I’m going to make a post that does not include every point I want to make. To do so would make for a very long post, which few would read. I’m going to coin a term - eomic. It’s the adjective form of an acronym - EOM, which stands for epistemology, ontology and/or metaphysics. I am going to use it to discuss eomic considerations in the context of knowledge. That sound a little odd to the philosophically minded, but I’ll use it in the case of scientific knowledge. My claim is that scientific knowledge is that which predicts phenomena. Or, that which produces technology.
Now, when we say “predicts phenomena”, we will often say that when certain conditions are met, a certain outcome will result. And as soon as we say that, the philosopher may pounce and say “How certain?” And that philosopher will almost always then be introducing eomic considerations. Now, I maintain that the scientist can go about his or her work without the slightest awareness of eomic considerations - which is what gives those considerations an importance - they are not truly connected to the actual task of the scientist - they are a separate set of considerations.
Just as the mathematician may do math without knowing the underlying assumptions of the system he is using, so may the scientist. That is not to say that eomic considerations are what underlie science - it’s an analogy. We can produce fire or telephones without metaphysical certitude about the nature of the universe and we can count to ten without knowing the definition of number.
That’s a brief overview of my initial position. It probably needs fleshing out. I am not trying to be mysterious, but brief. Some will get all they need from this to understand what follows, whether they agree or not, and some will not.
In this context, i want to talk about counterfactuals. More to follow. Feel the pressure to keep it short.
So, let’s try an example I found on Wikipedia. I’m gonna concentrate on Lewis.
I am unable to divine how these statements are either true or false. That is, under what circumstances are either of these meaningful claims? They seem to me to introduce eomic considerations - there seems to be a sense in which Lewis knows something that I do not - all I have is probabilities. I have no knowledge that will guide me. Nor could I ever have that knowledge, so far as I can tell. What are these worlds that Lewis knows about that i do not? How is a possible world to be understood?
The Earth has a moon. When we are asked “Could it have been otherwise?”, we may quickly answer, “Yes”. But what does that mean? Do we know what that means when we give that answer? Aren’t counterfactuals useful only with causal conditionals at best? And what is their use in causal conditionals? How are these counterfactuals more effective than a series of hypotheses, which are assigned truth values the old fashioned way and then tested?
Hmmm…
My first thought was, “But what is the ‘M’ stand for?”
I can agree that the task of a scientist is that of a investigative technician, not a ontological architect (theoretical physicist/metaphysicist). But the problem arises when the technician misunderstands the epistemology involved and presents conclusions incorrectly stated without challenge from the philosopher. The evangelical prophet for Science and Technology then proclaims metaphysical truths based on his own misunderstanding of what he thought he was witnessing.
The Engineer asks the technician to try certain things and verify certain things, but he does not ask him reveal the understanding beneath what he has witnessed.
Faust, you know I always do this, but there’s a David Lewis paper called “elusive knowledge” that I think relates to your concept of distinguising between the principles by which a scientist might function and those by which a philosopher might doubt his credibility. Basically, it comes down to the question of when skepticism, (certain kinds at least), can be properly ignored.
I’m not sure if you’d end up agreeing with him or not, based on how much skeptisicm he decides to ignore at a given time on a given subject, but it definitley could serve to contribute to the fleshing out of what you’re getting at, I think.
If I remember correctly, I think the idea is that you narrow things down to the most precice information that you can get based on the information about a thing that you’re presented with, and you at some point have to say look, fuck it, I don’t care if there’s a .001% chance that this rubber might break, I’m putting this thing in!
I mean, if philosopher told me that I’d dumb to wanna put it in cause there’s a possibility a rubber could break, I think it’d be proper to ignore him, because at the end of the day, his philosophical method of determining what he knows is probably hardly any different from what the scientist is doing, at least in its flaws.
