Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
From: shaman@cix.compulink.co.uk (Leo Smith)
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle (Long)
Reply-To: shaman@cix.compulink.co.uk
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 00:03:00 +0000


amnell@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Marko Amnell) writes..

In article <TORKEL.92Nov5224750@lludd.sics.se> torkel@sics.se 
(Torkel Franzen) writes:

[....]
>Allow me to quote Peirce's definition of reality in "The Fixation of
>Belief".

>  Such is the method of science.  Its fundamental hypothesis, restated
>  in more familiar language, is this:  There are Real things, whose
>  characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them;
>  those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though
>  our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects,
>  yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain
>  by reasoning how things really and truly are; and any man, if he have
>  sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to
>  the one True conclusion.  The new conception involved here is that
>  of Reality.

Neatly put. I agree that that is exactly the way Western thought has
gone: It pre-supposes that reality, operates as if that reality were
de-facto, and uses the functionality derived from that assumption
(the fact that science WORKS) to support the notion that the de-facto
assumption is valid.

In fact it is merely internal consistency: It is not its truth that
gives science its power, it is its utility: Ideas of the planet being
consumed by a giant banana (or whatever Torkels fevered imagination
conjures up) are not useful in adding to that utility.

I think it is not so much a question of what is Real or True, but
what works.

But then I am only a humble engineer, and my degree was in Cambridge,
and not in Scandinavia.
[..]

>If we begin with Peirce's definition of reality, then you see why I
>am so interested in the problem of the existence of Truth. If there
>is no totality of all true propositions (if, say, Tarski's result
>about formal logics with the usual configuration of quantifiers --
>Hintikka changes the way quantifiers work, and it is this that
>enables him to avoid Tarski) then there is no Truth as the ideal end
>of inquiry, and the whole Peircean metaphysics crumbles. We are left
>with some kind of radical constructivism (that reality is a purely
>social construct) or with some kind of relativism (a variety of
>relatvism that avoids most of the old knock-down arguments can be
>found in Margolis' book _The Truth about Relativism_)

Surely Marko, Truth is in one sense just a mental concept: the game
goes like this.

IF you assume that there is an objective reality independent of our
ability to intellectualise it

THEN

it ought to be possible to approach a perfect intellectualised
conception of it which for the purposes of this philosophy we can
call the 'Truth'

That is to say, that Reality and Truth are aspects of the same model.
The model that Western thought is based on, the model of the
independent perceiver of the exterior universe.

As an engineer, I am used to approximations. I assume that for all
practical purposes, the 'physical world' is not affected by my
assessment of it. Hesienberg represents one aspect of the limitation
of that assumption. Psychology another. So I suppose that Truth and
Reality become truth and reality. Only relative.

>It is because all these metaphysical theories are living options to
>me, and because I more or less follow Peirce's definition of reality

I respect that. I am probably in a minority of one though :-(

>and his linkage of it to Truth, that I am interested in the problem
>of whether a truth predicate can be defined internally in a formal
>system that does the things we want it to do (like arithmatic).
>Note that this problem is not the same problem as the metaphysical
>problem of whether there is a totality of all truths or not (what
>is usually called simply Truth).  But, there is a linkage here,
>whose strength depends on how far we follow, eg. Hintikka or
>Penrose that human thought can be modelled by a formal system.

Surely formal systems are just tools: we are looking to generalise and
simplify our experience such that we can condense it into general
rules. This has utility. It is easier to teach a child that 'all
moving cars are dangerous' than it is to recount the deatails of all
the automobile accidents one has witnessed... but that doesn't make
it nearly as TRUE as the recounting of all that data...and the data
itself is only a reference to the presupposed actual events....

.. perhaps I could say that for me, it is not such a binary thing as
correct or not correct: There is existence. Maybe. I don't and can't
know. What I DO know is what experience I have. This is the nearest
to the Truth that I can get, and having been accused of being a
mystic on this group, I suppose that means that using the experience
as the starting point of the model. Then the memory of the experience
is another layer, and further away from one sort of reality, the
reality of direct experience, is The Model. That is the series of
generalised internal constructs and guidelines that we use to
manipulate our experience. The way we store it and refer to it
internally. THAT is what a realist calls Reality IMHO. He calls what
I call Reality mystical babblings :-)

What Peirce (Pierce?) seems to be saying, is that the assumption of
an independent reality is the basis for an inquiry into its nature:
The endpoint of that inquiry is the Truth. But Science itself, in its
attempt to simplify that reality into objects and rules, is in itself
a part of that reality. As we reduce complexity in the exterior
world, we introduce it in the interior! It seems likely to me that it
would require an infinite description to simplify the world
completely.

So I consider that such a search for Truth is meaningless in absolute
terms: You can for utilitarian reasons exploit the modelling ability
in your mind to produce object/rule arrangements of the world. This
gives you funtional efficiency - but it doesn't add to the 'Truth'.
All there is is all there is, and restating it in other terms IS just
philosopho-babble - amusing as an intellectual exercise - but not
useful in answering the basic questions of 'what am I?' and 'what the hell
is going on?'...:-)

Because in the final analysis, the Zen like answer, and I am afraid
it IS the only answer to those questions is:

'whatever you think' [you are/is going on]

The questions are a product of a model, and the answers are in terms
of that model. Mystics might say that the way out of that Gordian
knot is to practice Not Thinking. i.e. transcendental mentalism of
some sort. But then although you may experience Reality a little more
directly, you are [literally and in a very pragmatic sense]
completely at a loss for words...since these too are a product of
thinking, of that rational model. So this experience, whilst
illuminating, can't help answer those mental questions either.

Metaphysicist: 'Which is more powerful - God or an H-Bomb'
Engineer: 'If you can put God there at Ground Zero we'll find out......'

:-)







Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta