I have always been puzzled by the theistic evolution belief system. It makes absolutely no sense to me at all as it clearly seems to contradict both theism and evolution – the two fundamental beliefs it is supposedly be based on…
Why?
In short, theistic evolution totally contradicts the act of creation clearly described in the bible so cherished by the great majority of believers…
Theistic evolution also seems to contradict the fundamental evolutionary belief that evolution is a random and an unguided process…
While there may be, and probably are, many variations to the theistic evolution belief system, the general idea most likely is that God either created the laws governing the universe for life to create itself and then evolve to 10 billion species we apparently have on Earth today, or He created the first “simple” life form and let it evolve, through some kind of Darwinian process (either guided or unguided), such as random mutations and natural selection…
In any case, no matter how one can look at theistic evolution, its supporters seem to want to have the better or the best of two worlds. They would like to be respected by both theists and evolution supporters… In my view, theistic evolutionists sit on the fence between theism and evolution belief systems and can, and should, “get shot” by both sides…In other words, they should be rejected by both sides of the worldviews because of their obvious inconsistencies…
Theistic evolutionists belong to the large group of people who I call The Swedish Buffet Belief System. They want to believe in something but they would like to pick and choose themselves what they are going to believe. They want to decide what that “the truth” is going to be…
Theistic evolutionists (and many believers today as well) remind of the lyrics of one of the songs by Benjamin Booker entitled “Believe”:
“I just want to believe in something
I don’t care if right or wrong
I just want to believe in something
I cannot make it on my own”
In any case, theistic evolution has what I call The Judas Iscariot Effect written all over it. According to the bible, Judas Iscariot was Jesus’ apostle who, just like theistic evolutionists, wanted the best of both worlds. He was following Jesus, saw many of his miracles first hand, and yet, he also decided to make a few bucks on the side by cooperating with Jesus’ enemies and sold him for 30 pieces of silver…
In my view, theistic evolution has a trademark Judas Iscariot. Its supporters like to have the best of both worlds:
the theistic world support to view them as believers in God, and the so-called scientific world of evolutionary scientists…
As I have already mentioned it at the outset, just like Judas Iscariot, theistic evolutionists are sitting on the fence between theism and evolution, and should “get shot” from both sides of the worldviews…
After realizing his mistake of trying to play both sides of the worldviews, Judas Iscariot committed a suicide…
I personally think that theistic evolutionists “commit both religious and scientific suicides” by promoting both religious and scientific inaccuracies… just to put it very lightly…
One of the prefect examples of such inaccuracies is the promotion of the many of unfounded speculation that Adam and Eve could not have been the only two human parents of the whole human race… This unfounded notions recently got some unnecessary attention from Biologos “born-again” theistic evolutionist Dennis R. Venema by means of his book… These inaccuracies however have been exposed by a biologist Richard Buggs and some others…
BTW: If anyone, including theistic evolutionists, has some ideas how to experimentally test the unfounded speculations based on pure assumptions, such as human mutation rate now must equal Adam and Eve’s mutation rate or how to challenge the sharp population bottleneck of 8 people after Noah’s flood, please speak up…
There may be some data available of some sharp bottleneck, isolated populations recently discovered in the Amazon, as well as others, such as Inuit, Bushman and the like…
There are two separate questions to disentangle. The first is the question of having semantic content, which I will take as the same as having a truth value. That question is something different from being true; that is, whether the truth value is .TRUE. (for the Fortran programmers among us). One can agree theories have truth content but still be an anti-realist (which includes quietism about realism).
In the philosophy I have looked at, the issue concerns whether theories with unobservables have truth content. No one argues whether statements solely about observables, like paths in cloud chambers, have truth value. Logical positivists thought all unobervables in theories could be replaced by series of statements about observables and sense data, so there was no need for unobservables. These claims and other similar ones have been rejected. Therefore most now agree that theories containing unobservables should be taken literally, that is as having truth value. (BTW, there is no relationship between this and ones theorizing about the concept of truth).
