Boydstun
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Posts posted by Boydstun
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22 hours ago, KyaryPamyu said:
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§6. Doesn't M2 exist independently of M1? The same way a physical banana exists independently of the visual percept of a banana.
No, and this reveals the unity of 'percept' and 'object'. Does that unity make logical sense? No. Does it happen anyway? Yup. A man will deny he has a nose if logic and/or some dictionary tells him otherwise.
So you reject the logic of Kant's Second Analogy of Experience (A189–211 B232–56) and his Refutation of Idealism? (B274–87)? Why?
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Bill, in general epistemology:
The Sensitivity Principle (papers on Nozick's epistemology)
Being Known by Christopher Peacocke
The Art of Abduction by Igor Douven
Bill, what text or readings are being used for the course?
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19 minutes ago, AlexL said:
1. It is not Maria, but Mario Bunge
2. Your link is: https://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php? Nobody had heard of me.”
Why this disparaging comment? ☹️
That link was incorrect. Fixing it now. Thanks.
The words "Nobody had heard of me" was somehow a portion of recent statement of Nikki Haley (talking about when she had run for Governor) I had copied and pasted elsewhere this morning that mysteriously got pasted here. Not a comment on Prof. Bunge.
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References
Alväger, T., Farley, F.J.M., Kjellman, J., and I. Wallin 1964. Test of the Second Postulate of Special Relativity in the Gev Region. Physics Letters 12:260.
Bahcall, J.N. 1990. The Solar-Neutrino Problem. Sci. Amer. (May):54–61.
Brecher, K. 1977. Is the Speed of Light Independent of the Velocity of the Source? Phy. Rev. Ltrs. 39(17):1051–54.
Breuker, H., Drevermann, H., Grab, C., Rademakers, A.A., and H. Stone 1991. Tracking and Imaging Elementary Particles. Sci. Amer. (Aug):58–63.
Chiao, R.Y., Kwait, P.G., and A.M. Steinberg 1993. Faster than Light? Sci. Amer. (Aug):52–60.
Ciufolini, I., and J.A. Wheeler 1995. Gravitation and Inertia. Princeton: University Press.
Cowan, R. 1998. All in the Timing. Sci. News 154:318–19.
——. 2000. Revved-Up Universe. Sci. News 157:106–8.
Feldman, G.J., and J. Steinberger 1991. The Number of Families of Matter [= Three]. Sci. Amer. (Feb):70–75.
Kearns, E., Kajita, T., and V. Totsuka 1999. Detecting Massive Neutrinos. Sci. Amer. (Aug):64–71.
Krauss, L.M. 1999. Cosmological Antigravity. Sci. Amer. (Jan):52–59.
Kuhn, T.S. 1990 [1970, 1962]. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: Univerity Press.
Lasota, J-P. 1999. Unmasking Black Holes. Sci. Amer. (May):40–47.
Logothetis, N.K. 1999. Vision: A Window on Consciousness. Sci. Amer. (Nov):69–75.
Piran, T. 1995. Binary Neutron Stars. Sci. Amer. (May):53–61.
Putnam, H. 1974. The "Corroboration" of Theories. In Scientific Revolutions. I. Hacking, editor. 1981. New York: Oxford University Press.
Quine, W.V.O. 1951. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues. M. Curd and J.A. Cover, editors. 1998. New York: W.W. Norton.
——. 1969. Epistemology Naturalized. In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press.
——. 1995a. Naturalism, or, Living within One's Means. Dialectica 49(2–4):251–61.
——. 1995b. From Stimulus to Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rossi, B. 1977. X-Ray Astronomy. Daedalus 106(4):37–58.
Suppe, F. 1977 [1973]. The Search for Philosophic Understanding of Scientific Theories. In The Structure of Scientific Theories. 2nd. ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Wald, R.M. 1984. General Relativity. Chicago: University Press.
Weinberg, S. 1999. A Unified Physics by 2050? Sci. Amer. (Dec):68–75.
Other Works by Thomas S. Kuhn
The Essential Tension (1977)
The Road since Structure Edited by James Conant and John Haugeland (2000)
The Copernican Revolution (1957)
Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912 (1978)
Works about Kuhn’s Work
Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science – Paul Hoyningen-Huene (1993)
Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History of Our Times – Steve Fuller (2000)
Thomas Kuhn's Revolution – James A. Marcum (2005)
Kuhn’s Evolutionary Epistemology – Barbara Gabreilla Renzi (2009) Philosophy of Science 76(2):143–59,
Bibliographic Essays on Scientific Revolution
The Scientific Revolution by Richard S. Westfall
The Scientific Revolution – Paradigm Lost? by Robert A. Hatch
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Notes
1. The preceding study was composed in 2000.
2. Hilary Putnam points out that Kuhn exaggerates in asserting that a paradigm can never be overthrown in the absence of a competitor paradigm. But Putnam then deflates the demerit of the exaggeration by posing as a hypothetical counterexample to Kuhn's universal claim only a Goodmanesque scenario: the world simply starts to behave radically differently. Barring such an implausible scenario, Putnam then expressly affirms the Kuhnian generalization at issue (Putnam 1974, 69–70). My counterexample scenarios (failure of light-speed postulate or failure of principle of equivalence) are intended to be entirely, mundanely realistic.
