What arguments, or academic disciplines or metaphysics don’t rest on the assumptions of one or both of these “isms”? I’m willing to bet that even some versions of transcendental ones do.
I’ve never thought to ask this sort of question before, so I’m interested to see how this thread goes.
If you have any desire whatsoever to post something, please don’t hesitate. I think that the wider the variety of perspectives we have on this the better. So if you’re one of the really super smart members and you have something to say but are afraid it’ll be too much trouble to explain, then stop being lazy and explain something to us. If you’re reading this and have no idea what it even means, then ask.
I think there’s probably more to be said about this subject that alot of the ones on ILP, and alot of the discussion, because of the nature of the question, will be more philosophical than some.
If no one responds to this, I’ll be really dissappointed in you guys.
So…
What arguments, or academic disciplines or metaphysics don’t rest on the assumptions of one of functionalism and/or reductionism?
As soon as an idea has been abstracted enough to become an image of thought, there is usually a degenerate body of images which become associated with an ‘ism’: Platonism, Nietzscheanism, relativism, absolutism, dualism, monism, spiritualism, atheism… But these are always just images of bodies, representations of mixtures and molecular arrangements of presignifying intensities, or at best they are images of thoughts, signifying but trapped, static, unable to move or evolve and ultimately to ‘mean’ anything. Science traps us this way: ‘scientism’ or naive ‘pragmatism’ is probably the worst, but ‘functionalism’ or ‘structuralism’ is pretty close, too.
How, after all, do we guarantee the coherency or completeness of a system of explanations? In fact, we always need a bigger system to establish completeness. But if we’re searching rather for foundations, we can trace an actual sociohistorical path and establish the pre-arranged sources and singular vortexes, the plane of consistency upon which all the various ‘isms’ co-mingle and evolve into new molecular arrangements. So evolution is the single most important idea in intellectual history. The way into which it has been reduced to an ‘ism’ and set up against, of all things, religion– perhaps the single most interesting consequence of evolution, that it could have once and for all explained spirituality and religion naturally, showing the intermingling of culture and nature… But we’d rather have a debate about God when the real question of social change is immediately before us.
I may simply be too tired to be imaginative but what metaphysical claims are NOT either function and/or reductionist? Aren’t these qualities that are inherant within metaphysical claims?
Fundamentally I believe they would to have any explanitory power, which is necessary to be a metaphysical claim. How could one give an metaphysical explination of anything while avoiding either function or reduction?
By the logic of an identity theorist is you might could say that knowing and not knowing are the same. Maybe we could deconstruct reason and find what about it coincides with the rest of existence? What assumptions would we have to make to do this? Maybe an assumption of identity and then those of neuroscience?