For me, in the end whether or not you are a scientific realist, that is whether you think theories are .TRUE., depends on your intuitions about the merits of the No Miracles argument versus those of the Pessimistic Meta-induction. I recognize there are many more technical and detailed issues, arguments, and counter-arguments. But I think that intuition is at the core.
I am confused by your use of ‘convention’ since I associate the word with arbitrariness based only on a social agreement. In what sense is it arbitrary to call the no-miracles argument arbitrary? Or in what sense is it arbitrary to call some statements true and not others? Again, I see this issue as unrelated to one’s concept about truth. In particular, one does not to subscribe to a correspondence theory of truth to be a scientific realist.
I do agree that the community of scientists does use various means of persuasion to bring dissenters into line with what that community sees as the consensus view. Atlantic has a fine article on that process in the argument that an asteroid impact causes the extinction of dinosaurs (versus global volcanic eruptions).
To me, those seem almost orthogonal. Yet you say that they are the same.
Purely syntactic statements can have a truth value. And poetry is full of semantic content but we don’t presume it to have truth values.
However, depending on what you mean by “semantic content”, I might agree that the best scientific theories should have no semantic content. That is to say, viewed as if propositions, the best scientific theories should consist only of analytic propositions. And I’ll add that I see it as a fundamental mistake to view scientific theories as propositions.
This sort of reasoning never made sense to me. It is what makes philosophy look like a religion. What philosophers call “unobservables” are central to what scientists call “observations” (or “data”). If “unobservable” means what cannot be seen with the naked eye, and truth does not apply to unobservables, then should we conclude that a blind person cannot have any notion of truth?
The whole point of theoretical terms in a scientific theory, is to define them carefully enough that we can observe them. Whether or not a theory has truth values, observation statements made under a theory do have truth values.
From SEP:
As I see it, the standard account from philosophy of science does make the success of science a miracle. My own philosophy of science avoids that, yet I am accused of being anti-realist.
As for pessimistic induction — for me, that cannot get a foothold. Since I take it that scientific theories are neither true nor false, the pessimistic induction cannot even get started.
Scientific theories emerge from the scientific consensus. You don’t count that as a social agreement?
We changed from Aristotelian ideas about motion to the Newtonian conception of motion and then to the relativistic conception of motion. This sort of change is completely consistent with the view that there is some arbitrariness in our choice of scientific theories.
That an asteroid impact caused extinction, is an hypothesis rather than a theory. It is unfortunate that we sometimes use “theory” when we mean “hypothesis”. I’ll agree that an hypothesis should have a truth value, even if that truth value is currently unknown. But scientific theories are not hypotheses.
BruceS,
That’s all very helpful, and thank you!
I do think that there’s a question here about “truth in a theory” and “truth of a theory”. (This may be the distinction that Neil was making.)
Within a theory, or with respect to a theory, we can identify true and false claims. With respect to the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, it is true that species are populations; with respect to thermodynamics, it is true that temperature is mean kinetic energy, etc.
That’s distinct from the question whether the theory is “true of” reality. Neil has been urging that that’s a nonsense question. In fact I agree, largely for the reasons he gives, as well as reasons of my own.
For me, the really interesting question arises as to how we can make sense of scientific realism without attributing truth to theories en bloc, or if you prefer (this might be somewhat inside baseball) a version of scientific realism that accepts Carnap’s distinction between “internal questions” and “external questions.”
That’s all in Sellars and Hall.
Not nonsensical, categorial.
J-Mac,
Link to the video for J-Mac: “Stop trying to be God”.
I know. I don’t always cite or quote everything I say here because the constant name-dropping annoys some folks. But certainly my claim to originality is quite meager.
Could you explain a bit more of what you mean?
Yes, that’s exactly the point.
Maybe “nonsense question” isn’t quite the right term there.
