Let’s have a new topic, preferably one that is not Christian apologetics.
This is mostly intended as a response to a comment by KN, but I think it deserves its own thread.
There’s a recent blog post elsewhere that is related:
- Knowledge and Reality (by Dan Kaufman)
Personally, I think of myself as a realist. But I agree with some of Dan Kaufman’s criticisms of traditional views of reality.
Now my response to KN. The quotes will all be from KN’s comment (linked above).
I think I’m more inclined towards realism about objects than you are. I find this curious because you and I both appreciate Gibson’s work on affordances, and I am a realist about affordances — affordances are real features of the organism-environment relationship But perhaps you are more inclined to think of affordances as “projections” from the organism onto the environment?
I’m not sure I am understanding the point there. Affordances are not objects. Moreover, what counts as an affordance will depend on the knowledge and interests of the person (the perceiver).
“Objects” are that which pushes back against us, thwarts us, offers resistance to our actions.
I’m not sure that’s completely satisfactory. But, ignoring that for the moment, even that conception of objects makes them pragmatic things rather than logical things. And it makes what counts as an object depend on our interactions with the world.
If Nature had no joints at which to be carved, then any criteria for successful action would be equally arbitrary as all other criteria.
I’m not sure that makes sense. The world is not homogeneous, so even arbitrary choices are not equally arbitrary.
I live in Illinois. The border of Illinois and Iowa is the Mississippi river. That could perhaps be considered a seam. But if I look at the border of Illinois and Wisconsin, part of the border is a river, and part of it isn’t (the river was not followed as far as it could be). The part that is not along a river doesn’t seem to fit the idea of seam. Even if there are seams, we are not bound to follow them and often don’t. And where there are no seams, we still carve up the world. So whether or not there are seams isn’t all that important (in my opinion).
If we were trying to define the boundary of Illinois and Iowa today, we would probably do that in terms of GPS coordinates, rather than using the river. The way that we divide the world depends on our abilities.
And here’s where I largely disagree:
So while we should always be on guard against the assumption that any theory correctly describes the structure of reality, we really cannot do away with the assumption that reality does indeed have an intelligible structure, and indeed one that is knowable by us because our cognitive capacities are a part of that structure and informed by its history.
If I climb a rock, I look for footholds. I don’t doubt that the footholds are real enough to support my weight. But the footholds are not part of the structure of the rock, they are just accidental inhomogeneities. That they are footholds derives from my pragmatic choices, from my temporizing. If the rock were completely smooth, I would not be able to climb it (or maybe I could find some glue pads, and then climb with those).
I see nature as like that, in that it is not homogeneous. So we can find something like footholds that we can use to anchor our descriptions. But that does not make those anchor points part of the structure of reality.
Here’s where I disagree with Gibson. According to Gibson, we pickup information from the immediate environment. I used to think that way, but it doesn’t work. The better view is that the environment is devoid of information. We create information. Part of what the brain does is creating information. We (or our perceptual systems) use whatever “footholds” or “anchor points” that we can find to anchor some sort of practical coordinate system to reality. And then the mathematics that we see in science comes from the very mathematical way that we have used those coordinate systems to systematically divide up the world.
When I look at scientific laws, a large part of these laws have to do with anchoring our coordinate systems and using those anchored systems to allow us to make measurements (making a measurement creates Shannon information).
When I look at Maxwell’s equations, they allow one to derive the wave equation. From that, we can conclude that our measurements of electromagnetic phenomena satisfy the wave equation. I don’t think it means anything to say that light itself satisfies the wave equation.
So now think of water waves. If I’m right about information, then perception works by virtue of our brains doing something similar to measurement. So when we see water waves, we are really seeing waves in our measurements. And, indeed, it is known that the water molecules just go up and down, or in small approximately circular motions. The molecules don’t advance in the wave (except when the wave is breaking near the shore). So perception is really looking at something like measurements that our brain is making.
