Ouros wrote:

The more I think about it, the more I think that materialism isn't even wrong.

If that's the case, then the ​denial of materialism also isn't even wrong. You can't take the negation of nonsense, unless you want some more nonsense.

​That said​, a materialist might be a (perhaps selective) scientific realist; that is, he might hold that the existence of the entities posited by science is a reason to suppose that some of them exist. And he might hold that one can know, for instance, that there are certain particles out of which everything else is 'built', even if he hasn't situated those particles in a complete theory.

​Another question is what is meant by 'materialism'. If materialism is, broadly, the view that everything is made out of matter, then it will be incumbent upon the materialist to say what matter is and how everything is made out of it. But maybe it isn't a view​ or ​set of theses​ at all, but rather an approach or temperament. Perhaps the materialist is the person who tends to look for reductive explanations or who tends to consult science or who tends to avoid positing what science cannot explain--quite apart from having any general theory about how it all hangs together, or about the fundamentality of the entities he admits.

Greg wrote:

Ouros wrote:

The more I think about it, the more I think that materialism isn't even wrong.

If that's the case, then the ​denial of materialism also isn't even wrong. You can't take the negation of nonsense, unless you want some more nonsense.

​That said​, a materialist might be a (perhaps selective) scientific realist; that is, he might hold that the existence of the entities posited by science is a reason to suppose that some of them exist. And he might hold that one can know, for instance, that there are certain particles out of which everything else is 'built', even if he hasn't situated those particles in a complete theory.

​Another question is what is meant by 'materialism'. If materialism is, broadly, the view that everything is made out of matter, then it will be incumbent upon the materialist to say what matter is and how everything is made out of it. But maybe it isn't a view​ or ​set of theses​ at all, but rather an approach or temperament. Perhaps the materialist is the person who tends to look for reductive explanations or who tends to consult science or who tends to avoid positing what science cannot explain--quite apart from having any general theory about how it all hangs together, or about the fundamentality of the entities he admits.

 I tend to agree with this. I wonder which of these stances (whether its more of a metaphysical claim or an approach to metaphysics) is more credible. I tend to think "materialism" has a better shot of working if one adopts an Aristotelian view of nature, so to me the reductive approach stroke of "materialism", which seems to be the more popular one these days, makes much less sense.