Truth within a theory is correspondence truth, where the theory defines the correspondence to be used. The truth of a theory cannot be a matter of correspondence, which is why I take it to be more a matter of convention.
I do distinguish between “true” as used technically (such as in this discussion) and “true” as used in ordinary language. For ordinary language use, “P is true” can sometimes be saying only “I agree with P, and I think that you should also agree.” And that sort of usage of “true” seems important for the spreading of ideas and norms throughout the culture.
That’s true! 🙂
A very minor quibble here: to the best of my understanding, the logical positivists thought that sentences containing terms that referred to unobservables (posits) were true if and only if those sentences could be analyzed into sentences that only contained terms that referred to observables. (That’s crucial to their verificationism.) So it wasn’t about eliminating unobservables from the ontology (which may indeed be what van Fraassen wants to do) but explicating the semantics of terms that refer to unobservables.
I especially agree with your last sentence here! But again, it’s important to be careful in the distinctions we make. Whether we are committed to the real existence of unobservables or if unobservables are basically just convenient fictions is one big question; whether there’s scientific progress is another question. In discussions of scientific realism they are typically conflated and indeed they are closely related but they can still be distinguished.
https://www.scribd.com/book/61493351/Hall-on-Categories-Excerpts-From-Philosophical-Systems
Kantian Naturalist,
Both of your points state the matter better than I did. Thanks.
But to convince someone why they should agree, one has to give arguments. If it is a scientific issue, those arguments are going to refer to the pragmatic nature of science — empirical success, simplicity, fruitfulness, unification with other science, etc.
Further, there is a “meta-pragmatism” about how these norms apply in a scientific community that allow them to evolve or be adopted to circumstance.
What I cannot see is how arguments based on pragmatic success can be conventional and hence arbitrary. Perhaps one can say that the goals of science — prediction, control, explanation — are conventional. But after that, it seems to me that convention is not the right description.
ETA: “Only social agreement” – it is the “only” in describing convention that I want to emphasize. Scientific consensus involves more than arbitrary agreement — there is argument based on pragmatic success according to goals and norms of science.
ETA: Let me temper that agreement by adding that I understand Carnap accepted pragmatic arguments for choosing the internal framework. Given the goals for science of prediction, control, explanation , then scientific theories/language and the model/vocabulary for a given scientific domain is the one most effective in meeting those goals. Then the no miracles argument says science is true of that reality. So saying scientific theories are truly about real entities (or structure or processes) seems to me to be a claim about a reality within a framework that should be important to us as humans. Such truth is not arbitrary.
FWIW, even a hard-assed realist like Psillos has tempered his position to be something in this neighborhood. Choosing the Realist Framework
Yes, we agree about this.
Maybe you are reading too much into “arbitrary”. It isn’t the same as random. As far as I know, it really only implies that different choices could have been made.
Here and in Canada, we drive on the right side of the road. That is often mentioned as an example of a social convention. And in Australia and the UK, they drive on the left, so different choices could have been made. But nobody suggests that you could have a rule to drive on the right when the sun is out and on the left when the sun is behind a cloud. That would be taking “arbitrary” too far, and would be a poor pragmatic choice.
I think you are missing something there.
In physics, we take mass, time and distance as fundamental. And all other properties are derived from those. But to me, as a mathematician, it is obvious that we could have take quite different properties as fundamental, and derive everything else from the ones we take. It is just a matter of a simple change of variable — the kind of thing you used when you learned the chain rule in calculus. So in some sense, the whole of physics is arbitrary, and based on accidents (or choices) from history. But if physics were done with different choices, it would still be describing the same world. And maybe it would be — more or less — translatable to our current theories (via a change of variables).
Other than the trivial cases of tautology and contradiction, I don’t see how syntax alone can yield truth. One needs a model.
