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Natural Law and the Modeling Relation

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Natural Law and the Modeling Relation

Arkady
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Posted 10/24/09 - 10:23 AM:	#21
Legion wrote: Hmm Arkady... Let me take a different approach and simply tell you what I think his purpose is in this excerpt. I think he is addressing the basis of the explicit understandings of natural systems. When we can justifiably claim to have an explicit understanding of a natural system then what does this imply? I think this is the question he is addressing. I think natural law applies to all natural systems. We can justifiably hope to understand a society, and thus be sociologists for instance, because we strongly suspect that a society has entailments between the various phenomena associated with it. Again, I appreciate the attempt, but this is still clear as mud. No worries, though. To each their own.
"Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." -T.H. Huxley

ciceronianus
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Posted 10/24/09 - 10:43 AM:	#22
Legion wrote: Well Cicero if we are examining an epistemology which science is grounded in then isn’t it incumbent upon us to say what we know and how we know it? It seems to me that here we must make “common sense” explicit. In all honesty, I don't think that we must do any such thing, and question the usefulness of such an exercise. But, I am impatient with certain philosophical fascinations, and wonder why they fascinate. That, though, is another topic.
"Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts."--C.S. Peirce "There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it."--Marcus Tullius Cicero "Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men."--John Dewey

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Grand Moff

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Posted 10/25/09 - 03:47 AM:	#23
Legion, Of course there are no 'ironclad proofs' that phenomena entail other phenomena; there are no ironclad proofs of anything, including this sentence. But I wouldn't say that means we take scientific facts 'on faith', unless by faith you mean something rather different from what is usually meant by the term. Furthermore, you seem to hold that an epistemology should ascertain what we can know infallibly, correct? I would say that a meaningful, functional epistemology should be more concerned with the procedures we actually use to obtain knowledge, as fallible as it may be. As for propositions being in a fully formal system, I would say that applies even to theories of perception. After all, we have certain entities and the relations between them. As they are, they don't necessarily refer to anything in our perception; one can still consider qualia without holding they are a good description of our perception. Furthermore, perhaps it is a mistake to concentrate so much on individual propositions? I would say Quine has made quite a convincing argument for a kind of semantic holism. As for the question of whether laws exist in disciplines other than physics, one should distinguish between laws that are valid only approximately, like the laws of biology, chemistry, and a large part of physics as well, and the laws of fundamental physics, which are valid exactly. The latter are not really laws, but it is useful to introduce them as laws in an approximate treatment of some region of experience.

Legion
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Posted 10/25/09 - 03:50 PM:	#24
TMT, I don’t believe everything Descartes did was solid. But when he said, “cogito ergo sum” that seems completely unassailable to me. That seems ironclad. I believe he could have said, “I emote thus I am”, or “ I imagine thus I am”, or any number of other things and many of them would have had veracity. The essence seems to me to be: “I engage in some subjective activity therefore I must exist.” I don’t believe that propositions need be, in some sense, entirely contained within formal systems. I think propositions can be entailed by measurements, for instance. Or they can also be also be hypotheses which imply phenomena via prediction. And for some reason here I am also thinking of the syntactic/semantic distinction. It seems to me that natural law is an assertion that nature is understandable to some extent. My aim in starting this thread was to hopefully explore the possible truths, or the philosophy, underlying explicit understanding. And again I ask. If any of us can justifiably claim to have an explicit understanding of a natural system then what does this imply?
We sense. We reason. We predict. We don't always get those right.

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Grand Moff

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Posted 10/26/09 - 11:18 AM:	#25
No, I would say personal identity is as much a theory, and I would say a suspect one at that, as any other. After all, it seems to claim at least: (1) That there are mental facts. (This has been challenged by, for example, the Churchlands.) (2) That these necessarily belong to an ego. (The weaker of the two assertions, challenged for example by Hume and the Buddhists.) The point being that the idea of science as modeling extends to the entire domain of knowledge. I would say propositions only acquire meaning by being in a system of propositions (what Quine called the 'web of belief'). After all, the readings on an ammeter mean nothing to me unless I posses at least some of the conceptual apparatus of classical electrodynamics. As for the last paragraph, I'm not sure what you mean by an 'explicit understanding'. Care to explain?

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