I’ll go along with that, James, in that the philosopher will make a challenge - but that challenge can go in more than one direction. if the scientist makes any epistemic claim at all, the philosopher can challenge the notion that eomic (epistemic) concerns have a place at all in the discussion. That may not have been clear, due to my mistake in the OP. Due to that mistake, your response may change - I mean by eomic that ontology and epistemology are metaphysics - that introducing any of these considerations is equivalent in that they are all metaphysical concerns. And that science need not utilize them.
Thus, logic and/or mathematics need not concern itself with eomic considerations - and should not. This is my general objection to modal conditionals.
Smears - whenever I mention Lewis, i think of you. I’ll respond soon.
I did a seminar once on constructing ontologies. You kinda gotta have one for science, it’s just sort of like a bubble within the bubble that is a full philosophical ontology.
You just need a few objects like relations, properties, points, functions…you know, all that scientific stuff. Not alot of room in a scientific ontology for noumenal kind of stuff, but without some kind of collection of objects that makes up the shit they’re doing, how would they know what they were doing?
Well, with the ontology of your average six-year old. Among prominent philosophers, there are at most 2 non-technical logiciansthat share this thinking - and one of them, you seem to despise. Hume and Nietzsche. Hume actually destroyed ontology, along with the rest of eomia. Nietzsche assumed Hume’s stance and expanded upon it. The only other philosophers to ignore epistemology were logicians - and damned few of them, if we have to consider Lewis and his ilk logicians. Frege was one of those who understood that logic admits of no eomia. And it is his conception of implication that all these others like Lewis are trying to emend. To what end, I have never been able to divine. But I do have my suspicions.
None of these are empirical (or “real”) and none of them need to be regarded as anything but mental constructs. You need objects, but these can be defined arbitrarily. That’s not really ontology in the philosophical sense.
What you really need is to understand abstraction. But abstraction is not ontology, either - just don’t tell Plato.
Take a younger child - maybe 2 years old. She learns “cat” and for a while, every furry quadruped is a cat. 2 year olds overgeneralize. When they learn not to, they can become scientists.
Okay, so we are talking about basically 4 disciplines;
Epistemology - structuring thought
Metaphysics - architecting reality models
Logic - requiring consistency in thought and architectural principles
Science - verifying hypotheses
I agree that these disciplines “should” not overlap. But the real social world, due to politics and control efforts, DOES overlap them, quite intentionally. The evangelical prophet of Science and Technology is the black Bishop to play against the white Catholic Bishop. It is a war game with domination as the goal.
But now, I really can’t discern your intended point. Science MUST “utilize them”. They each utilize each other…
James - the Big Three of eomia are Epistemology, Ontology and Metaphysics. Now, the first two are subsets of the last, but the purpose of the coinage "eomia’ is to obviate the need to spell out just which aspect of metaphysics I am referring to - it’s shorthand, and a shortcut from having to defend my general position in terms of each, depending upon who is responding. That is, I’d rather defend my definitions of those terms at once, outside the context of my general thesis. To avoid an article-length post every time.
To wit - you may agree that ontology is metaphysics, but that epistemology is not. By using the term eomia, I’ll settle for a common partial meaning - I’ll take any combination, or one term by itself as extraneous to the scientific endeavor.
Science must utilize logic, by definition. As in my response to Smears, it doesn’t need to use any eomia.
The reason that you can combine epistemology and ontology is that they are so intertwined. Words and knowledge are formed based upon ontological concerns and ontological concerns are based upon words and knowledge. The same with metaphysics. So I have no issue with calling them “EOM”
That part I have to disagree with.
Science cannot verify (its ONLY function) that God exists or doesn’t if Science isn’t given a definition of what the very concept “God” actually is. And it can’t verify that a particle exists either without such definitions of concept. Science for awhile had merely used the obvious concepts, a good place to begin. But when they got into extremely complex mathematical models, the issue arose concerning, “what is it that we are looking at?” That is an issue for EOM to answer, NOT scientists. But they presumed anyway. And from their presumptions we now get all kinds of philosophical and logical non-sense.
Now we have, represented as “Science” something called a “wavefunction”. In pure mathematics, that wavefunction makes perfect sense and is rational to consider. But that same wavefunction is now touted as the CAUSE of a variety of phenomena when it “collapses”. A wavefunction doesn’t “cause” anything. And it only “collapses” because new values were put into the function which yielded a zero result.