Perhaps you will use mathematical truth as a counterexample. In that case, you assume math is nothing more than syntax, where the math proofs are to be seen as syntactic manipulations. I think that means you have a truth from an inquiry with the goal of mathematical proof. But I know you have given the issue deeper thought than than I have. I’ll see if you can find your blog entries.
I do agree that the inquiry into poetic truth is different from the inquiry into scientific truth, which is in turn different from inquiry into ethical truth. But given that, poetry does have truth of its sort.
I’m having trouble parsing that. Are you saying scientific theories should be analytic propositions? And what do you mean by “proposition”?
Perhaps the issue is whether you consider the structure of scientific theories to be syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic (see SEP).. (As per previous post, I lean to the last).
I have to disagree with that.
There a weed growing in my backyard. Is that true or false? I’m not asking you whether there is a weed. I am asking whether the weed itself is true or false.
And yes, I think that’s a nonsense question. We do not apply truth to reality. We apply truth to statements about reality.
We cannot have statements about reality unless we somehow name parts of reality.
It is that naming that is conventional. And the truth of statements using those names is relative to the naming convention.
Maybe a little more detail there. We divide the world into parts (often described as “carving the world at its seams” except there are no seams. There are only seems, as in “that seems like a good way to do it”. So we have a system of carving conventions — how to carve up the world into parts. And we have a set of naming conventions — how to name the parts into which we carved the world. Only then, can we make statements about the world and judge whether those statements are true or false.
Standard philosophy of science sees a scientific theory as a description. And that’s where I disagree. I see a theory as, primarily, a set of systematic carving conventions and naming conventions. Statements made within the theory are then descriptions and properly seen as true or false. But the theory itself is what connects those statements to reality. The theory is the set of carving and naming conventions.
Take Newton’s laws as an example. When I first saw them, it was obvious that Newton’s first law was false. We know from every day experience that things in motion slow down and stop, contrary to Newton’s first law. So to grasp Newton’s laws, I had to understand that he was reconceptualizing motion. And, in effect, that’s changing the naming conventions.
And the result of that reconceptualization — we can now talk about the force of friction, the force of air resistance, etc. These — force of friction and force of air resistance — are new parts of the world that we can now carve out, following Newton’s conventions. We can now measure quantities that nobody would have thought of measuring under the old conception. So this increases the amount of information we can have about reality.
It is that increase in the amount of information that explains the success of science. Miracles are not required.
I’ll suggest: 2+2=4
Yes, two kittens plus two puppies is four animals. And that’s a semantic truth. But “2+2=4” seems syntactic. Maybe you consider it a tautology. I’m inclined to say that it is conventional but not tautologous.
No, definitely not. I’m saying philosophy of science seems to treat them as propositions.
I see scientific theories as being about the behavior of scientists working in that area. When a scientist sees an object accelerating, he is to ascribe a force in accordance with by
.
I agree with that and it is part of my scientific realism. If the only difference is a change of variables, then that is of no significance.
Put more generally: There is a fundamental causal-nomological structure to the world. . Successful physics converges on it. That structure is real. Isomorphisms of the structure [eta presented by a particular approach in physics] are no significance: they are saying the same things about that reality.
General covariance is about one kind of isomorphism. But I think there are deeper kinds. But I don’t know enough math to define “deeper” well. I have the vague idea it relates to category theory.
But why are we justified in using the word ‘true’ in math? And under that use of the word, why it is true?
I say that in math ‘true’ means proved from the assumed axioms. A statement is true in a math system if it meets the standards of proof for the relevant math community.
Truth in science is something different. More specifically, the means of inquiry after truth differ. In science, truth is about the world we live in. Further, it is an inquiry with the goals of how to explain, control, predict that world (and not, eg, about how humans shouldtreat each other and themselves in that world, which involves ethical inquiry and truth).
