Right, it’s nothing more than twp descriptions of a table. One description explains the table in terms of use or purpose, manufacture and “everyday constitution”, the other in terms of “ultimate” constitution. On the technological side, we have the crossovers of geometry, mass, density of material. Then we have aesthetic considerations. Sellars (and Heidegger’s) categories are not as neat and tidy as they might seem.
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Right, it’s nothing more than two descriptions of a table. One description explains the table in terms of use or purpose, manufacture and “everyday constitution”, the other in terms of “ultimate” constitution. On the technological side, we have the crossovers of geometry, mass, density of material. Then we have aesthetic considerations. Sellars (and Heidegger’s) categories are not as neat and tidy as they might seem.
Agreed. To me we just have fuzzy pointers at fuzzy but insightful distinctions. We can’t squeeze the world itself into our talk.
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Interesting that Eddington can only poeticize here. It has “substance.” What a reliably tactile pushing back ? A sense of it’s being hard to push around ? But this is what physics started with, initially unable to think of anything but stuff bumping into stuff.
Which is why Locke made color secondary and unreal. He saw no use for it in the methodological reduction of the lifeworld into a mathematical map.
The “scheme” of knowledge.
And remind what measurements are again ? Actual human beings in the social lifeworld applying “officially recognized” techniques for reducing the total richness of a situation to a few numbers.
@John @j_j
The tables are great, thank you. We might even need to refer to a “third table,” the table that – if it were mine – would be the item I refer to in my memories, fond and otherwise, and regard as handsome or well-made. This “personal table” isn’t quite the lifeworld table.
But yes, only one table in actuality. And that is where the controversy starts, because the naturalist (or at least a naturalist of Price’s description) has some very specific things to say about the conceptual grounding of the lifeworld and the scientific world. This naturalist says that the scientific description is the more basic of the two. According to them, we can find explanations within the scientific world for why the lifeworld table appears as it does, but the reverse is not true. Thus, for the naturalist, the physical world (or, if you prefer, the world described by science) is fundamental, ontologically. In short, only one table but more than one description, and these descriptions are not on a par. One is more accurate about what fundamentally exists.
We know how various phenomenologists would reply to this, so I don’t need to give specimen answers. Personally I think phenomenology’s account is deeper and more defensible. But what we want to know is, Why does the naturalist give such primacy to the scientific picture? Are they merely being arbitrary? Dimwitted? Surely not. It may be true that, by placing such emphasis, they bias the outcome – but why do that? What does the naturalist think they gain by drawing this picture of what grounds what?
I think the charitable answer is that this kind of science can’t be practiced without the explanatory grounding assumption referenced above. But is it the only kind of science? Is science always about explanation? Here is the door through which phenomenology may enter as a type of reputable naturalism, I would say.
Ah, but I’d say that it is indeed the lifeworld table. If we drop the pretense of lifeworld-from-God’s-perspective. Now perhaps you me the form-of-life generally considered in terms of “The Anyone.” Heidegger has his own critique of two tables, where he contrasts Husserl’s analysis of the spatial object into adumbrations with his own “historical personal lifeworld approach.”
What is there in the room there at home is the table (not “a” table among many other tables in other rooms and houses) at which one sits in order to write, have a meal, sew, play. Everyone sees this right away, e.g., during a visit: it is a writing table, a dining table, a sewing table- such is the primary way in which it is being encountered in itself. This characteristic of “in order to do something” is not merely imposed on the table by relating and assimilating it to something else which it is not. Its standing-there in the room means: Playing this role in such and such characteristic use. This and that about it is “impractical,” unsuitable. That part is damaged. It now stands in a better spot in the room than before-there’s better lighting, for example. Where it stood before was not at all good (for … ). Here and there it shows lines-the boys like to busy themselves at the table. These lines are not just interruptions in the paint, but rather: it was the boys and it still is. This side is not the east side, and this narrow side so many em. shorter than the other, but rather the one at which my wife sits in the evening when she wants to stay up and read, there at the table we had such and such a discussion that time, there that decision was made with a friend that time, there that work written that time, there that holiday celebrated that time.