So here’s my objection to phenomenology. As I see it, the phenomena are created by the brain (I think some folk would agree with that), and so it isn’t that we are seeing phenomena. Rather, it is that we (or our brains) are creating phenomena as part of what seeing is. The basic underlying idea of measurement (which is really a kind of categorization) is something that can be studied when it is done publicly by scientists. So, at least in principle, we can understand how phenomena arise, and need not just take phenomena as a starting point.
When I go through all of that, I cannot find a standard whereby we can judge the correctness (or truth) of a scientific theory. We can judge how well it works, but pragmatism is a guide, not a standard. That’s why I disagree with talk about whether theories are correct. We should limit ourselves to talk about how well they work. We can then talk of the truth of the data, if it conforms to the standards set by the theory.
If the majority of people here are not scientific realists they sure act like it.
Mung,
If you have a better mechanism for developing better predictive models than the scientific method, I’m all ears.
As I have pointed out before, there is no such thing as “the scientific method.”
And I am also pretty sure that a number of people here disagree with your assertion that science is required for developing predictive models. If I’ve understood them, some people think that predictive model generation is just what the brain does.
This view of theirs of course stands somewhat counter to the claim that science itself is unnatural.
If you’re buying in to scientific realism, read this OP again just to see what you’re actually buying into.
Mung,
However derived, those models are tested against reality. That’s the essence of the scientific method. If you have a better way of generating predictive models and constantly improving them, please present it.
I am pretty sure you know, but the bit about “suppression” was a joke, meant to have been given away by mentioning “presuppositions” .
BruceS,
I did listen to Maudlin’s 2 hour youtube video last night. It’s as weird as that review suggests.
An article about the need to be pragmatic with regard the conceptual frameworks and models of economics.
Whether or not one accepts the philosophical position of scientic realism has little to do with being a successful scientist or accepting the results of science for achieving its goals of predicting, controlling, and explaining the world in a way that works for anyone.
Hopefully, weird in an entertaining, pleasant-way-to-pass-the-time way, at least for a mathematician. I guess if you watched the whole thing, that would answer the question.
I’ve bookmarked it but I suspect it will be out of my mathematical league.
I did say “listened” rather than “watched”. I left it playing, while I was doing other things on the computer, some of them using a different browser tab.
It wasn’t particularly technical. He did try to explain standard ideas from traditional topology, before giving his alternatives. But I think it was reasonably accessible to non-mathematicians.
A plurality of scientific methods doesn’t undermine the point that scientific methods have a higher degree of reliability and shareability than other ways of pragmatically coping with the world.
Surely one can think that predictive model generation is one of the many things that brains do, and that this particular cognitive activity gets amplified in a variety of interesting ways through institutionalized scientific practices, but that this amplification took a long time to develop.
Except that, after extended and animated discussion, we ended up rejecting that list of “presuppositions”.
Also, you’re not actually doing yourself any favors by learning philosophy of science from a Christian perspective. All that does is present science as if it were another kind of religion, and that can’t capture the differences between science and religion. I think that with a healthy appreciation of how different science and religion are, the illusion of conflict between them dissipates — they play different roles in human life and satisfy quite different needs and interests. Treating either as a substitute for the other fails to capture this important difference.
This is from memory. I haven’t searched for links on this.
A year or three ago, Massimo Pigliucci had a post on his old blog, where he described anti-realism (it may have been a post on Ladyman & Ross). A mathematician, Jason Rosenhouse, commented on his own blog, and said that to him this looked like a description of realism. I suspect that many mathematicians and physicists would agree with Jason.
My point: “realism”, as used by philosphers, is not what scientists are talking about when they call themselves realists.
I have found the same thing. In philosophy, realism used to mean realism about universals or other such metaphysical categories. More recently, due to influence of analytic philosophy, realism tends to mean the affirmation of something called “mind-independent reality”. Whereas in (physical) sciences, realism seems to mean narrow empiricism, i.e. objective phenomena are real, inductive generalisations from them are as good as it gets, and anything beyond is to be scoffed at.
There are many kinds of realism: perceptual realism, scientific realism, semantic realism, moral realism, and so forth.