ETA: But what about “2+2=4” in the sense that two things plus two things is four things? This is now a statement about the world. The world as referenced by the English language is the model for the (say Peano) axioms of the math. Reference to that world is provided by the English language. Further, because “2+2=4” is proved from the axioms of math, we have a priori knowledge the inquiry will yield empirical truth. (ETA: poorly worded, but I will leave for now).
For physics’ theories expressed as math, the semantic component of scientific realism says the we should take all of the model’s entities as making literal reference to something in the world, and scientific realists say all those entities captured in that reference exist in the world, whether observables or not.
ETA: split rest into separate post.
This sound close to the philosophers who take a pragmatic approach to the structure of scientific theories. From SEP
In particular, it rejects view that scientific theories must be expressed in a language like predicate logic.
Before I address your long and interesting post on truth and reference, I need to understand your view of scientific theories better. It is only scientific realism and scientific theories I am trying to address, not global realism or realism in other domains like math or ethics.
The distinction between observables and non-observables is important when we focus on scientific realism. Scientific realism takes realism about ordinary objects like tables and trees as given. Unobservables lie outside that realm of ordinary objects so the question of their existence is separate.
As defined by Constructive Empiricists:
Scientific realists do question whether such a distinction can be made, much as you do.
But how can we observe a quark? Or a dinosaur? Or a black hole? We can only observe their predicted effects in the ordinary world when using instruments built in accordance with the theory.
Because of that, would you say such things as quarks do not exist? It is key that I am focusing on quarks, not on their predicted effects on the ordinary world.
I skimmed the start of that, but the philsophical context is too far from what I know to understand it without a lot of work.
Has anyone revisited Hall’s ideas to express them in terms of modern debates about ontology and meta-ontology, and in particular how these ideas apply to scientific realism?
For example, in the appendix of his 2012 Choosing the Realist Framework Psillos provides some preliminary remarks on how his approach relates to Carnap’s Empiricism, semantics and ontology and Quine’s criticism of Carnap’s approach to ontology.
Let me try again on that.
Math truth is provability and a math theorem is proved (ie true) when the proof is accepted by the relevant math community.
“Two things plus two things equals four things” makes a statement about the world. The world is used as a model for the axioms of arithmetic. The English language provides the details of that modeling process. That is, English and its community of speakers supply the reference for ‘two’, ‘four’, ‘plus’, ‘equals’, ‘things’ and the norms for determining the meaning of the sentence using those references. For the math notion of truth,we predict (not a priori know) that when we take two things plus two more things we will have have four things. And indeed that is true, but now using English language and its community of speakers to determine truth (not math). So from that we have evidence that the model of the axioms we are using is successful.
We can generalize this for scientific use of mathematics, that is, for the case where the science is expressed as mathematical equations, as in GR. The science and the relevant scientific community provide the referencing process in the model (I think this is similar to Neil’s ideas) and the math allows us to derive predictions for testing by proving the predictions are a mathematical consequences of the equations of the theory. If the predictions are successfully tested, it increases our confidence in the model used to interpret the math, that is, in the scientific theory expressed in the equations and the model.
Me. Molto Espensivo unfortunately, though. https://www.amazon.com/Roots-Representationism-Introduction-Everett-Hall/dp/3659484350
This is also in the same ballpark, I think, although linguistics isn’t really my cuppa:
https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/file/bach_-_natural_language_metaphysics.pdf.pdf?token=AWy8g2Y9870m4oVhiW8A-jHXEBAo9vlHmaKUBrB3fHCmuoRRoNNVXSqpErOb0S0XDTo1epoEXfcWXeREcuIeY4j-iWI1wHfnN_x7jpVfzrCOfrzYGicpe–UW_ACFPobMCkwPmpSbtXOlkrsBCYb3Mcdlbecdsnp28Zcl-cllgHmgmPyxpSuQM4PI9HMC61_0gN6oh8cWEUYEWXn97sarX-c
The other thing to do is look up articles by his student Romane Clark in JSTOR.
I don’t agree with that.
