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.
Neil Rickert,
In accordance with Neil’s truth or dare challenge, here are my thoughts:
Regularities* in the world make possible life and then evolution.
Through evolution, life diversifies; animal life is one result of that diversification.
Different species of animal life perceive and act according to the particular affordances of that species. They do so in order to live and reproduce in ways which have been successful according to their particular evolutionary past.
Conceptual system are implicit in each form of life’s evolved affordances. Each individual animal starts with conceptual systems hard-coded by evolution to match the affordances of their species.
Some animal species acquire through evolution the ability to learn and thereby adjust actions in small, local ways to match changes in environment. This allows those animals to take actions which are not hard-coded.
Humans evolve further types of learning abilities which support intertwined development of language and culture.
Language, culture and evolved human intelligence permit humans to intersubjectively recognize, discuss, change, create, and improve shared conceptual systems. These shared systems are the result aligning private conceptual systems in order to allow for successful cooperation and communication.
The shared conceptual systems are embodied physically in the teaching of (eg) tool-making practices to each new generation, in the memories which are passed through language between generations, and eventually in writing.
Humans create science as a set of practices to predict, explain, and control the world. The practices are governed by norms which best achieve those goals. The norms themselves are adjusted by the practices. New, shared conceptual systems are created as part of those practices.
Because of science’s success, we are justified in claiming the the conceptual systems of science latch onto real structures* in the world; structures which are not merely the creations of human conceptual systems (though they are also that to start with).
————————————————————-
* In this post, I am not making any claim about the metaphysical nature of regularities or structures.
For an illuminating view of laws, causation, and the role of action in physics, I suggest Jenann Ismael’s YouTube talks (or her book “How Physics How Physics Sets Us Free”).
Very roughly speaking, she claims local, limited human, scientific conceptual systems and actions must precede and must also contain more information than the “God-eye view implicit in laws of the universe”.
There is some overlap in these two videos. They are not at the TED talk level of detail (ie they are much richer).
I tried watching the videos but the sound quality on both is too poor to tolerate. Is there any transcript of either talk available? I checked out her book on Amazon and there is an interesting review of it by retired philosopher, Joel Marks.
I see Neil’s description of the theistic view as closely akin to the Metaphysical Realism that Putnam has disparaged. In “From Realism Back to Realism: Putnam’s Long Journey”, Baghramian characterizes Putnam’s description of MR as including (among other things):
a) That the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent
objects.
b) That there is exactly one true and complete description of “the way the world is.”
c) Truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or
thought-signs and external things and sets of things.
d) It prioritizes an externalist or what may be called a God’s Eye point of view
I read Neil’s posts as relying on the “theistic view” as his go to insult for any philosophical position he disagrees with. That is, all of them.
You are right about the sound quality: the videos are live recordding by apparently mediocre equipment from a couple of seminars she gave.
No transcript that I know of, but the NDPR review is a good summary of the ideas in the book
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/how-physics-makes-us-free/
A pre-publication-edits version is now downloadable at both academia.edu and philpapers. I’m planning to incorporate much of it into a book, so (painful as it will no doubt be) I suppose some discussion here might be helpful.
Re moral values, I basically punt on them: they’re beyond me. That makes the democratic theory I advocate either modest or useless, depending on one’s mileage.
Well, there’s charity and there’s obsequiousness. The mentions of God in these remarks:
are just ridiculous. No one but a theist would suggest anything like the existence of some valid inference that could take one from there being objective relations between “things” in the world and a God who must have put them there.
All the God-obsession there must come from Neil’s childhood or something. It could be an FMM post, actually.
The “heavyweight” problems will probably never be solved–by philosophers, scientists, theologians, critical theorists, or anybody else. But at least the philosophers actually understand the questions and can put them correctly. The others wouldn’t know whether they’ve got the answers to them or not, since they generally get the questions completely confused.
I am not at all impressed by that G-S paper. As best I can tell, he has everything backwards.
But then you have no possibility of accounting for norms and practices, because you are taking those for granted. So you have no possibility of understanding cognition.
Perhaps there’s a rôle for an interpreter or translator. It sounds a bit like the answer to life, the universe and everything being 42.
Thank you for that detailed description.