3. Rudolf Carnap (1966) likewise recognized that what in one context of inquiry should be taken as inferred from what was observed could in another context be rightly taken as simply observed (Suppe 1977, 47).
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[Continued]
III. Saying
According to Kuhn, "there can be no scientifically or empirically neutral system of language or concepts" (S 146). Moreover, since we have no rudimentary paradigm-neutral observation language, the pendulum and constrained fall must be simply different perceptions, rather than "different interpretations of the unequivocal data provided by observation of a swinging stone" (S 126). Kuhn has in mind "a generally applicable language of pure percepts," where, by the term percepts, he apparently thinks not of swinging stones, but of more primitive constituents that compose our perceptions of swinging stones. Attempts to construct such a language of pure percepts have not fully succeeded, and anyway, all such projects "presuppose a paradigm, taken either from current scientific theory or from some fraction of everyday discourse, . . . . [thereby yielding] a language that—like those employed in the sciences—embodies a host of expectations about nature and fails to function the moment these expectations are violated" (S 127).
I should say, with Willard Quine, that we do indeed have a trustworthy scientifically neutral system of observation language appropriate and necessary for the physical sciences. This is not a rarified, fully reductive language of "pure percepts," but a natural language of posited objects and events (1969 [EN], 74–79; 1995a [N], 252, 254; 1995b [SS], 10–21, 27–29, 35–42; cf. 1951, 293–98). Swinging body and pendulum are both legitimate expressions of things observed[3], the former providing a fallback in cases of dispute over the latter. "What counts as an observation sentence varies with the width of community considered. But we can always get an absolute standard by taking in all speakers of the language, or most" (EN 88; also N 255; SS 22, 42–45). Pendulum, damped harmonic oscillator, and electron-positron track may be rightly spoken of as observed in the narrower, scientific community. But when necessary, scientists can shift gears and recognize those items as interpretations of more widely accepted and developmentally prior observed items.
Our broadest and most rudimentary observation language is our language of everyday experience, in which we report "it is raining" or "the iron is on" and in which we generalize "swinging suspended bodies return to rest" or "if it is snowing, then it is cold" (N 252, 254–55; SS 22–26). That last ordinary observation sentence is an example of what Quine calls an observation categorical, which is an empirically testable hypothesis, standing (as Popper would have it) as not yet shown false. Quine supposes, reasonably I think, that an empirically testable scientific hypothesis can be cashed out as an elementary observation categorical (N 255; SS 43–47). The detection of cosmic background microwave radiation, for example, cashes to visible records of activities in an antenna (which antenna cashes to . . . ). Quine realizes, of course, that scientists do not trace all the links from their hypothesis to observational categorical. "Still, the deduction and checking of observation categoricals is the essence, surely, of the experimental method, . . . . [and it remains] that prediction of observable events is the ultimate test of scientific theory" (N 256).
Quine recognizes that some hypotheses thus far not testable are accepted, rationally, even in the hard sciences. They may be accepted because "they fit in smoothly by analogy, or they symmetrize and simplify the overall design. . . . Moreover, such acceptations are not idle fancy; their proliferation generates, every here and there, a hypothesis that can indeed be tested. Surely this is the major source of testable hypotheses and the growth of science" (N 256; also SS 49). Can we test whether spacetime is curved? Well, yes, indirectly, more and more, we can.
Kuhn overrated the difficulties of vocabulary translations between alternative paradigms (S 149, 201). He did seem to allow that eventually translation can be effected (S 201–3). Such has been effected between Newtonian gravitational theory and general relativity, and gradually physics has attained more and more tests between those deep and grand theories, tests such as that for an innermost circular orbit about a neutron star. [Continued]
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[Continued]
II. Seeing
Kuhn errs thirdly, and most seriously, in his (inconstant) denial that in our scientific observations we can always separate and adequately express what we literally perceive and what we take those percepts to indicate. Having learned prevailing scientific concepts, theories, and natural laws under exemplifying concrete observational applications, one is not able to see the phenomena in those applications entirely freely of the prevailing conceptual apparatus (S 46–47, 111–12, 186–89). Scientific observational phenomena are to some extent inextricably structured by the scientific, theoretical paradigm under which one is operating (S 111–35, 147–50).