Without scientists in later years, very significantly listening to and considering what the EOM people already understand with extreme detail, they make fools of themselves at every turn. They presume to know as obvious what they do not even comprehend.
The ONLY function of Science is to VERIFY what the EOM people propose. It is NOT to propose it themselves. They become the car mechanic who professes universal understanding of engineering beyond what any mere design engineer knows. They are “preaching out of school”.
In a sense, I agree. However, the way we analyze the universe is still arbitrary in that no matter what we are observing, in the end, it is dependent upon sensory perception - or analogs for that. We have many instruments that serve as proxies for sensory perception, but much of what science presents to us but does not yet understand is due to the fact that we cannot find an analog for sensory information. “What is it we are looking at?”, indeed. We merely infer the existence of dark matter because we have no way of experiencing it, for instance.
Without the philosopher, the scientist doesn’t realize that every single “direct observation” he makes, is actually a process of deduction, Logic.
The light entering the eyes is merely a data stream that the mind must use to deduce the probable locations of where “things” might be and what they might be. For the simple day to day things, that process is automatic and need not be understood or examined. But Science is WAY beyond anything concerning the average day to day life. But they are still presuming that there is such a thing a “direct observation” and thus “certain knowledge”. To a large degree that is just fine with me. I hate arguing for no reason. But along comes “Relativity”.
Relativity reveals that your senses can’t be trusted to proclaim absolute truth. But guess what. Without the philosopher, they STILL can’t work out the issues that their own relativity proposed… not to mention that they daily violate the very philosophical foundation for their proposed relativity scheme (they are fundamental being inconsistent - “illogical”). They are forever and directly dependent upon the Logic, the Philosopher.
Fortunately relativity doesn’t actually play a significant role in daily living. But such confusions are then used to promote false paradigms which are then used to profess false understanding to people with significant influence who DO affect your daily living and in some very serious ways.
Misunderstood Science, especially by scientists, leads to (and has led to) some very, very serious consequences. I personally don’t expect homosapian to survive as a species due to the confused notions that are directly related to Science arrogantly ignoring the EOM.
That is partly my point - science can afford to assume that the knowledge it uses is certain. Even if it is not. That question is important to eomians, but is not to scientists. Therefore, the mathematical logic employed works just fine.
What Science experiment can you provide to demonstrate the better society to form? Wouldn’t that take enormous resources and thousands of years?
Science is most definitely affecting society, right?
In what direction?
Science cannot answer that question… at all.
But isn’t that the most important question to be answered before releasing any proposed medicine or weapon? …or really any significant change? “Well, WE don’t see any harm in the thoughts and technologies that we promote throughout society, so what’s the big deal?”
The “big deal” is that you scientists are absolute morons when it comes to the whole issue of WHY you are asked to do what you do in the first place.
Science might be able to “afford assumptions”, but can we afford their assumptions?
This sounds either close to tacit knowledge or that it might be useful to distinguish it from tacit knowledge. (just trying to understand, really. my way of probing)
I can’t see any good way to deal with those statements but to bracket them off, black box them, shrug.
It would seem like he is saying is that all anyone has is probabilities and would implies certainty. So it is not simply an assertion of an outcome but that the outcome is knowledge and fixed. There are implicit claims about the nature of things that Lewis thinks are false, even though the coin toss will affirm most of the explicit claim - but not the certainty called out by ‘would’.
Me probing again: science does not need to use epistemology? I am not sure what that means. I think it is clearer to refer to agents as you have before in the thread, but I am not sure. Does a scientist have to use epistemology? He or she has a methodology based on an epistemology, one that to some extent he or she has probably not just learned implicitly via practice. They don’t need to, as a regular part of their practice, mull over epistemology, most of that already built in before they become professionals, except in instances where the specific research raises epistemological issues.
I hope I can at least see the ballpark you are in, even if I am not in it yet.
