- ficino
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Re: Answer a Physicist's Questions and Objections to Ed Feser's /Aquinas/
Since Ladyman's paper is from a lecture he gave the year before publication of his and Don Ross' book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalised, I shall offer a summary of what Katherine Hawley said in her review found here:
I became aware of Hawley only today. She teaches at St. Andrews. In the review she numbers herself among those who do "neo-scholastic" metaphysics.
Hawley says that Ladyman and Ross reject what they call neo-scholastic metaphysics. As you predicted, Jeremy, they argue for a naturalised metaphysics. Acc to Hawley, they fault many analytic metaphysicians for not knowing enough science. They think that lack matters because metaphysicians often rely on thought experiments which, say L&R, misconceive the world as fundamentally composed of tiny, billiard-ball like particles. Metaphysicians w/ insufficient science background make a priori pronouncements about matters about which scientists have empirical evidence. [Much of the first Ladyman paper I linked goes into various scientific theories/findings, and I certainly could not follow it.]
Hawley replies that while this is true of many metaphysicians, the cutting edge of the field now is "metametaphysics" or "metaontology." In that milieu, she says, "On such occasions, the main threat to standard metaphysics is taken to be some form of Carnapian conceptual-scheme relativism about existence claims." She says there's a lot of argument about everyday objects vs. the more fundamental entities (subatomic stuff?) out of which they are composed. So it gets to what is meant by "exist."
Hawley thinks that Ladyman and Ross would be impatient with the above debate about the nature of ontology and composite object because they think metaphysicians tend to stick too closely to everyday language and descriptions. They think most metaphysicians don't realize how far physicists have moved from everyday common sense. So they think metaphysics' task is to reunify the sciences from an informed perspective.
Hawley says this is a salutary challenge, but she maintains that analytic metaphysics has much to offer. She says L&R are not aware of all the distinctions that contemporary analytic metaphysicians are making in how we talk about things' existing. She extols David Lewis and Peter van Inwagen. Important distinctions made, e.g. by Jonathan Lowe, escape L&R. Overall, Hawley says that analytic metaphysics can do much to help clarify concepts so as to draw conclusions from science.
Hawley doesn't really defend scholastic metaphysics or "neo-scholastic metaphysics" in this review.
If I can manage a summary of Ladyman's lecture linked in my earlier post, I'll post it later.
Last edited by ficino (11/03/2017 8:52 pm)
- Jeremy Taylor
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Re: Answer a Physicist's Questions and Objections to Ed Feser's /Aquinas/
Yes, I think more needs to be unfolded about Ladyman's precise view. For example, it is not clear to me whether his position is that some metaphysicians make illegitimate use of science in areas where it shouldn't be used, or that science does have a lot to say in areas of metaphysics, but metaphysicians just don't understand the science. These would be quite different claims. Personally, I think more can be done to properly delineate the borders of science and philosophy, but I'm sceptical of attempts to reduce philosophy to the handmaid of natural science.
Also, I think exactly how far the models of science should be taken as exhaustive pictures of reality, replacing common sense, is one of areas of dispute between many scientistic naturalists and those more sceptical of such metaphysics. The debate about the nature of the models of physics is, indeed, a good illustration of the importance of philosophy to our knowledge, given it is ultimately a philosophical debate. Physics can't, in the end, decide whether its view of what a physical object is, for example, exhausts the reality of that object. That is a philosophical question. And it shoud be borne in mind that a scientistic naturalist metaphysics is not simply science, and the former would be as undermined as any other metaphysics if we deny philosophy any role but to give a framework for science. If we can never know if the scientific picture exahusts reality, that makes claims that it does as uncertain as those those that it doesn't.
- FZM
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Re: Answer a Physicist's Questions and Objections to Ed Feser's /Aquinas/
ficino wrote:
As to your first, Jeremy, I wrote an "if - then" sentence, so I was not claiming that empirical testibility is the standard of judgment of every discipline. I do see people say that science cannot do what it does unless its principles are delivered by metaphysics, or words to that effect. Aristotle, of course, says things along this line. If someone questions that stance, is that person thereby a proponent of "scientism"? I suppose it depends on how that person handles questions that normally are considered in the province of metaphysics. Ladyman seems to opt for a tentative, epistemically cautious approach to them but to want to eschew building metaphysical structures.
More later.
As Feser defines it in his 'Scholastic Metaphysics' manual, scientism is claiming that science is our only source of knowledge about reality and involves making important claims when science is defined non-trivially (so that it doesn't just mean something like 'rational investigation' or 'learned investigation'). As an example, Feser uses Alex Rosenberg, who, he claims, argues that Physics is our only source of knowledge of reality, that Physics provides exhaustive knowledge of reality and that everything not reducible to Physics does not really exist.
This seems a fair enough definition and I think it makes Jeremy's point here important:
Personally, I think more can be done to properly delineate the borders of science and philosophy, but I'm sceptical of attempts to reduce philosophy to the handmaid of natural science.