"Looking at a bubble-chamber photograph, the student sees confused and broken lines, the physicist a record of familiar subnuclear events" (S 111). To enter the physicist's scientific observational world, the student undergoes "transformations of vision," like coming "to see a new gestalt." Hardly. Throughout the student's entry into the observational world of physics, all participants easily, routinely, and expressly distinguish between what of the physicist's observational world is commonsense perception and what is scientific interpretation, however automatic the latter may become (cf. S 196–98).
A bubble-chamber photograph provides detailed records of particle events "in a form that experienced physicists can interpret at a glance" (Breuker et al. 1991, 61). The photographs from bubble, cloud, or spark-streamer chambers never do yield a strictly perceptual particle-interaction gestalt in the way, say, that an X-ray photograph of a hand yields a strictly perceptual hand-skeleton gestalt. In the hand X-ray, given our ontogeny and our ordinary visual experience with hands, we are required to see the hand-in-the-image. We can tell ourselves, truly, that what is before us when we see the hand-in-the-image is only the trace of a hand, shadows of hand preserved on film, but we cannot avoid seeing the hand-in-the-image all the same. That is our perceptual constitution. Gestalt shifts too, such as in the Necker cube, are mandated by our primate perceptual constitution. We can tell ourselves that before us are only lines on paper, but we are required to see one cube or the other, with alternations every few seconds (Logothetis 1999). Contemporary elementary-particle tracking is mediated by vast electronic and computer processing systems, embodying painstaking deliberate interpretations. What is perceptually obligatory in the resulting computer-image displays are things like colors, lines, and 3D perspectives; all of these, self-conscious visual aids to scientific, interpretive observation.
Kuhn writes: "Since remote antiquity most people have seen one or another heavy body swinging back and forth on a string or chain until it finally comes to rest. To the Aristotelians, who believed that a heavy body is moved by its own nature from a higher position to a state of natural rest at a lower one, the swinging body was simply falling with difficulty. Constrained by the chain, it could achieve rest at its low point only after a tortuous motion and a considerable time. Galileo, on the other hand, looking at the swinging body, saw a pendulum, a body that almost succeeded in repeating the same motion over and over again ad infinitum." (S 118–19)
To be sure, Kuhn was "acutely aware of the difficulties created by saying that when Aristotle and Galileo looked at swinging stones, the first saw constrained fall, the second a pendulum" (S 121). Yet Kuhn will not let go his continual equivocation on see and its cognates (S 196–97). He maintains that an embracer of the new paradigm of mechanics—such was Galileo—is not an interpreter of swinging stones as pendulums, but "is like a man wearing inverted lenses," like a man who's vision has adapted to those lenses (S 122). "Galileo interpreted observations on the pendulum, Aristotle observations on [constrained] falling stones" (ibid.). That is inaccurate, I should say. Rather, Galileo and we interpret swinging stones as pendulums, on which we then make further interpretative observations. Similarly, one may interpret the swinging stone as in Aristotelian mechanics, as a constrained body working its way to the lowest feasible point. We can deliberately, with training, switch our interpretative perspectives: Aristotelian, Galilean, Newtonian, Lagrangian. Kuhn suggests that the contemporary scientist "who looks at a swinging stone can have no experience that is in principle more elementary than seeing a pendulum. The alternative is not some hypothetical 'fixed' vision, but vision through another paradigm, one which makes the swinging stone something else" (S 128). I suggest, to the contrary, that developmentally, epistemologically, and evidentially, it is a swinging stone that is most elementary for everyone. It is with respect to analysis that we "see" (take) the pendulum as most elementary.
I do not mean to contradict Kuhn's thesis that scientists do not come to reject scientific theories on account of uninterpreted observations (e.g. S 77). We can recognize that and assimilate that without conflating what we literally perceive and what we make of those percepts in thought. [Continued]
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Welcome to OO Bill!
Old study of mine previously online:
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas S. Kuhn
I. Searching
In Thomas Kuhn's view, observation and experiment are essential to scientific understanding of the world (1990 [S], 42), but observation and experiment, in an established science, are guided and made sense of by one or another paradigm (S 109). Under the notion paradigm, Kuhn means to include theories, theoretical definitions, natural laws, particular models, and preeminently, concrete problem-solutions that exemplify theory and law, giving them empirical content (S 182–89). Scientific concepts, laws, and theories are presented and comprehended not in the abstract alone; but with applications to some concrete range of phenomena, purely natural, such as freely falling bodies, or natural-within-contrivance, such as pendulums (S 46–47, 187–91).
Normal science undertakes ever more exact and subtle experimental and observational investigation of "facts that the paradigm has shown to be particularly revealing of the nature of things" (S 25), determination of facts that "can be compared directly with predictions from the paradigm theory" (S 26), and articulation of the paradigm theory (S 27–29). These are roles of observation in science, I should say, even if we should reject Kuhn's distinction between normal and revolutionary periods of science as too sharply drawn.