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To me this at least includes a psychological question. What’s the payoff for them ? sado masochistic correctitude. The joy is in blowing down the house of the superstitious sentimental folks. “Spiritual pain is weakness leaving the mind.” That’s one counter-cynical rendition among possible others. Rorty talks of the fantasy of a certain absoluteness as something that overpowers us. Hence my talk of piety toward this projection of the “trans-human,” which is free of the taint of anthropocentrism.
I also suggest an addiction to an absolute correctness, an addiction to Truth. An “atoms and void” substrate allows for at least the existence of truth even if one is humble enough to confess that we don’t know it when he have it. At least the world from God’s POV is out there somewhere. So inquiry becomes “more” than mere problem solving or spiritual poetic self-invention. It’s a quest for contact with the Real. And laws of nature are typically taken to be eternal. So yeah, contact with Eternal True Reality. Juicy, no ? Read thou the stains of the vanished demiurge, my sons.
Note that politicians do not make this an issue. The only make trusting or not trusting experts on concrete policies the issue. So, as I see it, this ideology of the theo-material-mathematical substrate is a very local indulgence. It’s probably best read in terms of an old culture war. It’s an unenlightened (crude, naive) appropriation of the enlightenment, which misses the central normative point of human autonomy. “Think for yourselves, you little babies ! Don’t worship books.” That’s Kant in a nutshell on the issue.
But I come at this as an atheist, attacking from the left. Sure, I’d be called an “idealist” like Mach was by “materialists.” As Sartre saw, materialism is the doctrine of The Serious Person. Hence the pious outrage of Lenin against Mach, yet Lenin wants to “use” his “cold material truthmaker” in a hot rearrangement of human society.
Ues. And also literary criticism and sociology and so many other “suspicious” disciplines. This is basically what Truth and Method is about.
Art “reveals” reality to us. A portrayal of X can affect the very being of X itself. But this is nonsense to a theory that presupposes a clinical distance from the object.
Yes, as opposed to the God’s-eye perspective. But it does form an important subset of the lifeworld: experiences that only I can validate. Both of Eddington’s tables are public, in principle.
This, and what follows, is perhaps true for some, but it’s not quite what I had in mind in the way of charitable interpretation! Not to say that psychological speculation doesn’t have its place, but I’m more interested in how you’d lay out the naturalist’s case in terms of philosophical advantages. I assume you believe that, from the naturalist’s viewpoint, there are some; naturalists are not fools. So what might they be?
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@Andy
If you’ll pardon the digression (I’m not eager to defend a narrow naturalism from the position of a broad naturalism), I think you’ll find this paper fascinating:
Wheeler, after a long intellectual evolution working in physics, attempted to approach physical reality not as something “out there”, which is passively described by observers, but to see it as a genesis through conscious dialogue between observersparticipants and physical reality, so that the universe emerges as a special articulation of the relationship between human intelligence and physical reality (Wheeler 1994[1], p. 128)
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This approach, challenging the natural scientific attitude, was not appreciated by physicists who found Wheeler’s ideas “unpalatable in view of its rather mystical overtones” (Carr 1998, p. 158), and hence has not received any further attention and development. A sceptical reaction of physicists to Wheeler’s ideas can be understood because his ideas represent a metaphysical extension of physics which physicists do not consider as a part of their vocation and duty.
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However, seen historically and in particular in conjunction with philosophical developments in the 20th century, this was not an entirely arbitrary attempt for it manifested a certain inevitability of sliding towards a transcendental or phenomenological appropriation of physics if the latter were to be to tackle the issue of its own foundation and its very facticity. A simple question which must be posed by any physicist who is interested to know the truth would this: why is physics possible at all?
