Re: SUO: Re: natural lite of reason
At 01:23 AM 7/3/2003 -0400, Jon Awbrey wrote:
>o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
>
>| The natural thinker is one who believes
>| that everything that happens is natural.
>| Those who extract small truths from the
>| roots of words will tell you that "be"
>| and "physical" are co-derivatives of
>| the same urpflanze. I am now, and
>| always have been a natural thinker,
>| and one who extracts small truths
>| from the roots (stems, leaves,
>| flowers, and seeds) of words.
>| So what? A natural thinker
>| says nothing of substance
>| until claiming something
>| about the form and the
>| structure of what is.
>| And that is what
>| makes all the
>| difference.
>
>Mike,
>
>I really thought that this one was pretty plain.
>Suppose that a person is a "hydroist" and thinks
>that everything is made of water. Maybe that's
>supposed to be a "substantial" theory, because
>it commits itself, ontology-wise, to a single
>substance that's supposed to "stand under"
>and support every other essence of being.
>
>But pretty soon the hydroist is forced to say:
>Well, I know that the phenomena, that is, the
>appearances, do not appear so uniform as all
>that, but that is because this "water" is not
>your ordinary water like you see in the salty
>seas and the freshwater pools, but is a kind
>of universal, polymorphic, protean water that
>can take on the appearance of whate'er else
>there might be to see. So we have the ever
>fluid form of a non-falsifiable hypothesis.
>The theory has no content, because it makes
>no distinction, and thus determines no form.
>The hydroist doctrine, I am forced to say,
>just doesn't hold water.
>
>A naturalism that says "everything is natural",
>like a reism that says "everything is a thing",
>has no more substance than that, and it is just
>another form of nominal thiking, until it makes
>some formal, informative, relational, structural
>commitment to the shape and flow of what exists.
Jon,
Thanks for the clarifications. I agree that the version of naturalism that you portray here is not very interesting. But I don't think it's fair to suggest that Ian Niles was presenting something so uninteresting. Ian's definition of naturalism had more heft than that, i.e., he was claiming that only physical processes and objects exist. That is an interesting substantial claim about the way the world is to my mind. Of course, like most metaphysical claims, including the positing of Leibnizian monads and those of Berkeleyean idealists and the hydroist's, it is non-falsifiable.
However, just to be clear, the question that I had had nothing to do with whether or not Ian's version of naturalism was correct or falsifiable or consistent with our best theories. Nor was is it about the correctness of mathematical realism or logicism. I was merely asking for an explanation of what I perceive as an obvious tension between the claim that the SUMO is rooted in the austere naturalism that Ian described and the fact that the SUMO appears to explicitly posit the existence of entities that are neither physical processes nor physical objects.
(I'm not asking the hydroist to explain all the objects that appear to be non-water, I'm just asking the hydroist to explain why his ontology contains the class "NonWater".)
Mike
>Jon Awbrey
>
>o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o