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Ontology, Metaphysics

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Title: Ontology, Metaphysics


1
Ontology, Metaphysics Epistemologytowards a
natural history of scienceNick Winder
2
If the nomenclature doesnt work, theres
something wrong with the natural history
  • Realism at least 2 meanings, almost opposites
  • Formalism at least 2 meanings, rather different
  • Idealism at least 2 meanings, very different
  • Gnosis esoteric knowledge about some ultimate
    reality
  • Gnosticism the belief that gnosis is humanly
    possible
  • N.B. Agnosticism is not atheism for wimps it is
    the denial of gnosis, not of god.

3
A Model of Science
4
Three Overlapping Communities
  • Humanists put themselves inside the systems
    they study. They know that causal structures are
    shaped by beliefs and understand that, by
    changing conceptual taxonomies, humans can change
    the course of history subjective, discursive.
  • Natural Philosophers see themselves standing
    outside the systems they study. Tend to see
    conceptual taxonomies as space-time robust
    objective, analytical
  • Natural Historians (somewhere between the other
    two)

5
A Model of Science
6
A Model of Science
7
A Model of Science
8
Science as Super-organisms
  • Herbert Spencer - human society as living thing -
    sociology, anthropology (General System Theory,
    see also Bertalanffy) - aprioristic
  • Charles Darwin the mutual relations of organic
    beings - ecology
  • Commensals
  • Social insects
  • Uncomputable complexity - Rosen, soft systems
    (Boulding, Churchman, Vickers)
  • Cultural Ecodynamics - tacit k, explicit k,
    action, environmental reaction. Habitus social
    structure, persuasion, coercion
  • Specifically modern science

9
Natural History is the agnostic pursuit of
knowledge
  • Knowledge consists of socially constructed
    beliefs, intuitions and tacit expectations. The
    study of how we know is epistemology
  • The study of how we know about concrete, material
    existence is ontology
  • The study of how we know about the abstract,
    immanent reality is metaphysics

10
Modern
  • Modern - a term applied in the 15th century to a
    group of late natural philosophers (the moderns)
    who held that science was agnostic and the
    categories of human knowledge were expedient and
    socially constructed
  • Modernism - a tradition of renaissance humanism
    that emphasises human creativity and agency. Many
    modernists are devout agnostics
  • Modernity technocratic extremism based on
    unitary models of progress that downplays agency
    and emphasises constraint. Late 18th and 19th
    century anti-humanism - opprobrious
  • Post-modernism - ???? You tell me

11
Metaphysics - A category or set of categories can
be real
  • as an abstract idea or form in the mind of some
    creator god (this is the mystical reality of
    which gnostics speak - Platonism).
  • If their boundary judgments (definitions) entail
    no contradictions statements of the form A is B
    and not B. This is rational reality.
  • If those categories are not just meaningful in a
    closed region of space-time but are always and
    everywhere meaningful. This is universal reality

12
Rational Reality
  • ? X X/X 1
  • X1 X
  • X2 X1 X iff X 0
  • Divide by X and clear
  • 2 1
  • (? Xgtlt0 X/X 1)

13
Empirical Testing (Universal Reality)
  • All swans are white
  • (Everything in the Universe, if it is a swan, is
    white)
  • Need to know what it is to be a swan to test the
    hypothesis. Signets arent white isolated swan
    beaks arent white,
  • All true (i.e. determinate) swans are white
  • (fragmentary swans and signets are not swans by
    definition)

14
Russells Paradox(Universal Reality)
  • Everything in the universe, if it is a (true)
    swan, is white
  • i.e. U S ? Cu(S)
  • The universal complement, Cu(S), is
    self-referential. S is self-sufficient. So we
    ask
  • Is the collection of all self-sufficient
    categories in U self-sufficient or
    self-referential?
  • Either answer is contradictory, whence universal
    complements are not (rationally) real.
    Universalism is a form of (irrational) mysticism
    that we must exclude from agnostic science
  • In agnostic science, there is only rational
    reality and any appeal to universal complements
    is unscientific

15
What does Russells Paradox mean?
  • It means that rational reality and universal
    reality are contradictory
  • Any appeal to universal complements takes us into
    the realms of irrational mysticism
  • It also suggests that physical species (like
    swans) are not necessarily real. Existence and
    reality (ontology and metaphysics) are not the
    same.

16
Existence Ontology(neo-Aristotelian)
  • Every physical individual implies an object in an
    arena (interval of space-time) accessible to
    sense. Categories (species and genera) are
    quasi-universal too widely distributed in
    space-time to be apprehended directly, but not
    metaphysically universal.
  • Each species has an essence a set of observable
    attributes necessarily shared by all constituent
    individuals and a key, a subset of the essence
    sufficient to identify a member of the species.
    The result is a syllogism

17
Ontological (Empirical) method
  • If key then species
  • If species then essence
  • Sterile syllogisms (Key essence)
  • If human then soul
  • If soul then human

18
Key must be smaller than essence
  • If human then soul
  • If soul then human
  • Sterile syllogism. Many mathematical and logical
    categories (including data structures) are
    abstract. Numbers and colours, for example,
    appear to be (rationally) real, but they dont
    seem to exist.
  • Reality is an intuition or embodied aesthetic
    that guides us towards problems the human mind is
    competent to solve. This intuition has been
    shaped by natural selection over the millions of
    years animals have had neural networks. This
    theory (intuitionism) is due to Henri Poincaré.
    An approach to mathematics that avoids universal
    complements is called constructivism -
    pioneered by LEJ Brouwer. We lose some of
    Brouwers own existence theorems and Cantors
    theory of transfinite sets, but analysis, algebra
    and geometry come through fine.

19
Discursive Method (greatly simplified)
  • Boundary Judgment defines categories in terms
    of attributes of material species and genera and
    logical relations between abstract categories.
    Coincidentally defines problem-domains and the
    spatio-temporal arenas in which scientists will
    work
  • Operational Judgment defines the rational
    methods to be applied to those categories
  • Value Judgment defines the purposes and
    intentions of those making the judgments. Value
    Judgments need not be politically sensitive, but
    they can be. When boundary Judgments contested,
    we can infer a clash of values and/or space-time
    perspectives

20
A Model of Science
21
A Model of Science
22
A Model of Science
23
A Model of Science
24
The Doughnut Model
25
Recapitulation
  • All Boundary Judgments (conceptual taxonomies)
    are local
  • Most are logically unconnected (there is no
    universal omni-science)
  • If there is no ontologically robust taxonomy with
    names, keys and essences, you are no natural
    philosopher
  • Dont rely on gestalt or jizz, define keys and
    essences and test boundaries
  • Dont forget ethics and values
  • Remain agnostic, even when the argument gets
    unfriendly. You do not know and cannot know how
    things really are
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