On 6/26/2014 1:49 PM, David Nyman wrote:
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
Ok, thanks. I think I grasp your idea. But ISTM you are taking "fiction" and "artefact"
to mean "untrue" or "non-existent". I don't see that is justified. Just because a water
molecule is made of three atoms doesn't make it a "fiction". If our perceptions and
cognition are successfully modeled by some theory whose ontology is atoms or arithmetic,
then that is reason to give some credence to that ontology. But I see no reason to say
the perceptions and cognitions are now "untrue" and useless as a basis for inference
simply because they are derivative in some successful model?
Brent
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
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