That is an excellent account of the viewpoint that I am disagreeing with. If you ever want to understand human cognition, then you must toss (reject) that way of looking at things.
BruceS,
That seems basically right and in line with what I was going to say in response to Neil.
What Neil calls “theism” is what I (and I think most philosophers) would call “realism” or if you prefer “metaphysical realism” (Putnam) or “transcendental realism” (Kant). And his alternative view is very close to what Kant calls “transcendental idealism” and what Putnam calls “internal realism”.
The decisive question here is (something like): do determinate objects exist independently of our practices of classification and predication, or are determinate objects constituted through those practices?
The problems with realism are, I think, sufficiently well-known by us here that we don’t need to rehash it.
The question is whether idealism is a viable alternative. I think that it is not, unless one’s idealism is sufficiently transcendental (a la Kant or Husserl) or objective (a la Hegel).
To see why, I want to briefly consider and then reject the most extreme version of idealism, which we can call a “cookie-cutter” picture of cognition.
On this picture, the world in itself is completely smooth, undifferentiated dough. Then we come along with our perceptual and conceptual abilities and, like cookie-cutter, sink them into the dough — and out come objects. All of their determinate properties are a result of the determinacy that we bring to the dough.
The dough does not offer any resistance: it has no features or properties. It has no causal or modal structure. It is purely unstructured stuffness — prima materia, as the Scholastics would say. We cannot even describe it, since it lacks even the minimum necessary features to support predication. (This is why Kant denied that we can have knowledge of things in themselves — to which Schopenhauer and others correctly responded that we can’t even say that is a plurality of them.)
Since all of the determinate properties of things as we experience them come from us, we can never be really surprised. The world is determinate only to the extent that we make it so, so we can’t make predictions that turn out wrong. It’s just-so stories all the way down. There can’t be any different between a poorly designed experiment and a well-designed experiment. Normally we say an experiment is poorly designed if it only tells you what you’re expecting to hear, but it’s hard to see how that commonplace wisdom amongst experimentalists can make any sense under idealism.
We can see a closely related difficulty by considering “how did our conceptual and perceptual abilities come into being?” If one consider these cognitive abilities to be in any sense “natural”, then they must be contingent and have an empirically testable explanation of their causal history. One might notice that it’s not just humans who freely invent the joints of a jointless world; every minded organism does so as well. Bees do it; birds do it. But the birds and the bees (and us) are themselves have determinate properties. So where does that come from? If all determinate properties come from mind, then where do our own determinate properties come from? Ourselves? (“We have found the causa sui and he is us”.)
For Kant and Husserl this was no objection, because they demanded a bright line be drawn between “transcendental” and “empirical” inquiry. Kant is tolerably clear on this point: there is no possibility of inquiring into the causal history of our cognitive abilities, because they are a priori: universal and necessary for any cognitive experience that we can intelligibly recognize as similar to our own. Since they must already be presupposed by any empirical inquiry, they cannot be subjects of any empirical inquiry.
But this has deep and pervasive ramifications for what we can say about subjectivity and rationality. If our cognitive capacities are “transcendental” then what is our mode of epistemic access to them? How can we know what’s transcendental and what’s empirical? And on the converse side: if our cognitive capacities are natural then they can’t be the sole source of determinacy, since they are already determinate themselves.
This is not, it must be emphasized, to defend “metaphysical realism” or “transcendental realism” in any way. I consider Kant’s objections to that to be entirely convincing. It’s the cogency of the alternative that I’m objecting to.
Philosophy is hard, man.
BruceS,
One thing I’d stress about that account: it avoids both the problems of metaphysical realism (aka Neil’s “theism) and the problems of idealism aka internal realism.
By the way, I am not opposed to Neil’s suggestion that metaphysical realism is implicitly theistic. I might even go a few steps further than he would; rejecting every variant of metaphysical realism is necessary for doing philosophy after what Nietzsche colorfully calls “the death of God”.
The quandary is that internal realism or transcendental idealism faces its own internal contradictions that have been extensively worked out in the history of 19th and 20th century French, German, and American philosophy.
I’m interested in contributing to a version of pragmatism that avoids both realism and idealism.
I certainly do not buy that view.