I've read somewhere that Ladyman & Ross tend to adopt a kind of sociological or institutional definition of what science is, that science is whatever the people who society identifies as scientists do or produce. I don't know if it's an accurate reflection of their view.
Hawley doesn't really defend scholastic metaphysics or "neo-scholastic metaphysics" in this review.
Again, this is something I recall reading a while ago but I think Ladyman is just using "Neo-Scholastic" as a derogatory term for all the kinds of metaphysics he rejects and doesn't specifically have Scholastic or Neo-Scholastic metaphysics in mind.
- ficino
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Re: Answer a Physicist's Questions and Objections to Ed Feser's /Aquinas/
I've sort of hijacked this thread. My apologies, ForumUser.
If anyone is interested in further discussion of James Ladyman's and Don Ross' version of naturalistic metaphysics, I'm happy to initiate a thread about it. From what I've learned so far, I'll leave L&R here with this summary of some of their positions:
1. they fault the majority of metaphysicians for insufficient background in science, esp. physics
2. they fault practitioners of what they call "a priori" and/or "neo-scholastic" metaphysics for making claims about the world that rest on appeals to common-sense intuition, which get the science wrong much of the time
3. they fault the above metaphysicians for failing to show interesting connections between their dicta and how current empirical theories describe the world
4. they propose that physics provide a regulative principle that metaphysics should respect
5. they propose an ontological commitment to objective modality: scientific theories describe objective modal structures of the mind-independent world
6. claiming that it is better to say that this world contains real patterns than to talk about the individual substances and daily-life events that most metaphysicians work with. I have read that "physics has now long been forced to abandon the classical notion of localized causation between objectively existing, self-subsistent individual entities" (Sophie R. Allen in a review of their book in Analysis).
7. They propose their ontology of objective modality and real patterns provisionally, expecting that much more remains to be figured out.
As far as I can see, they are NOT proponents of "scientism." They want a metaphysics informed by current work in physics.
- seigneur
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Re: Answer a Physicist's Questions and Objections to Ed Feser's /Aquinas/
As far as I can see, they are NOT proponents of "scientism." They want a metaphysics informed by current work in physics.
If the particulars of this are like Dennett (see Feser's review in the latest Claremont Review of Books), it's underwhelming.
That said, ForumUser's questions are legit. I'll be back soon with some sort of defence.
- seigneur
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Re: Answer a Physicist's Questions and Objections to Ed Feser's /Aquinas/
1. Comment: You claim redness is an aspect of the ball's being (p. 10), but rather color is a function of the radiation bouncing off of it. I can make sense of your argument if I think instead of the frequencies of radiation it absorbs: That (as we currently understand) /is/ an aspect of its being.
Getting really fundamental with the physics, isn't it rather so that the ball itself is a whirl of radiation and there's other radiation bouncing off of it? And the redness is not just the other radiation bouncing off the whirl of radiation, but conditioned by the whirl that it's bouncing off of? Right? Agree or disagree?
In terms of physics, each and every thing is such a whirl of radiation and each and every thing reflects some radiation, resulting in a color or an effect like color. Since each and every thing behaves so, resulting in a color or an effect like color, then why is it problematic to say that it's part of their being?
2. Objection (p 10): Why believe this metaphysical model [about actualization and potentiality, and change being the actualization of potential rather than the breaking of atomic bonds; rather than leftover pizza absorbing radiation from the microwave, "the microwave actualizes the pizza's warmth"?] instead of our modern physical models? In other words, "How can change occur?" seems like a meaningless question, and to give it meaning, one must invent or presuppose this system of "metaphysics". Instead of saying "Change occurs when potency is reduced to act," one can instead be satisfied with, "Change occurs when atoms interact": Why do we need this metaphysics at all?
"Change occurs when atoms interact" is also a metaphysics, called atomism. You can't get by without metaphysics. At all.
3. Objection: You say potentiality is "rooted in a thing's nature" (11), but is it not rather rooted in our own minds? Does aluminium have the potential to spark regardless of whether the microwave has been invented? It appears if a set of objects gain a potentiality depending on what we can invent to interact with it, then potentiality is not rooted in the object itself (rather, it is a function of their nature and everything they can interact with). Or, does every physical object have every logically possible potentiality? Yet you appear to reject this resolution to the objection.
Are you saying that the nature of things is rooted in our own minds? In what way? As a delusion? Is the universe and everything in it an ad hoc construct? Given this, how seriously should we take anything about what we observe of things, including by scientific experimentation? And, the crucial question becomes: What is mind? Do you (or science) have an answer?
Good enough for a start, I'd say. Your next post now.
Suppose a man surveys a river near a forest, and declares that there's potential to build a bridge over the river, that the river "has the potential to be bridged". At this point, all we know clearly exists is the man, the river, and the forest. The "potential" the man sees in the system is his own idea about what is possible in the future. He does not see this 'potential' the same way that he sees 'the river'. It does not exist in the same way. It does not clearly exist at all. What appears to exist, rather, is that his interaction with the river and forest triggered his neurons to synapse in certain ways. My concern is that Feser and others (any argument leading to God from this metaphysics) is declaring that this potential is "real", actually exists regardless of the man's presence, whereas it appears to me this potential is only a word used to refer to the man's own thinking, an idea generated by himself.