I think that what’s really crucial here is how we think about the constraints on our rational activity. To be a realist about X is to think that there are properties or facts about X that determine how one ought to think about X. To be an anti-realist about X is to think that there are no such facts or properties, but that our conceiving of X is a free construction, or if it is constrained, it is self-constrained.
And what if how we think about X is undetermined by reality, yet not completely free. That, it seems to me, is what often happens.
For example, I see scientific theories as undetermined by reality, but our choice of theory is not completely free.
That’s what I would call “pragmatic realism”. But one can be a pragmatic realist about perception, about theories, about morality, and so forth — as indeed I am!
Well, I don’t think realism means anything scientifically. It is a philosophical position. And I agree there are many adjectives different philosophers would prefix it with, as I listed (some of them) in my earlier post.
I do think many scientists accept a form of philosophical scientific realism in their hearts even if they have not explored the philosophy. As I’ve said before, why else would they get up in the morning to do science? But I doubt many bother with philosophical niceties like exactly what entities are real in science (eg the relations or the objects being related).
Ah, but the key question is whether you left it playing at normal speed. I’ve found the 1.5 speed option very helpful myself. Even 2.0 for some speakers.
I understand internal realism says any questions about reality external to a framework are illegitimate whereas pragmatic realism says they are legitimate but must be answered pragmatically.
But I’m not clear whether that is making stronger claim (than internal realism) about objects in the (pragmatically) chosen framework: that is, is there any implication that such a pragmatic choice means the objects delimited byf the framework have a claim to have a continuing existence separate from us?
Any hints or thoughts welcomed.
Larry Moran opines on philosophy of science and scientific realism. But he does not address both sides of the debate, eg I don’t see mention of the pessimistic induction, one of the prime reasons given to doubt scientific realism about unobservable, theoretical entities in science.
Normal speed. Hmm, I wasn’t even aware that you could change the playback speed.
I’ve found it depends on the browser (I use firefox mostly), the video plus I think you have to be using HTML5 playback. The option is there underneath the settings gear in the lower right of the video and works for me in the Maudlin video.
It depends not on the browser (different from what BruceS claims) but on the plugin or the media player.
Some browsers display youtube in HTML5 mode, others in Flash Player mode, while some browsers can switch between these modes. These different modes enable different options for playback.
VLC is a media player that can play youtube directly. Just feed the link to it and most VLC features, such as sped-up or slowed-down playback, become available.
Youtube videos can be downloaded too, and then played in pretty much any media player.
I’d like to return to Peter Godfrey-Smith’s (PGS) review of Retrieving Realism (RR).
In RR, Taylor and Dreyfus attack what they call “the mediational picture” of mind, or what Rorty calls “the mind as mirror of nature”. The central idea of the mediational picture is that all of our access to reality is mediated by Something Else: ideas (for the early moderns) or language (for analytic philosophers). There’s no direct access to the world, so we have to give some account of how our mediated access allows us to know what’s really going — and barring that account, the slippery slope to Kant and to idealism!
According to Dreyfus and Taylor, Wittgenstein and Heidegger both favored a kind of “absorbed coping” (one of Dreyfus’ favorite terms) which functions as a “knowing how” more basic than “knowing that”. We do have a kind of unmediated commerce with the world, one that consists of our embodied coping with it.
(This seems to me much more like Merleau-Ponty than it does either Wittgenstein or Heidegger. Wittgenstein talks about practices and rules, and Heidegger about practical understanding, but neither Wittgenstein nor Heidegger talk much about the role of embodiment in coping — whereas that is the central insight of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.)
PGS worries that Taylor and Dreyfus make a serious error in neglecting Dewey’s naturalistic alternative to mediational theories of mind:
While this is just as anti-mediational as Wittgenstein and Heidegger, it has one major difference — which PGS thinks is its major virtue: Dewey’s basic approach is the third-person modelling of organisms in environments, not the first-person description of subjective experience (contra phenomenology):
One can easily see that PGS criticizes Wittgenstein’s aversion to theorizing. (He does not comment on Heidegger’s aversion to scientific explanations, but I am sure he is also opposed to that tendency in Heidegger.)