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And here the question is not only about the intelligibility of the world, but rather of the very basic existential premises of physics related to humanity as its agent. Physics, as a science and social activity, is a product and a certain accomplishment of human beings who are themselves part of the physical world. In this sense the facticity of physics is related to a particular position of human beings in the world, such that this world allows them to produce its own explication and description. On purely philosophical grounds, this explicability and description has an absolutely contingent character related, speaking in Heideggerian terms, to that fragment of the unconcealed being which is associated to a specific living presence, that is human persons.
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Still, for physicists, prone to reductionism, there remains a question as to whether physics itself can explicate its own existence, or, in a slightly different parlance, can some simple initial rules of interaction with the world (which, in fact, presuppose the world’s explicability from the beginning) lead with necessity to that picture of the world which we have here and now.
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In this sense the case of Wheeler’s thought (in spite of deviating from the established stream of physics) represents an example, in the history of scientific ideas, of how a naturalistic epistemology in science in attempting to make a certain self-correction, through the search for its own facticity, leads to a transcendental problematic (remarkably with teleological overtones), that is to the view that the complete picture of physical reality must include the conditions of its explicability and constitution.
My initial reaction is to imagine a Hegel who was deeply interested in the mathematical details. As we “illuminate” the physical object more and more, our own illumination becomes present for us…and must itself be illuminated.
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That is an interesting essay to be sure. Very much in line with the ideas I’ve been exploring about intentionality in phenomenology of biology. The times, they are surely changing.
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I’m fascinated by how three threads – “Placement Problems,” “Is Mind Cause or Consequence?” and “Question about a philosophical sentence” – have converged to treat similar problems. So I’m going to post this twice, here and also in “Is Mind Cause or Consequence” – I can’t tell which is the more appropriate spot!
Basically I want to bring our friend John McDowell into the loop again, and quote some of what he says in the final lecture in Mind and World. I should add that I don’t think McDowell has the last word on any of this, I just happen to be reading him right now and finding him helpful.
He references Aristotle:
. . . the Aristotelian idea that normal mature human beings are rational animals. Animals are, as such, natural beings, [but] a familiar modern conception of nature tends to extrude rationality from nature. The effect is that reason is separated from our animal nature, as if being rational placed us partially outside the animal kingdom. Specifically, the understanding is distanced from sensibility.
. . .
One way to avoid this dilemma is to leave unquestioned the conception of nature that threatens to extrude reason from nature, but to reconceive reason in naturalistic terms, on a corresponding understanding of what it is for a term to be naturalistic. This position is what I have been calling “bald naturalism.” It allows us to conceive ourselves as rational animals . . . but it does not address the philosophical worries I have been considering, but simply refuses to feel them. (108)
In other words, we could simply assert that reason is natural after all – it is not the sort of thing that is “extruded from nature” – and leave it at that. But that is unsatisfying, because it seems not to account for the Kantian spontaneity of reason – or, as we might say, the claim that the space of reasons is sui generis, and deals with meaning, not cause-and-effect.
The other way to go, according to McDowell, would be to reject a conception of “natural” that reduces reason to the realm of lawlike behaviors. Aristotle’s conception of “rational animal” is
neither naturalistic in the modern sense (there is no hint of reductionism or foundationalism) nor fraught with philosophical anxiety. What makes this possible is that Aristotle is innocent of the very idea that nature is the realm of law and therefore not the home of meaning. That conception of nature was laboriously brought into being at the time of the modern scientific revolution.
. . . [So] we can acknowledge the great step forward that human understanding took when our ancestors formed the idea of a domain of intelligibility, the realm of natural law, that is empty of meaning, but we can refuse to equate that domain of intelligibility with nature, let alone with what is real. (109)
Thus, we can tinker either with what “rational” means or with what “natural” means. McDowell favors the latter. He doesn’t think we can shove rationality into the Procrustean bed of “bald naturalism” and then walk away. Instead, we should reconsider what counts as “natural,” and why we are feeling the anxiety about a “natural world” that somehow mechanizes or reduces rationality to the realm of law (science). Whose conception of “natural” are we frightened of here, and what warrant is there for it?
I won’t go any further, but I hope it’s plain how these various options have informed the discussions on the threads so far.