And then you get some really weird naturalists. For example, one of the guys at that conference I linked holds that everything reduces mathematical entities (ersatz particles, I think -- a bit different from Tegmark). He's one of the co-authors of Ladyman and Ross's Every Thing Must Go.

iwpoe wrote:

I never quite understood how exactly in the end Russell maintained his atheism. If you think "north of" is real why is the Form of the Good troubling?

I myself am open to something like the Hegelianism of Russell's youth, but I'm not sure that can easily get you to anything like the kind of modern scientistic atheism taken for granted now, or if it's even a non-theism.

Certainly nothing like what Dawkins thinks. Russell held to the existence of universals. For example, in his earlier works, I understand he held to the existence of full-on, Platonic Forms or at least "free-floating" abstract objects. In his later works, he dropped the Forms but held that all objects were just bundles of instantiations of universals.

Last edited by John West (6/26/2015 9:17 am)

I think it's important to point out though, that truthmaking isn't reference. For instance, consider the statement "Unicorns don't exist.” This is almost certaintly a true statement, but clearly it doesn't refer to a not-existent. That would be absurd. Instead, we can say the statement “unicorns don't exist” is true in virtue of the totality of horse-like animals, none of which are single-horned. I'm not saying you're implying this, by the way. I just think it's important, in a thread partly about Platonism, to point out so that people don't mistake truthmaker talk for the old argument from reference.

 There are plenty of other good reasons why intellectually honest people should admit universals.

Last edited by John West (6/26/2015 9:59 am)

I'm not used to truthmaker talk yet (cribbed it from Plantinga and a former student if his)- though to be fair to the full range of the "absurd" I think Meinong is committed to the position that non-reals *are* in some sense.

Oh, as I understand, Quine was fine with metaphysics, especially if they're indispensable to our best scientific theories. He just didn't think that we should be able to strike out scientific theories with metaphysical arguments. Instead, he thought natural science and metaphysics should be contiguous, with the hypothetico-deductive method leading the investigations[1]. In fact, in a sense, Quine (and his era of philosophers) mark the end of positivism and verificationism (and even gave some of the decisive arguments against verificationism), and the start of contemporary philosophers taking metaphysics seriously again.

One reason for Quine's methodology was that he was concerned about how we might select between competing, seemingly plausible, internally coherent metaphysics (only one of which, after all, can be correct)[2], and thought we should anchor our metaphysics in our best scientific theories, partly, to help deal with this.

For what it's worth, I agree with Quine only insofar as I think metaphysics and natural science ought to be contiguous with each other. But I approach metaphysics with a broadly Aristotelian methodology, in short, because I distrust the idea of building a metaphysic on uncertain inductive inquiry (as in science) instead of rigorous, deductive reasoning (based on undeniable first principles, like the law of non-contradiction, and equally undeniable, basic, self-evident features of reality, like change).

[1] Part of this is tied up with Quine's view that when we confirm a scientific theory, we confirm the theory whole. So, crudely, if I posit a quark and part of what's required for the theory I'm making that posit based on is existential commitment to mathematical entities, Quine argues I would be intellectually dishonest if I were a realist about the quarks, but not the mathematical entities the theory on which I'm making that posit require to work.
[2] Quine famously wrote:

Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle? (Quine. Two Dogmas of Empiricism.)

iwpoe wrote:

I mean, how does that actually deal with the problem? One has just sunk the problem into a problem both of competing scientific approaches (which are the norm, though not emphasized as such) and competing metaphysical interpretations of prevailing apporaches.

I slid in with a ninja-edit right before you posted precisely to clarify this point (sorry). It helps by putting a constraint on the type of internally coherent metaphysics that may or may not be correct.

iwpoe wrote:

Metaphysics has to seek its own grounds proper to its status as fundamental, not seek to borrow some alien method- even a deductive one.

Not according to Quine.

iwpoe wrote:

Also, I'm not sure what it would mean to say that natural science and metaphysics not be contiguous with each other. Even if one held via a metaphysics that science was an illusion, one would presumably still need an ontology of that illusion and its viscitudes. 

Consider Quine's scientific realism. If we're scientific realists and take the findings of the scientific method seriously as Quine wants, then it rules out a Cartesian demon scenario (which would, among other problems, require an instrumentalist view of scientific posits.) So, even though the Cartesian demon scenario can be made internally coherent, it's not contiguous with scientific realism.

Last edited by John West (6/26/2015 11:56 am)