I sympathize with the thinking behind it. I do agree that there is a reality that is independent of us. And 30 years ago (before I got into studying human cognition), I might have said something similar.
However, I now understand that the structure we see is the structure that we have created. Structure comes from the way that we carve up the world.
There is a world to carve up, and that world is independent of us. But the structure we see comes from the relations of the parts into which we carve the world, so is dependent on our carving.
We carve up the world pragmatically. And thus the way that we carve the world cannot avoid being dependent on our biology. An alien from Andromeda would see similar structure to what we see, if that alien carved up the world in accordance with the same kinds of criteria. But there is no reason to assume that such an alien would use similar criteria.
I’ll put it differently. It is possible that the world is full of gnomes, elves and fairies. But they are completely invisible to us and we are completely invisible to them. Note that I am not seriously proposing this. It is just that it cannot be ruled out. Our access to reality is limited by our biology, and the structure we see comes from how we manage to exploit whatever access to reality we do have.
I checked the Wikipedia entry on “nomological”. It says:
I do not know of any general laws that lack theoretical underpinnings and just are. Anything we call a law depends on how we carve up the world and how we name the parts. And that carving and naming already amounts to a kind of theoretical underpinning, though perhaps a crude one.
That seems about right. But I think that applies to all technical uses of “true”. A statement is true if it meets the appropriate community standards for that kind of statement. And the standards come from us humans.
In a way, the core point of all of this, is that philosophy should pay far less attention to “justified true belief” and pay far more attention to how we develop standards. Because that’s at the core of human cognition. That’s what is needed to understand consciousness. That’s the basis for intentionality (our ability to have thoughts that are about something). And an AI system cannot be conscious because we want that AI system to use our standards instead of inventing its own.
Yes, but not as different as you think. Science still must develop standards. We don’t call them “axioms” — we call them “measuring conventions”. And they differ from mathematics, in that they connect our statements to reality. Science, most basically, is not solving a truth problem; it is solving an intentionality problem. It is inventing standards which allow us to talk and think about reality with increasing amounts of detail. And those same standards also become standards for scientific truth. But it starts with inventing useful standards.
No, it is a statement about an idealized world. The actual world might be more complicated. Think of how “two things plus two things” might work out if those things are quantum particles. Or think about the hanging chads with vote counting in the 2000 Florida presidential elections.
That’s why I’m a fictionalist about mathematics. I see mathematical entities as place holders for the ways that they will eventually be used. The trouble with mathematical platonism, is that it’s not clear how the mathematics of platonic entities could apply to physics unless the entities from physics are also platonic.
That seems reasonable enough.
Thus it privileges the measuring instruments in the head over the measuring instruments in the lab. But I don’t see that “in the head” distinction as important, since lab instruments were designed using what’s in the head.
Why pursue the truth?
I think you got me confused with theistic evolutionists…
Neil Rickert,
“We wish pursue the truth no matter where it leads. But to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism both .”- Carl Sagan
Yes, that’s the common view. But there’s no reason that we cannot question it.
So…you have changed your mind!!! How nice…
You see Neil, I have noticed that you have been one of the main driving forces of this OP and I was just wondering as to why?
Changed my mind about what?
Weird. I have said very little about the OP. However, the discussion drifted off-topic, and I have been responding to some of the off-topic comments.
That’s my view as well — what Jay Rosenberg calls ‘convergent realism’. I would probably finesse it just slightly and say that there’s a real causal & modal structure to the world, and that a succession of empirically confirmed theories of fundamental physics converges on that structure.
But what do say about all the rest of science that isn’t fundamental physics? Is there no progress in biology or sociology?
I’d say I agree with this about 95%, so let’s quarrel about the remaining 5%.
I think it’s clearly right to say that we cannot know what the world is like independent of our way of knowing anything at all about it. (That way of putting it makes the impossibility of absolute knowledge look like a tautology, which is — I think — actually the point that Kant was trying to make.)