This preference for third-person explanations over first-person descriptions has one interesting consequence that PGS explores, concerning the concept of representation. T
he mediational picture holds that we have access to reality only insofar as we correctly represent it, which is why it can so easily lead to idealism: how can we know that our representations correspond to reality if all knowledge is representational? We would need a metarepresentation that represents the representation-reality relation — but how could we know that that metarepresentation correctly represents the representation-reality relation? We would need a metametarepresentation! Idealism seems necessary to halt the regress.
Against this, Dreyfus and Taylor use Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty to claim that careful phenomenology reveals that experience does not seem representational. But as PGS notes, that doesn’t mean that representations play no important explanatory role:
With a bit more care — though probably not wise to do so in a non-technical forum like the Boston Review — PGS could have appealed to the Dennett/McDowell thesis: there is a distinction between the personal-level explanations (though I wouldn’t call them that) that deal with the standpoint of experience, and the subpersonal-level explanations that deal with how the cognitive machinery in and across brains, bodies, and environments causally implements the structures specified by reflection on the standpoint of experience.
(It is a live possibility that at least some of our experience will turn out to be, in a sense hard to specify, “illusory” when contrasted with the third-personal stance on our subpersonal mechanisms. That’s one of the hardest areas of contemporary philosophy of mind, but we can’t yet rule out that subjective experience is produced because the brain cannot model itself — our brains may be blind.)
However, I do not think that positing representations at the subpersonal level is any threat to the realism that Dreyfus and Taylor urge us to adopt, because the positing is done at a third-personal level — that of scientific explanation — that assumes we do have epistemic access to reality in the first place. The trick is to understand science itself, including cognitive neuroscience, in terms of the picture of absorbed coping that replaces the mediational picture of mind. Dreyfus and Taylor do not undertake this project, but it can be found in Rouse’s How Scientific Practices Matter.
We posit subpersonal states, including representations, in order to explain how absorbed coping is causally implemented, and we do so because the third-personal stance of scientific explanations is also a kind of absorbed coping, and not an alternative to absorbed coping at the personal level.
(This is actually one of the deeper lessons to be learned from Peirce and Dewey. Wittgenstein and Heidegger are all too content to concede a basically Cartesian/Kantian picture of theorizing, since they were not practicing scientists and really did not understand science very well — whereas Peirce, James, and Dewey were practicing scientists and rejected the Cartesian/Kantian picture of scientific theorizing itself.)
The result does not vindicate the kind of metaphysical realism that characterized the ancients, medievals, and dogmatic rationalists of the early modern era — but it does vindicate a rich pragmatic realism, and one that is the only realism we need.
Well, I searched amazon for Philosophical Foundations for a Jewish Worldview. Nothing.
Perhaps a bit dated, of questionable relevance to modern philosophy of science.
Medieval Jewish Philosophical Writings
Have you read the book I’m quoting from? No? So how would you know whether or not it presents science as if it were another kind of religion.
Did I mention I’m also reading Feyerabend? Probably not a philosopher of science though.
3. We must begin by mistrusting the word “thought”; for the greatest difference between the realist and the idealist is that the idealist thinks, whereas the realist knows. For the realist, thinking simply means organizing knowledge or reflecting on its content. It would never occur to him to make thought the starting point of his reflections, because for him a thought is only possible where there is first of all knowledge, The idealist, however, because he goes from thought to things, cannot know whether what he starts from corresponds with an object or not. When, therefore, he asks the realist how, starting from thought, one can rejoin the object, the latter should instantly reply that it is impossible, and also that this is the principle reason for not being an idealist. Since realism starts with knowledge, that is, with an act of the intellect which consists essentially in grasping an object, for the realist the question does not present an insoluble problem, but a pseudoproblem, which is something quite different.
– Etienne Gilson
That mostly sounds as if it is in the right direction.
Science as coping seems better than typical philosophy of science. Looked at that way, I would say that a scientific theory is a map, not a representation (which is why I resist the idea that they are true). Data (measurements), on the other hand, are representations.