One illustration of normal science would be the ongoing investigation of neutrinos. The existence of neutrinos is a fact established in 1956 (they were then detected) within the theoretical framework of quantum mechanics and detail conservation of energy. The characteristics of neutrinos are facts particularly revealing of the nature of elementary-particle interactions. The further, more refined determination of neutrino characteristics bears on the correctness and further refinement of a number of interconnected paradigms. Elaborate observations of solar neutrinos the past few decades provide quantitative constraints on models of nuclear reactions in the sun's core and on models of the sun's magnetic fields. And they provide constraints on the fundamental theory of neutrinos and of the electronuclear forces of nature (Bahcall 1990). Elaborate observations of cosmic neutrinos, these past few years [1], to ascertain whether they change flavors, hence whether they possess nonzero mass, inform efforts toward a Grand Unified Theory that may eventually supercede or subsume the Standard Model for elementary particles and their forces (Kearns, Kajita, and Totsuka 1999; Feldman and Steinberger 1991; Weinberg 1999). And they bear on current cosmology, under purview of general relativity.
Other normal-science investigations framed under the paradigm of general relativity are these: The finding of pulsar binary neutron stars has yielded, as hoped, empirical data for comparison with predictions from general relativity in the context of strong gravitational fields, predictions such as the rate of the orbital precession of the major axis of the stars' elliptical orbit and red-shifting of the pulse-clock (Piran 1995). Observation of quasi-periodic X-ray emissions from neutron stars pulling in matter from gaseous companion stars are yielding data indicating that, as predicted by general relativity (contrary the prediction from Newtonian gravitation), there is, just outside the neutron star, an innermost circular orbit for captured gas (Cowen 1998). Black holes are entities conceived and cultured solely by general relativity. Astronomical search for black holes and their distinctive features may yield an overwhelming vindication of general relativity (Lasota 1999).
There are three points made by Kuhn concerning the role of observation in science with which I should take some issue. One is his claim that "no part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena" (S 24). "Even the [normal-science] program whose goal is paradigm articulation does not aim at the unexpected novelty" (S 35). "Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none" (S 52). But scientists will be human, chronically so, hoping to catch something unexpected and momentous in their instruments, not only expected and readily comprehended phenomena. X-ray astronomer Bruno Rossi writes: "The initial motivation of the experiment which led to this discovery . . . was a subconscious trust of mine in the inexhaustible wealth of nature, a wealth that goes far beyond the imagination of man. This meant that, whenever technical progress opened up a new window into the surrounding world, I felt the urge to look through this window hoping to see something unexpected" (1977, 39).
Kuhn does say that "without the special apparatus that is constructed mainly for anticipated functions, the results that lead ultimately to novelty could not occur" (S 65, emphasis added). So I should productively construe the statements of his that I have quoted in the preceding paragraph as delineation of the strain that he calls normal science which in truth is found within a broader, richer actual practice of science.
Kuhn errs secondly, though only slightly, in his contention that "the act of judgment that leads scientists to reject a previously accepted theory is always based upon more than a comparison of that theory with the world. The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other" (S 77, further, 147). Not always so. We continue to test empirically whether any mass-energy can be transported faster than vacuum c (Alväger, Farley, Kjellman and Wallin 1964; Brecher 1977; Chiao, Kwait, and Steinberg 1993). Some of these experiments, in the last two decades, have helped to articulate more finely the light-speed postulate of relativistic kinematics. But it is perfectly possible that such tests in the future could dispositively contradict the postulate. That would be the demise of special relativity regardless of the existence of competitor theories. Without viable alternative kinematics already on the stage or in the wings, what should we do if the light-speed postulate were empirically refuted? We should take our cues from the particulars of the failure and from our old, very successful special-relativity kinematics, and then develop a new and better kinematics.
Again, we continue to test a principle of general relativity, the principle of the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass. These tests are not simply tests that help us articulate the paradigm, as when we search the heavens for evidence bearing on whether Einstein's field equations should include a nonzero cosmological constant (Krauss 1999; Cowen 2000). No, tests of the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass cut to the quick of general relativity (Wald 1984, 8, 66–67; Ciufolini and Wheeler 1995, 13–18, 90–116). As I understand it, if gravitational and inertial mass are not precisely equivalent, then gravity cannot rightly be made geometric. And we have no viable alternative (nongeometric) to general relativity waiting in the wings. Were gravitational and inertial mass shown inequivalent by experiment or observation, then theoretical physicists would scramble to construct a replacement theory. We need not already have a competing theory to prefer over general relativity in order to reject the latter on experimental or observational grounds [2]. [Continued]
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1 hour ago, RupeeRoundhouse said:
My understanding is that a consequence of being axiomatic is that it's implied in all thought, including those that deny the axiom. This is clear with the principles of existence, identity, and consciousness; it's not so with causality.
