On 26 June 2014 20:38, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't understand your point? Are you saying that if there is a basement > level explanation then everything above is a fiction? I think of "fiction" > = "untrue". If there is not a basement, then every explanation is a > "fiction", since there is always a lower level. Or are you claiming there > can be no reductive explanations of anything; that something is always left > out?
Well, I attempted to address these points in my response to your previous post. However, to re-iterate, I'm trying to draw a clear distinction between explanatory and ontological assumptions. You may personally take the view that in the end all we have is (attempts at) explanation and in one sense (that of cognitive closure with respect to "ultimate reality") I would agree. Nevertheless, any exhaustively reductive explanatory scheme is founded, ex hypothesi, on a bottom-up hierarchy, such that the basement level entities and relations, whatever we take them to be, are deemed fully adequate to support (i.e. to be re-interpreted in terms of) all the levels above them. IOW, they comprise, exhaustively, the ontology of the theory. It's in that sense that higher levels in the hierarchy are (ontologically) fictional; i.e. they are, however useful in an explanatory role, surplus to requirements from an ontological perspective. Not that, in any purely 3p reduction, anything is thereby left out. How could it be, if all the higher levels are fully reducible to the basement level? It's only when we consider the putative association of 1p phenomena with *intermediate* levels of the 3p hierarchy that a gap appears, because now we are associating such 1p phenomena with a "level", that, whatever its *explanatory* power, has no independent *ontological* purchase. Furthermore, at this point it becomes easier to see that these explanatory "fictions" are, essentially, artefacts of the perception and cognition we are seeking to explain; no doubt, in the best cases (e.g. computation), of great generality and power, but nonetheless, ex hypothesi, incapable of adding anything effective to the bottom-up ontological hierarchy. If so, we seem to have arrived at the position of attempting to found the aetiology of perception and cognition on nothing more than its own fictions! But since these fictions immediately degenerate, ontologically speaking, to the basement level, it should be apparent that they are capable of offering rather less independent ontological support than the smile of the Cheshire Cat. David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