Maps are not representations? There are true measurements, but not true maps?
I’m intrigued where this line of thought might lead. I suspect it will lead nowhere.
Not true.
Why is the verb “coping” useful for science?
From at dictionary definition of cope:
1. to struggle or deal, especially on fairly even terms or with some degree of success (usually followed by with):
2. to face and deal with responsibilities, problems, or difficulties, especially successfully or in a calm or adequate manner:
Coping seems to be something we do in our everyday interactions with the world, and I understand the key to science is how we extend those practices for reliable predication, control, and explanation.
In other words, it’s not the coping that is important but the practices science adds to that.
I did not know that VLC could play YouTube and reliably record it. Thanks.
Or did you have another program in mind for You Tube? The ones I’ve used in the past have all eventually have been broken by the people running YouTube, although I have not looked lately.
An aerial photograph could be said to be a true map. But it isn’t very useful as a map.
Maps are iconic and exaggerated in the detail that is important for guiding.
Maybe look into the history of the scientific study of electricity and magnetism. There was lots of coping (IMO). They struggled to find ways to measure the electrical phenomena, from gold leaf in Leyden jars, to twitching frog legs, until they eventually found the ways that we use today.
That’s surely right, but scientific practices are forms of coping that are more reliable and also more shareable than other kinds of practice. Scientific practices of measurement, observation, experimentation quantification, and so on — using an increasingly sophisticated set of devices and programs, in many cases — allows us to cope better then other practices.
In other words, I’m willing to re-frame scientific realism in terms of pragmatic realism. While Ladyman and Ross might object that that’s not really realism at all, I think it is the only kind of realism that makes any sense to beings with our kinds of cognitive and affective capacities.
Yes, but that means only that isomorphisms are useless as action-guiding representations. It doesn’t follow that maps aren’t representations.
I sometimes wonder if you’re suspicious of the concept of representation because you are thinking of representationalism as an isomorphism between sentences and facts (or objects, states of affairs, etc.). But if the concept of a map is a useful analogy for understanding how brains predict novel situations, detect situations, and revise predictions (sometimes) in light of detection, and if maps are a kind of representation, then we’re dealing with a different picture of what representations are.
We are also changing the account of our mode of epistemic access to them. In traditional Representationalism, a representation is a personal-level concept epistemically accessible from within the standpoint of first-person description of experience. (Examples” “ideas” are for Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley; “impressions and ideas” for Hume, and “intuitions and concepts” for Kant.)
In the new representationalism under consideration here, a representation is a subpersonal-level concept epistemically accessible from the standpoint of third-personal explanation.of causal processes.
I am not saying that we should retain the concept of “representation” for doing cognitive science — though I’m sympathetic to the arguments made by Andy Clark and Michael Wheeler that we can take on board the insights of Heidegger, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty without throwing “representations” under the bus. Whether we really ought to retain it is not for philosophers to decide “from the armchair”, but rather up to neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, linguists, social and cultural psychologists, cognitive ethologists, anthropologists, and sociologists to tell us how useful the concept is, and for what purposes.
That makes sense to me, even if it is philosophy. 😉
I’m not so much suspicious of representations. Rather, I’m troubled by an over-emphasis on propositions and truth, and a tendency to ignore the real problems in connecting with reality.
We use maps for connecting with reality, whereas propositions as representations are typically used to abstract away from reality.
Ok, but then the problem isn’t really with representations per se but with propositions as a specific picture of what representations are.
Sure, I cannot argue that some of science is coping, if that word is interpreted as learning how to build useful measuring devices and using them to conduct experiments.
But that omits so much — analysis of results, building new theories and models, suggesting and planning new experiments, participating in the community of scientists to extend and critique scientific knowledge, mentoring new scientists, plus much else I am sure.
So it does not make sense to me to make to call science “coping”.
I’m more used to representationalism (SEP article linked) used as a first-person, personal-level philosophical theory of consciousness as used by (eg) Tye, Lycan, Papineau. What you are calling representationalism seems more to me like sense data theory.