Take for example, the thought that "Jane is blue": It implies the existence principle (Jane and blueness exist), identity principle (Jane has blueness), consciousness principle (I'm aware that Jane has blueness), but nothing of the causality principle. Not all thoughts—only some, as exemplified in your reply—invoke the causality principle.
Rupee, when Rand introduced her principle of identity, she took for illustration three categories in which there are exclusionary kinds: entity (leaf/stone), action (freeze/burn), and attribute (all-yelow/all-red). In addition to those occasions of identity, she added later, in ITOE (p. 39), that anything standing in no relations to things not itself is nothing. Let existence in its entirety, including all its parts, be an exception, but the only one. Aside from that case, for all existents, their identity includes some relations to things not themselves. An illustration would be the relation of a lightning discharge and thunder in the atmosphere. There is a temporal relation between the two and a causal relation between the two (and really more than the two, discharge and sound, in the total reality). An argument for the necessary-identity principle can be given for existents that are entities, for existents that are actions, and for existents that are attributes (attempts for entity and action). In my last post, I attempted showing that denial of causal relations for all existents cannot be put forth without self-contradiction. That is a necessary condition for showing that a truth of existence generalizes to any and all cases. (The source of the truth as distinct from the necessity of the truth is simply the manifest in perception and all such manifests-in-perception considered in concert.) So I've come round to thinking that "Existence of an existent necessarily entails that it stands in causal relationships" is a strand in the axiom "Existence is identity." We might say it is part of the meaning of the axiom.
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19 hours ago, RupeeRoundhouse said:
The Law of Causality is actually a corollary (of identity), not an axiom. Per page 15 of OPAR, "[a] corollary of an axiom is not itself an axiom; it is not self-evident apart from the principle(s) at its root (an axiom, by contrast, does not depend on an antecedent context)."
Rand called such corollaries in her metaphysics "corollary axioms" (AS 1015). That suggests that they inherit, as Leonid suggested, the certification of truth had by the truth of self-evidence (manifestation in sense) and by contradiction upon denial of the axioms to which they are corollaries. For Rand the Law of Causality is that things act in definite, distinctive ways and not in any other ways, due to things having definite, distinctive identity. Indeed, that causal character of things is part of their definite, distinctive identity. Moreover, that causal character is an instance of the identity of things having causal character. So it would seem that to say "the law of causality is the law of identity applied to action" really is a little understated. Not only is causality an application of identity; it is an instance of it in just the way that Socrates, being an animal, is mortal is an instance of the universal fact that all animals are mortal. Although, the axioms and corollary axioms in Rand's general metaphysics, unlike the connection of mortality and animality, have truth of their widest-of-wide range certified additionally by their epistemic character of contradiction upon denial.
Let me attempt to show that causality as a corollary axiom is indeed an axiom by having the character of ensnaring one in a contradiction upon denial of the law of causality. To show the law is not a truth having completely general scope is to adduce a counterexample to the law. To defend the completely general scope of the law's truth is to show that no such counter-example can be adduced. To wit: "An occasion of adducing is a caused production or not. If not, then utterance of the assertion that is the putative counter-example is uncaused. If uncaused (specifically by an interlocutor), then it is incapable of having any controlled, intended referent. Then no counter-example as counter-example has been adduced. On the other fork, if the occasion of adducing is a caused production (which in truth it is), then the adducing of a counter-example to the law of causality requires one to implicitly affirm causality. No entirely self-consistent counter-example to the law of causality can be adduced." So, corollary axioms can have the axiomatic character of the axiom they depend from.
In his book How We Know, Harry Binswanger did not put corollary axioms into any role for his epistemology. He mentions the idea from Rand, but he does not himself put it to work, unlike Rand or Peikoff. I think that leaves a gap in Dr. Binswanger's picture. I don't mean a gap in full adherence to Rand's views, for strictly speaking, he was not out to set forth such an epistemology. I mean a gap in representation of the organization in our knowledge of metaphysics.
I think Dr. Peikoff is correct when he characterizes what Rand called "corollary axioms" as elucidations of the axioms. Rand's elucidation upon her famous axiom comes straightaway, in Galt's Speech: "Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists" (1015).
These corollary axioms are useful not for having additional fundamental propositions from which to deduce further metaphysics, as in the manner of Spinoza, but for countering some derailments in thinking. Such as Locke when he writes: "It is the first act of the mind, when it has any sentiment or ideas at all to perceive it's ideas." And such as Augustine's Platonic and Pauline conception of humans knowing by thinking immutable ideas within themselves, dimly reflecting divine mind. I take corollary axioms as elucidations and as performance-truths attending axioms and their grasp, immediately recognizable truths very like our recognition of the need of figure construction, labeled, and of discursive thought in composing a geometric proof in Euclid and very like the need for ability to count in order to comprehend that 7 + 5 = 12.