Instead, we should think of that cookie dough as lumpy — I think I’ve used that term before. And some of those lumps are more useful to us than others. So we carve up the dough in order to get to the most useful lumps. And that emphasis on usefulness is pragmatism.
What’s useful to us derives, to a large extent, from our biology. So how we carve up the dough is a reflection of that biology.
Indeed. But we don’t all divide up the world in the same way, because of the differences in biology. What’s pragmatic for birds is not the same as what’s pragmatic for humans.
The important point, as I see it, is that we are actively engaged in doing this. And that’s a lot of what brains and cognitive systems are doing. If you take the world as being a certain way, independent of us, then you are left with us as passive observers and with our brains and cognitive systems having nothing much to do. And you cannot understand cognition, if you ignore what it is doing.
KN,
That’s surprising. Why do you think metaphysical realism is implicitly theistic?
Neil,
Those lumps can move and behave independently of us, which undercuts your claims about truth. From earlier in the thread:
Neil:
keiths:
So you say.
Does anyone beside you have a position that is capable of “understanding human cognition”? That’s a serious question; I am trying to understand you and finding someone you agree with would help.
If you think that my position ignores action, then I have not explained my position.. But I don’t know how to do it better except to note that animals act and I tried to emphasize action throughout credo above.
Evolution favors animals which are successful in living and reproducing in their environment. (ETA: I think my successful is the same as your pragmatic useful). Being successful means the way their species divides the lumpiness must be correlated with some aspect of this lumpiness. From that success, there is an IBE argument that concludes that each species affordances must be picking out something real about the world the animals successfully engage with.
The same hold true for humans. That is, there is an IBE for the realism of ordinary entities, AKA observables, where ‘ordinary tentities’/’observables’ are defined relative to human sensorimotor abilities..
Now move to science. Scientific conceptual schemes include unobservable entities. Scientific realism is an analogous IBE argument from the success of science to the reality of those unobservables.
Many philosophers reject that IBE while remaining realists about ordinary entities. But my heart is with the scientific realists.
ETA 2: There is a further argument that the unobservables of fundamental physics are common to all possible conceptual schemes, in some sense. I leave that for another day.
I can see some affinities. But I don’t understand Neil’s viewpoint on knowledge and since IR says truth cannot outrun knowledge (I think), that means I cannot relate it to Neil’s thoughts. Also, Putnam would never subscribe the the relativism about truth that I read Neil as supporting.
Thanks for that discussion on idealism. I have not engaged with the arguments you present and will need to work more to understand them.
I’ll try to do that an post some comments/questions later.
walto:
I do read Neil as thinking that everyone who disagrees with him must hold the position Neil calls God-s eye. That is what I meant by saying it was his go to insult.
I don’t think his position is the same as FMM’s.
FMM says that anyone who ignores God cannot have knowledge (including the knowledge pertaining to understanding knowledge itself!).
Neil seems to be saying that anyone who disagrees with him assumes a role for God in knowledge.
Maybe that means Neil and FMM hold obverse positions? But it hurts my head a bit to puzzle out the applicability of obverse, so I could be wrong about that.
Phil notes on obverse, converse, etc:
http://philebus.tamu.edu/phil240/LectureNotes/5.3.pdf
What do you mean by “accounting for”. Do you mean
– explaining what norms are? If so, what are the challenges for such an explanation?
– explaining how particular norms are established? If so, what is missing from my view that scientific practices include adjustments of the norms as needed to increase success in meeting goals?
– something else?
I don’t think this view works out the way you want it to.
First, we have to be clear about the relation between metaphysics and cognitive science. Are we saying that we need to abandon metaphysical realism in order to do cognitive science correctly? Or are we saying that doing cognitive science correctly leads to abandoning metaphysical realism? Either view has its difficulties but we need to figure out which ones we’re trying to resolve.
Second, abandoning metaphysical realism is neither necessary nor sufficient for an action-oriented understanding of cognition. Even if we should think that the world consists of entirely mind-independent things with entirely mind-independent properties, there would still be plenty of room for an account of cognition as the active process of figuring out which of those determinate properties are obstacles, which are opportunities, etc. This is because the mind-independent determinate properties still do not fix all the relational properties that objects have with regard to organisms. The organism still has to do a lot of work in figuring out which objects are threats, food, mates, etc. And since those objects have their own behaviors which can sometimes conflict with the organism (threats and food) and sometimes coordinate with it (mates), there’s a lot of cognitive work for the organism to.