I would add philosophers to that list of specialities involved in understanding representation.
If I take Kaufman’s definition of common sense (metaphysical) realism as the claim that “physical objects have continued and distinct existence and are separate and external to our minds”, then I’m still struggling to understand the differences between internal realism, pragmatic realism, and L&R rain-forest, scientific realism (which I think is a form of Ontic Structural Realism).
How do you see their difference view of realism in these three approaches?
(BTW, I know I could read the relevant Putnam, since he has moved from scientific realism (metaphysical realism about unobservables for him, I think), to internal realism, to pragmatic realism, where I think he is today. And I do have that stuff on my list.
Different philosophers define representation in different ways, but often they separate these aspects of representation:
1. content, as in the content of a newspaper (not of a bucket)
2. vehicle, ie the implementation eg neural structure in brain
3. manner of presentation: how it prepresents, eg symbols which are only coventionally related versus icons as in a painting
It might be the the last, manner of presentation, captures what you mean by separating maps as different from representations per se. If so, maps are still representations under the above definition.
Ah, I see. Whereas I’m using representation as a subpersonal-level, explanatory concept used in theories of mental content, as we see in Millikan, Wheeler, Clark — and as contested by Chemero and enactivists like Thompson and Hutto.
I think that the anti-representationalism of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty is directed squarely against the first-person, personal-level account of consciousness on the basis of a phenomenology of embodied consciousness.
Internal realism was Putnam’s major view in the 1980s and 1990s, and it claims that all assertions about what is and what is not real are internal to some conceptual framework, and that there is no framework-independent method of determining which framework is correct. (It’s basically Rorty but with good arguments!) He abandoned it in response to McDowell’s Mind and World, which convinced him that direct realism about perceptual objects must be right. But he still might be an internal realist about unobservables. I don’t know.
Pragmatic realism (as I understand it) is the claim that our interactions with reality are cashed out in terms of what we do, and only secondarily in terms of which propositions we endorse when we engage in detached reflection.
Ladyman and Ross have a complicated view — on the one hand, they endorse ontic structural realism as a version of scientific realism. Since they worry that objects are fixed by reference, and references change when theories change, objects aren’t preserved across theory-change. But something must be preserved across theory-change if scientific realism is correct. So what is preserved is descriptions of mathematical structures. That’s how I understand their view, but it is complicated and I don’t fully understand it.
Their “rain-forest realism” plays a secondary role — it’s the ontological commitments of the different ‘special sciences’ (everything that is not fundamental physics). The special sciences are committed to objects — as fundamental physics (on their view) is not — but objects are just practical bookkeeping devices for keeping track of real patterns.
The paper I presented last week was an attempt to argue that even fundamental physics has to be, on their view, a version of pragmatic realism because of (a) the role that measurement plays in their epistemology, (b) they themselves insist (rightly) that metaphysics must be answerable to epistemology if it is not to be ungrounded speculation, and (c) measurement itself is a kind of embodied coping. Ladyman and Ross want to be naturalists without taking embodiment seriously, and that’s just not a coherent position. (Though it is a very popular one, for reasons that I find quite fascinating.)
A lot of theory building has to do with finding ways of getting data. (String theory is an exception to this)
That cannot be right. The content of a newspaper is ink marks on paper. But “content” is usually concerned with meanings.
Einstein engage in something akin to string theory building. I suppose the big difference was that the data was already available and unexplained. The first quarter of the 20th century gave rise to the expectation that the simplest and most elegant mathematical structure consistent with the data will be the trvth. It it predicts something, that’s icing.
But does that something have to be anything that we can name? Why can’t it be an understanding of scientists, rather than named entities?
I’m not sure what that means. But if I could work out what it means, I would probably disagree anyway (on the grounds that there is nothing mathematical about reality).
I’m a hobby hacker and Linux geek. Mostly I grab YT and Vimeo with mpv and youtube-dl.
No, that is the vehicle. The content is mostly Turmp buffoonery and Clinton backtracking.