And it’s clearly right that any organism with cognitive powers will represent its world, and hence perceive its world and act with regard to it, according to the systematically biased representations that are partially constitutive of how the organism occupies its niche. (To take a shopworn example: bats will represent their world as containing the relations that are represented by way of echolocation.)
This is just to say that it’s possible (and I would say necessary) to put Kant’s promissory notes on the hard currency of empirical cognitive science and evolutionary theory, just as (in their wildly different and perhaps incompatible ways) Nietzsche, Dewey, and Sellars all attempted to do.
But does that dash all hopes for convergent realism, at least with regard to fundamental physics? I’m not entirely sure why would work think so — though I do accept that no one has yet done the hard work necessary to reconcile convergent realism about fundamental physics with the role of ecological, developmental, and evolutionary constraints in shaping our cognitive powers.
But why would you hope for convergent realism?
Convergent realism is the view that science is coming to an end. It’s the nature of a convergent sequence, that it can change a lot at the beginning, but the amount of change gets smaller and smaller as it approaches the point of convergence.
You appear to be looking at science as providing a description of the cosmos. And your hope for convergent realism is presumably a hope for something like a nearly complete and true description. But if truth comes from us (from human culture), then that seems like an impossibility.
I see science as about us, rather than about cosmos. Science gives us abilities to exploit the cosmos to our benefit. And, as human culture changes, human interests in exploiting the cosmos also change. And that will also change science. Newtonian physics led to huge changes. But, lately, it has been digital electronics, gps satellites, genome sequencing that have been responsible for much change.
I don’t see science converging to a passive state. I see science as dynamic, because human culture is dynamic.
On the expense: the Russians don’t seems to have helped Trump with his Clinton emails request (at least not through Wikileaks), but they have helped me and others with expensive academic texts. (PM me for info). But, alas, it appears your book and Clinton’s emails have something in common.
However, I did look at T of C on your academia site. It appears that the book’s contributions are more from metaphysical/epistemological viewpoint, rather than the restricted versions of those considered by the phil of science I have read. So I suspect I would get much out of the book with what I know now.
I could tell from the reference list. Is the a common list or is it distributed among the contributions?
Good point. It is probably better to say that science progresses.
I agree with KN that it is reasonable to hope an alien species would still arrive at a fundamental physics structurally isomorphic to ours. That hope relies on the no miracles argument: the reason physics works well is that the structures in the math are isomorphic to real world structures. There is also a hope about mathematics being a non-human specific tool.
I agree with that as far as it goes. What scientific realism adds is the semantic claim (detailed above). Then the no-miracles argument argues that claim is sound. But I think we are at an impasse on these issues.
I agree with the first part of that: we do carve the world into parts and how we carve it initially derives from the evolutionary and sensory niche humans occupy. An issue between you and me, I think, relates to the difference science makes to that initial carving. I think that there are human-independent seams , namely the causal-nomological structure. Further, I think that science can reveal them, modulo isomorphisms.
Why would you question the pursuit of truth in science? Do you prefer the alternative, such as the support of preconceived ideas?
I mean…this is exactly what Darwinists are doing… unless obviously you can find evidence that Darwinian evolution is a scientific theory…;-)
I think there is progress. But I stuck with physics for the same reasons you have done so in other posts: it is universally applicable.
Fundamental physics picks out a universal causo-nomological structure. Non-fudemental physics or other sicencies, emergent structures are involved. That emergence may depend on human-specific senses and cognition. Rovelli argues “time” is an example of such a human-dependent emergent entity.
I have a question about your statement that claiming a theory is true of reality is nonsense. Is that position based on Carnapian deflationism of metaphysics? Or is it a based on a version of Ladyman/Ross Rainforest Realism which I take as saying claims of realism/truth must be made within the domain of a science and be based on that science’s conceptual scheme. Or something else?