Hence o we’re not left treating cognitive systems as merely passive detectors of already-classified objects even if metaphysical realism is true and mind-independent objects have fully determinate properties — because those determinate properties don’t contain all the specifications needed to tell the cognitive system how to classify the object in relation to the organism’s goals.
(I’m actively trying to write a short conference paper on the entanglement of metaphysical realism and cognitive science in Nietzsche and Sellars, so I’ll be experimenting with various ideas here in days and weeks to come.)
I am not as relativistic as you seem to think that I am. However, you are probably right that Putnam would not agree with me.
I will note, however, that Putnam does criticize the correspondence theory of truth — I think that’s in “Representation and Reality”.
Not quite right. I use that “God’s eye view” for specific positions that I disagree with. And, yes, those are common positions. But I don’t assume that it applies to everyone.
And I should add that it is not intended as an insult. It is intended to draw a sharp contrast.
A God’s eye view, as a way of looking at things, actually works pretty well in ordinary life. But it is a problem with respect to understanding human cognition.
Where do norms come from?
A new scientific theory is typically started by a single scientist or a small group of scientists. Many of the relevant norms do not yet exist at the time that the new theory is started.
I can’t tell other folk what they should do. I would be happy to abandon metaphysical realism.
You spend much of that post on “mind-independent properties”, so let’s talk about that.
The two extreme positions would seem to be:
realism: there are mind-independent properties; and
nominalism: there aren’t such properties, there are only names.
From my perspective, there’s no important distinction between those. And that’s why I would be happy with abandoning metaphysical realism.
But, for the sake of this post, I’ll assume realism. So, with that assumption, there are mind-independent properties. And there is an uncountable infinitude of them, at least according to the mathematical models of physics.
Physicists take a small basic set of such properties, and describe everything in terms of that basic set. Combinations of properties would also be properties. So lets call that small basic set a basis. So physics uses a finite basis. Maybe a theory of everything might require an infinite basis, but we can get by with a suitable finite basis.
As best I can tell, there is no mind-independent way of selecting a suitable basis. And the implication is that there could be no mind-independent way of talking about mind-independent properties, since all such talk is in terms of a basis.
What an interesting post! Thanks!
I didn’t mean to suggest that. Only that FMM could have made the same remark: i.e., people thinking that there are things or truths or whatnot must be theists.
Yes, I agree that new theories can establish new paradigms and those generate new norms for the science carried on within those new paradigns
But those are not the only type of norms. There also have to be norms for accepting and rejecting new theories, including the ones used to establish new paradigms.
Where do those other norms come from? I think they start with recognition of what makes our ordinary practices successful. Then thinkers like Bacon recognize the need for norms guiding what we now call scientific experimentation. Other thinkers add other norms, such as appropriate use of mathematics by Galileo.
But that only puts the issue off a bit. We still need norms to understand why Bacon’s ideas were seen as correct. I think because those proved successful in realizing science’s goals of prediction, control, explanation.
Now there is one more regress: recognizing success from failure. I think the ability to differentiate success from failure in meeting goals has been hardcoded into human cognition through evolution. So the spade is turned there, as Mr W would say.
Correct. It’s part of the metaphysical realism he rejects. He reconciled himself to a form of MR, but never to a single correct description of reality. Nor did he ever find a theory of truth he was satisfied with.
The “goto insult” was only intended as a friendly jibe. It was not meant to be considered a harmful goto [sic].
This is my understanding of your post
1. There must be determine properties of reality which do not depend solely on our minds.
2, But the ability to cognitively inquire into such properties requires that certain conditions of reality be presupposed by the mind to make such inquiry knowledge possible.
3. So there must both transcendental and empirical inquiry. But, contra Kant, there is no principled way to draw a fixed line between them, since such a line would mean it is impossible for us to know what is transcendental and what is empirical, which would in turn undermine any such fixed line between the two.*
Assuming that is close to what you are saying, can we not, instead of drawing a fixed line, draw a provisional, context-sensitive line between the transcendental and empirical for any given mode of inquiry? I understood that to be the point of the pragmatic a priori.