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1 hour ago, Cheryl said:
The dust cover is 35th anniversary . And the book is a signed by Ayn Rand but the that is what is info on publication. Could I have a signed copy but not with the original dust cover ? it further reads library of congress catalog card number : 57-10033 tenth printing
Yes, I imagine that is simply not the original dust cover.
I have the first printing. It has that same number 57-10033, which is the Library of Congress Catalog Card Number. It was given to me by a friend in college, and I think she got it at a garage sale, in about 1970. Mine is in poor condition in that the dust cover went away a long time ago, the front and back's hinge wore away from the spine and are now just free companions to the pages. I think the manufacturer had everything right; life of the book with me was pretty harsh, including endurance of one collapse of a book shelf. The important things for my purposes are fine: all the pages and all the words are there, and the print is large enough for me to read these 50+ years later.
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Cheryl, the 35th anniversary edition was in 1992, and Rand had died ten years before then. Are you perhaps looking at a signature in the book that is another name?
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50 minutes ago, necrovore said:
True. I'm just saying that the operation of the senses is deterministic, just like a rock rolling down a hill, so the operation of the senses cannot "err" any more than the rock can.
What matters is how we interpret what the senses are telling us. In many cases the naïve interpretation is actually fine, which is why our species is still around, but there are some cases (such as illusions) where the actual situation is not what it looks like.
Thanks.
Yes, the senses cannot err. They can malfunction if damaged or are in a special condition (which happen pretty frequently in olfaction). But the senses, functioning properly, lead the animal alongside presenting to the animal, even before higher identifications are made. Both veridical and illusory percepts are delivered when the sensory system is functioning properly. The "what" in "what it looks like" is at hand in awareness before any conceptual identifications.
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"Finally, it should be noticed that our approach conceives the physical reality as being determined solely by the quantum state at every instant of time. With that we reject retrocausal models according to which measuring the visibility at the output may determine the state of affairs inside the interferometer (see Methods for further discussions)."
This is in a paper by physicists which the commentator in Frank's first link parlays into "there might be mutually exclusive, yet complementary physical realities in the quantum realm." That baloney was not an interpretation given by the scientists concerning their work, only by a layperson making pedestrian hay. Frankly, she probably knows better, but stretches results in her reports so as to make her article attention-getting and accessible to an audience that cannot think very far (and mostly don't want to).
That there are both wave-like and particle-like characters of an entity, such as encountered in quantum mechanics of the world, in no way supports the existence of contradictions or coincident contraries in reality or non-existence of objective reality, whether in the quantum regime or in the classical regime the quantum regime gives rise to.
We can pronounce the question "What if everything we think true is false?" But that pronouncement fails to ask a question, which must have some specifics to attach to inquiry. It is good that Frank included specific examples for a general question "What if science concludes things contrary to basic metaphysics?" The specifics can be chased down and assessed for any alleged conflict with metaphysics, including any ways the scientific results suggest a modification or more precision in the metaphysics.
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Of illusions, we should not say they have error. We should say they mislead. Percepts are leaders even before our thinking about them begins. Percepts themselves are some amount of identification.
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An intriguing paper is to be presented in the upcoming Pacific division meeting of the American Philosophical Association which bears on analyses of honesty.
Its Abstract:
QuoteWhy do we tell each other things, and why do we want to be told things? What is the function of the practice of sharing information by telling? According to the information-sharing account of the function of telling, the function of telling is sharing information. In this paper I argue against the information-sharing account by arguing that telling has a function distinct from the function of sharing information: the function of establishing trust. We sometimes tell people things because we want them to trust us and we sometimes want people to tell us things because we want to trust them. Telling sometimes serves our social needs to trust and be trusted, not merely our intellectual need to know.
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necrovore,
Nothing I've said implies or insinuates that a rock rolling down a hill could have errors in its action. Neither could an uprooted gravitropic root of a plant have errors in its response to uprooting: beginning new root growth oriented in the direction of gravity.
Like the gravitroplic system possessed by some plants, our perceptual systems are living systems, teleological in the ways they are due to natural selection, and deterministic in the operation of the individual member of the species. Beyond those characters of a perceptual system, it is as well composed of living excitable communicative cells, neurons, conveying patterned activity to the brain of animals that have a brain where those patterned activations are processed in an automatic way set by evolution and by individual development having inputs from the right environment, and that brain, by neurons, has connection to muscle.
One's perceptual systems are part of what one is. They are parts of our awareness, parts of the awareness that we are. We do not stand outside them (contra the meditative states Descartes pretends he and we can engage in). We make errors by judgments to be sure. But we and other high animals are also given percepts that are illusory without participation of judgment. I'm inviting you to break with old habits of thinking about error that have been running since at least Descartes.