Some of the comments in this thread are about the possibility of conceptual schemes that humans and aliens could share. As usual, there is an SF book for that:
Solaris the best I know of. The people in the novel cannot understand the alien, but the novel leaves open whether the alien understands ours.
Annihilation again presents a alien presence which mystifies us (that us includes some readers like me).
The Gone World has aliens which do understand our schemes, at least as far as fitting tortures to religious beliefs or exercise habits. I recommend it to anyone who liked Annihilation. It covers similar themes, but the science involved is not biology; it is QM under the mulitverse interpretation.
And for the worst example of this type of SF, I nominate the Star Trek:TNG episode about aliens that communicated using (human!) metaphors only. A conceptual scheme which Picard (who else?) was able to figure out.
I’m pretty stymied by this post, Bruce. I know about the Russian site you mean (and there’s also a very nice Belarus site devoted to books), but I don’t know what “T of C” is or what “reference list” or “contributors you’re talking about. There are only a couple of things in my Hall book that haven’t been published elsewhere (or that I haven’t put on on-line). Among them is one long paper on metaphysical realism and our “categorial predicament” that I think is relevant to the conversation here. (The Journal of the History of Analytic Philosophy kept it for two years made me revise it once, and had it reviewed four times before the editor finally said No and I gave up and threw it into my book.) I’ll probably break down and shove it somewhere on the internet at some point. But not yet, I don’t think.
BruceS,
Don’t forget this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65dzjOIkwwI
One of my high school teachers (around 1960) asserted that science would reach a point in a decade or two at which everything that is knowable by the methods of science would be known.
I did not know much then and do not know much now, but I knew that was BS.
Table of contents?
Table of Contents.
If the list of references has people like Kitcher and Worrall or many others that I see in the Phil of Science stuff I read, then I will have a chance at understanding it without a lot of background work.
If there is one list of references for all papers at the end of the book, it would be easier to review than if each paper had its own list. I’ve seen both approaches in other books.
I agree that the paper you mentioned sounds relevant, but also likely in ways I am not conversant in.
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing
Let’s treat those, taken all together, as a single thing. Call that an example of an exotic category.
The thing is, that we do use exotic categories. The CDMA signalling system used for cell phones switches between different frequencies according to a digital code. So what we take to be a single signal is an exotic category.
Why would we expect an alien species to use the same exotic categories?
There’s a pair of shoes on the floor in a closet. We see those shoes as separate things. So when we carve up the world, those are separate parts. I very much doubt that an ant would see the shoes as anything other than part of the floor. It can’t lift them so it cannot see why we take them to be separate.
I am questioning whether that is an adequate description of science.
The gas laws are very important in physics. The gas laws are false, about any real gas, and they are well known to be false. But they are a very useful approximation.
If science were the pursuit of truth, it should scrap the gas laws (and scrap a lot of other physics, too). But if science is primarily pragmatic, then it should keep those laws because of their usefulness.
Not to break the spell of your post, but…
I restricted my claim to mathematics of fundamental physics to avoid examples like those. I also only suggested “aliens would arrive at” an isomorphic fundamental physics. Actually checking whether that is the case would be tricky. It would need some way of communicating about the world first to set the references/model of the math. That might be dicier, for reasons your post addresses. But if Carl Sagan thought it was possible, that’s good enough for me!
Did you see the movie Arrival? It centers on trying to close the types of conceptual gaps you outline. I enjoyed it, but the ending is one reason I did not mention it in this context: it is ridiculous in the way that X-men getting supernatural powers by genetic mutations is ridiculous.* (I have not read the novella it was based on).
I see you’ve let Davidson out of the closet. ETA: I’m not sure if he is on your side; I guess it would depend on whether inter-translatability applies across species. I suspect not.
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Spoiler on Arrival: learning the alien’s language gives one the ability to time travel. Or at least to give oneself knowledge of the world for all time, and to make such an ability retroactive.