I can see that leading to a different set of problems, but I will stop there to make sure I am following the gist of your argument.
———————————
* FWIW, that undermining argument reminds me of the cognitive instability argument Albert uses against believing one is a Boltzmann Brain.
Presumably, there’s no “mind-independent way” of talking about anything.
I’m used to seeing that distinction applied to abstract objects. Properties are definitely candidates for abstract objects, so the distinction does apply to any type of properties.
But what is the role of mind independent??
I don’t think that that nominalism/realism distinction captures the sense of mind-independent that KN is driving at. However, I will stop there since I am still under if I understand him correctly.
I am not sure what you mean by a mind-independent way to select a basis.
Is it fair to say you mean that any selection process must involve our goals? If so, there would be no one right way to select, because selection depends on the goals we have for a particular mode of inquiry.
Is that a fair summary of your position?
If so, I answer that I agree. The IBE argument is instead about why some ways of selecting are better than others in a mode of inquiry, given our goals and purpose for selection.
Neil’s argument seems to me to vaguely echo Putnam’s arguments as to why causation and reason cannot be reduced to materialism. Although I have only a vague understanding of those arguments of Putnam, so I may way off.
I glanced at it and it seems very far from my comfort zone in philosophy (granted, that zone is not particularly large).
If you or Keith does an OP, I will definitely make the effort to understand it well enough to comment on it.
So do some people (possibly not philosophers!) have a position you agree with? If so, who are they and what is the position?
Inquiring people with mind-dependent selection criteria want to know!
I’m not quite so sure about that.
It seems to me that Darwin’s science is very different from Newton’s or Einstein’s science. And that seems to be one of the objections to evolution. So it isn’t all that clear what norms, if any, are involved in accepting new theories.
Right. Or, as Wittgenstein put it, if a lion could talk we would not understand it.
There are two different problems as I see it.
Firstly, we choose a basis for the properties that are important to use. And that’s what could be said to involve our goals. To put it different, different creatures with different biology might have a different idea about what are the important properties to use.
The other problem that I see, is that the particular choice of properties that we have made to form our basis, seems to be contingent on accidents of history.
I am feeling very lonely here.
Oh, yes, absolutely! I was drawing a stark dichotomy only to indicate the extreme ends of a continuum. And since neither metaphysical realism nor transcendental idealism is workable — both of which are subjected to their own antinomies, as it were — the pragmatic a priori is considerably attractive.
But here too I think we shall need to be very careful about what is functioning as constitutive a priori relative to a cognitive task. In a sense the evolutionary history of cognitive systems — as well as the history & diversity of human cultural practices — is the history of different kinds of pragmatically functional a prioris.
Neil is making sense to me though I don’t see much difference between Neil, Bruce or KN – just different ways of expressing it.
Everybody else: Science is about coming up with grand rules that govern the universe, and something like induction is presumed to be the way of coming up with such rules.
Me: There are no grand rules that govern the universe. Or, more accurately, if there are any grand rules they are unknowable and undiscoverable by us. All we can do is cope with what we find. Science is all about getting as much useful information as we can, to help us with that coping. The “grand rules” that science comes up with, are rules that govern the behavior of scientists so as to make it possible for them to get as much useful information as possible.
Neil Rickert,
Everybody else is wrong then. 🙂
This can’t be accurate:
“Science is about coming up with grand rules that govern the universe, and something like induction is presumed to be the way of coming up with such rules.”
Perhaps something like the concept of species.
Neil:
walto:
Neil:
Neil,
I suspect walto’s point is rather more fundamental: when we talk about something, we are using our minds. Thus we have no mind-independent way of talking about things.
The fact that something is mind-dependent does not make it wholly mind-dependent. That’s why your argument fails.
Bruce:
Neil:
Seriously?
What about obvious ones like “makes better predictions than the old theory” or “encompasses phenomena that the old theory can’t handle”?
Yes, but that’s our rule for classification. It isn’t a rule that governs anything, other than how we classify.
KN:
But you’ve gone well beyond that and said:
I share walto’s bewilderment. How on earth does metaphysical realism imply the existence of a god or gods?