That we feel pain from certain sensations is in no part due to our having made a judgment about what the senses have delivered. That we experience visual luminance is in no part due to our having made a judgment about what the senses have delivered. That we experience relative largeness of the moon or sun near the horizon is in no part due to our having made any judgments in that awareness (and contra Descartes, in no part due to inattention). By conceptual reasoning, we can see through the relative largeness illusion (though not avoid experiencing it, thank goodness!) about the presented objects. That is later. Perceptions do not require talk-thinking.
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4 hours ago, Doug Morris said:
Stephen,
Please respond to the following:
The stick looks bent, but concluding that it is bent is a matter of interpretation or inference.
If we move the stick so that a different amount of it is in the water, the look of a bend changes its position on the stick. If we feel the stick with our fingers, it does not feel bent. Thus collecting a more thorough set of perceptions gives a more nuanced set of perceptual data.
Notion of looks and correctives is conceptual. All in the quote here is conceptual thinking. That is not the starting place. At the starting place, mere perception, mere deliverance by automatic brain processing, there is a display presenting and leading.
Might a lion perceive a prey without thought? Surely without conceptual thought. A lion's percepts too could be sometimes entirely veridical, sometimes only partly so (and leading the lion to a danger instead of a meal).
Quite possibly a chimp perceives the enlargement of sun or moon near the horizon as we do. The illusion is there without thought, without judgment, without interpretation or inference upon it.
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Grames,
The idea of Kant and of the Objectivists writers that percepts do not err and should should not be ascribed truth or falsity is mistaken.
Instruments we design for detections and measurements have a dedicated object (which I shall designate by all-caps TARGET), and we can manipulate and adjust the instrument to capture just that object for presentation to our senses. We could design a camera with the purpose of imaging a straight stick partially in water such that the camera system compensates for difference in the indices of refraction of air and water. A sensor in the air and a sensor in the water feeding information ultimately to the camera would likely be required, and this information processed in an automatic way in the camera recorder. The camera would show a straight stick because we had made the instrument system an indicator of our information purpose, our TARGET: straightness in objects it detects. Design of the instrumentation systems that are our natural sensory systems are the result of natural processes of evolution and individual development employing living processes in an environment having whatever material resource are locally available at the time. Mere typical success in detecting or measuring the TARGET (fortuitous, not designed by an intelligence) of the sensory system gives enough probability for preservation and reproduction of the animal.
We are able to learn that the enlargement of the moon or the sun when near the horizon is, in some unknown way, a contribution of our visual system. If we take a photo of the moon in that position, the enlargement-effect is not registered and reported by the camera. With thought and empirical investigation, we can tease out elements in our perceptions that are contributions of our perceptual systems. By modern scientific investigation, the Mach-band effect—which is a visual illusion in the degree of darkness of the grayness of surfaces and which may have had the adaptive advantage of accentuating edges—has been explained by the pattern of neural connections (lateral inhibition) in the circuitry of the retina.
In our era, science has also traced the processing of outputs from the retina by LNG and cortex for various receptions of light at the retina . Science has shown what elements of a scene are assembled by the visual system within the first 150 msec. after reception of the light from the scene. And how it all goes from those in the brain processing on up to formation of the percept of a scene. (Along the neural-activation course are topographical maps of arrangements in the distal stimulus.)
I mentioned the TARGET of an instrument we design. There is another sort of target of an artificial instrument, which is also at work in our natural, perceptual instruments. Advantage in animal species evolution or in survival of the individual animal is not the TARGET of a natural perceptual instrument. Nature is not a designer, and there are no TARGETS for natural perceptual systems. There is a target (lower-case) of an instrument which is in the detailed constitution and operation of the instrument. Our modern motion-detecting devices have as their target: alterations in level of light being received by their sensors, which has some fair correlation with objects moving in the field. Our purpose, our TARGET—detection of moving objects—is not the target we put into the design of the instrument. I maintain that this is the way to view natural sensory systems, from thermal contact systems to visual systems having a distal stimulus.
Veridical perception, I say, is neuronal system indicating in consciousness things as they are. Illusions are neuronal system indicating in consciousness things in some ways as they are not.
I say percepts are leaders to reality, due to our constitution. Percepts do not only present. They indicate due to our constitution. Their character of automatically indicating in consciousness is what makes percepts components in empirical cognition. The proverbial straight stick partially in air and partially in water indicates a bent stick. Understanding how it comes to look bent does nothing to change the circumstance that the perceptual presentation is misleading (contra Branden c. 1968, 47–48; Kelley [. . .]; Peikoff [. . .]). The stick’s looking bent is not on account of some inference we have made, not even an inference unconsciously made.
Kelley and other Objectivist philosophers ignore the leading I attribute to perceptual presentations. That is a mistake. The quality in perceptual presentations that I have called “leadingness,” and importance of that quality, should be recognized and put to work in a realist philosophy of perception.
