made in science. Sure the history, both of philosophy and science, is fascinating but science works perfectly well from first principles.