The potential of the river to be bridged, as you put it, is different from Aristotelian potentiality. The bridge is not *of* the river and it's not done *by* the river or using its components, so the bridge has nothing to do with the river's potentiality. Potentiality of a thing is of the thing's own being. Color is among the potentialities. In the dark, things don't have color. In the light, (visible) things have color. In the dark, the things's color is in potentiality, and in the light it actualizes.
(Because they are both mental models, descriptions of what we see, they can be held in competition....) .... I don't see the basis for declaring that either model we've created (mathematics or metaphysics) is "actually 100% true fact", rather than merely an invented model of observation -- that these systems exist in reality external to us, rather than only in our own minds.
Let's suppose they are invented models. And let's hold them in competition. How do you tell which one wins? This is how I tell: The one with (a) the greatest explanatory scope and (b) rigour (principle of economy a.k.a Occam's razor). Occam's razor alone by itself is not good enough. The explanatory scope is at least as important.
Last edited by seigneur (11/04/2017 9:49 am)
- Jeremy Taylor
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Re: Answer a Physicist's Questions and Objections to Ed Feser's /Aquinas/
Ficino,
Yes, that doesn't look like scientism. I doubt a professional philosopher would fall for scientism.
Still, a lot of it seems questionable. For example, they'd have to spell out just what they think physics can add to metaphysics and philosophy. This gets to the heart of the question of the boundaries between science and philosophy. Many philosophers, especially those like Feser, would doubt physics can say too much about properly philosophical and metaphysical issues. And the stuff about metaphysicians considering everyday day experiences too much is really just a part of the scientistic naturalist agenda, and one that is vigorously denied by those with other perspectives. Indeed, much of what Ladyman and Ross actually seem to be saying, if I have your summary right, is just an argument for scientistic naturalism and an argument against other metaphysical positions. It is hard for me to see what specific role the appeals to science are doing here except being turned into a particular metaphysics - when they talk about ignoring science, they are assuming their own metaphysics (which does things like assume physics gives an exhaustive understanding of objects). If one rejects that metaphysics, then I'm not sure what role the appeals to science can have here.
By the way, there are recent Thomists who have written extensively on philosophy of nature and science. William Wallace comes to mind. The River Forest/Laval Thomists gave especial prominance to the claims of science. Wolfgang Smith, although strictly speaking more a Perennialist/Traditionalist than Thomist, makes extensive use of Thomist philosophy and has written a lot of the relationship between philosophy and contemporary science. He is a scientist himself, I believe.
- seigneur
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Re: Answer a Physicist's Questions and Objections to Ed Feser's /Aquinas/
Ladyman brings what seem to me as a layman to be fairly strong objections to this view that metaphysics rules science, so to speak.
I have read the first 8 pages or so and I won't read further, one of the reasons being that you have apparently abandoned this discussion.
Ladyman does not bring strong objections to anything. His objections are repeated statements like "...even if it is granted that natural selection cannot explain how natural scientific knowledge is possible, we have plenty of good reasons for thinking that we do have such knowledge. On the other hand, we have no good reasons for thinking that metaphysical knowledge is possible." Without spelling out what "good reasons" he is talking about, these are plain assertions without substantiation.
This annoyingly empty manner of arguing is, I think, Quinean style. I have not read Quine directly, but every time I have seen somebody referring to Quine favorably (as Ladyman does), I have had to tolerate statements like "we have (no) good reason to..." Logically, these statements look like conclusions, but the premises are painfully missing. And upon further prying, the premises will remain missing. Such so-called objections can be legitimately dismissed without any further discussion.
If we live in the marketplace of ideas, in the world of "inference to the best explanation" and such, then we have the following situation: Coherent and sound ideas win over incoherent or disconnected ideas; complete arguments with greater explanatory power win over incomplete ones with less explanatory power.
Theism (particularly classical theism) is not a random thought. It's a world view and, at its best, a self-sufficient all-encompassing lifestyle. If you want to argue against it, you must, as a minimum, present a complete world view, so we can take a look at it to determine whether it's better than what we already have.
Last edited by seigneur (11/18/2017 2:55 pm)
- ficino
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Re: Answer a Physicist's Questions and Objections to Ed Feser's /Aquinas/
Ladyman brings what seem to me as a layman to be fairly strong objections to this view that metaphysics rules science, so to speak.
I have read the first 8 pages or so and I won't read further, one of the reasons being that you have apparently abandoned this discussion.
Yes, I thought I ought to let ForumUser's thread remain as his OP began it.
- seigneur
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Re: Answer a Physicist's Questions and Objections to Ed Feser's /Aquinas/
Yes, I thought I ought to let ForumUser's thread remain as his OP began it.
And did you start another thread to carry on the discussion? Do you even want to? ForumUser does not seem to want to have anything further to do with this thread.
Last edited by seigneur (11/19/2017 4:56 am)