SUO: Re: natural lite of reason
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JA = Jon Awbrey
MP = Mike Pool
JA: 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.
JA: 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.
JA: 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.
JA: 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.
MP: 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.
Again, any statement of the form "Everything is X" merely puts the expression "X"
in the same logical equivalence class as the constantly true predicate expression --
on what domain you ask? -- well, like you said, "X". Thus X = 1 : X -> B = {0, 1},
modulo a grammatical category functor that you may or may not be able to tolerate.
So moving onto physicalism gets you nowhere if all you are doing is treating
"physicality", that I already mentioned derives from the same root as "being",
with perhaps the extra nuance of "being born", "becoming", and "passing away",
as your next candidate for explanation through the invocation of this or that
animistic universal essence. Peirce, following a long tradition, noted that
constants, like 0, 1 : X -> B, are actually derivative hypostatic notions or
what used to be called "second intentions". They are otiose fictions all by
themselves, but serve a purpose when we use them to state relations between
contingent and thus falsifiable predicates. Nobody's Nature or Naive Physic
will acquire much general interest so long as it's nothing but a small group
of people saying "It's whate'er comes natural to us".
Think of your old-style "Naturalist", or what the word meant before
people started making up any old meaning that popped into the space
between their axions and axioms for it. Besides being a person who
collects specimens in the wild, somebody like Darwin comes to mind.
In what did his form of naturalism consist? Well, he had a theory
of "natural evolution" through "natural selection". Now, there's
a commitment for you! A specific family of laws and mechanisms
that he had in mind to replace the "supernatural" explanation
of the diversity of natural species by the Fiat of creation.
So, again, the forms of naturalism, physicalism, whatever, worth having
only get interesting when the shoe-in term in question is placed on the
other foot, that is to explain, the apodisis not the protasis, and one
begins to say, not "All is X", but rather "X is ...", et sic deinceps.
But here, in particular, there is nothing of substance in SUMO yet.
Nor will its reps be able to make much progress or to support much
superstructure if they keep going back to Thales and starting over.
MP: 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.
MP: (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".)
It is a matter of indifference.
I mean, one cannot dig oneself
out of these classical pits of
paradoctrinal nonbeing without
realizing that some signs just
do not have significance. But
this requires the more general
semiotic "place to stand" just
to get a sufficient semantical
advantage to put some leverage
behind one's objective fulcrum.
For the moment or lack thereof,
there's a mental block agin it.
Jon Awbrey
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