Notwithstanding that error of Dr. Kelley et al., Kelley made an important distinction to keep in mind for philosophy of perception: “As a form of awareness, perception may naturally be approached from various different perspectives. From the outside it is a physical response to the environment, and one may examine the way sense organs are stimulated by physical energy, and the way this stimulation is transmitted and transformed by the nervous system as it ascends the sensory pathways to the brain. Or one may view it from the inside, as we experience it, describing the features of objects we discriminate, the structures and relationships of which we are directly aware.” (1986, 8 )
That distinction is important to keep in mind when thinking about the alternatives Realism v. any Representationalism that is not realist in perception.
Consider our sense of warmth or coolness of objects or media that one’s skin contacts. Coolness or warmth are in the inside-stream that is awareness. From the external perspective, we know there are specific sensors in the skin whose target is the rate of heat flow into or out of our bodies in contact with objects or media. The content of this external perspective was won by intellect joined to making instruments to use in our experiments on the phenomenon, instruments whose use of course requires the internal perspective.
The two perspectives, internal and external, can and must be interwoven for understanding of perceptual experience. The warmth of a hot shower is from receptors registering rate of heat flowing into the body. The coolness when stepping barefoot out the shower and onto tile of the bathroom floor is from receptors registering rate of heat flow out of the body and into the tile. Until recent times, people would have identified the object of the perception that is warmth or coolness as traits of the shower water and of the tile floor. This was an error in perceptual psychology and provided a setting of perceptual phenomena as anomalous, which provided a gadget to bolster skeptical schools of philosophy.
Step now onto the tile floor from having taken not a hot shower, but a cold shower. The tile will not feel so cool as it would when stepping from a hot shower. We, who know that what our sensors are detecting is rate of heat flow into or out of the body and who know that rate of heat flow between two bodies in contact depends in part on the temperature difference between the two bodies find nothing paradoxical about the tile feeling more cool in the one step than in the other.
The puzzle for people thinking that warmth and coolness in our internal flow of conscious experience has as purpose and target a trait of external objects and media is: a tile floor is two different levels of coolness at the same time.
The possession of sensors conveying thermal contact conditions of the animal body are a heritable trait, and perhaps that is a trait selected by advantage in evolution. Current scientific accounting of sensory experience of warmth and coolness dispels traditional skepticism buoyed by sensory phenomena.
The misleading in percepts is not always deleterious. It has some disadvantage for hand grasping of objects in the bent-stick sort of situation. It can be advantageous, as the case of the Mach Bands shows. The illusion of space behind the surface of a mirror can be advantageous once one adapts to seeing it as a reflected space really in front of the mirror. Unlike the mirror case, many illusions are not remediable. The sun will continue to be sensed as moving across the sky, even though we know better.
The veridical percept is only advantageous. What is advantageous is whatever affordance for successful action is occasioned in the percept’s indication.
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On 12/5/2022 at 12:42 PM, Boydstun said:
California foolishly shuttered its San Onofre nuclear power plant after the Fukushima wreck. Although San Onofre was the same sort of reactor as Fukushima, the design basis for the San Onofre plant had been such that it would not have been breached by a tidal wave the size of the one that hit Fukushima. And the emergency diesel generators were elevated at the CA plant and would not have become inoperable, unlike at the Japanese facility.
Recently, the anti-nuclear movement in CA to close also Diablo Canyon, the state' last nuke, was blocked, with the governor's decision to keep it running and putting megawatts on the grid.
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Frank,
I'd take correctness as one thing and brilliance another. I'd take brilliance in this context as correctness that is not found elsewhere. Knowledge of the brilliance, then, would requiring knowing what is to be found elsewhere, i.e., in the history of philosophy to the present.
Finding out why so many professional philosophers would not consider Objectivism a valid philosophy would require getting hold of their specific criticisms and thinking them over. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any professional philosophers put their criticisms into writing, actually be competent in what the Objectivist view is in the major areas of philosophy, and be able to step out of, for a moment, the presumptions of their own philosophic school.
I'd say just keep on studying other philosophers until you can for yourself identify the ways in which they are different from Objectivism, and where they agree, and which, if any, of the positions (Objectivist or not) are correct by your lights.
An Objectivist on Vacation
in Metaphysics and Epistemology
Posted
Modern developmental cognitive science is not "pure speculation." One need not posit a second group of senses to explain how the child comes to acquire the notions of her senses or her mind. It is an empirical question which today is being uncovered by developmental cog sci and neuroscience.
Can you give an example of a percept and a specific object manifest in the percept being the same thing? The morning star and the evening star are two perspectives on the same thing, namely, the planet Venus. That was a discovery by observation and reasoning. How would one come to know that observation and the celestial body observed were the same thing? By an argument for neutral monism? By an argument for the Identity theory of truth?