On 26 June 2014 23:12, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > 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?
I fear you may not yet have quite grasped it, based on the last sentence above. I don't mean to say that the perceptions and cognitions themselves (i.e. the 1p part) are untrue or useless, it's the "fiction" of their having a non-conceptual 3p correlative in a hierarchical-reductive ontology. Furthermore, it wasn't at all my intention to *equate* atomic and arithmetical ontologies, but to try to be explicit about how they might be *differentiated*. To reiterate, any theory based on "atoms" (i.e. some finite set of entities and relations whose behaviour is postulated to underlie all other phenomena in a hierarchical manner) is, at least in principle, straightforwardly reductive without loss. It follows that any derived level (such as a water molecule) is precisely a conceptual fiction, convenient or otherwise, in the strong *ontological* (though not in the explanatory) sense, as a "molecule" is ex hypothesi a composite concept, not a member of the putatively basic set of ontological entities. This is hardly a surprise as it falls directly out of the strategy of reductionism. I appreciate, nonetheless, that it is an unusual distinction to make (as Bruno remarked, not many people see it) because in any purely 3p discourse it may seem to be a distinction without consequence, since there is in principle no loss of theoretical effectiveness after the reduction. But the selfsame distinction has crucial consequences in the unique context of perception and cognition, when we wish to associate a 1p part with a 3p part, because it then becomes starkly apparent (or at least it should) that no such non-conceptual "part" lies to hand, in the latter case, beyond the entities of the basement level ontology. As an example, let's consider "computation" in the role of the putative 3p part. On this analysis, any instantiation of computation based on "atomic" reductionism must be seen, from the ontological perspective, as instantly degenerating to the primitive relations of atoms. Of course (and this is what continues to confuse the picture) nothing prevents our continuing to *conceptualise* the behaviour of particularised composites of atoms as constituting computation *at the 1p level* of perception and cognition. But the selfsame theory originates all 3p phenomena effectively at the level of the atomic primitives, *independent* of any higher-level conceptualisation. Hence, we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of seeking to justify the correlation of a specific 1p concept (e.g. computation) with some 3p composite activity that has no independent ontological legitimacy or effectiveness outside the confines of that very conceptualisation! This seems to me to be arguing in a particularly vicious circle. I suspect it is this inherent circularity that drives some to dismiss the 1p part as "illusory" and the 3p composition as "real", but the desperation of this move is revealed in the consequence that the elimination of the first inevitably implies the simultaneous disappearance of both! In my view the above argument exposes an actual contradiction, or at least a serious inconsistency, in hierarchical-reductive attempts to associate 3p and 1p phenomena in general, without effectively eliminating the latter. Indeed, I think it may be a more general and ultimately more convincing argument than those deployed in Step 8 of the UDA. This brings us to the consideration of whether the selfsame argument can be deployed against an arithmetical ontology. If we can show that such an ontology (as you have suggested) is a straightforward reductionism then indeed the same criticism should go through. However, I think we can discern that this is not the case. Arithmetical relations, as deployed in comp, do indeed serve in a certain sense as the "primitives" of the theory, but they are not thereby a basement-level "foundation" on which the remainder of the theoretical structure rests in a hierarchical-reductive organisation. Rather, they appear in the theory as the minimum necessary to justify the constructive existence of a computational domain in terms of which logico-computational features of a generally epistemological nature (notably self-reference) can be derived. It is the epistemological consequences of the latter (notably the FPI) that then take over the explanatory thrust, and it is impossible thereafter to show how such consequences can be reduced without loss to specific dispositions of the ontological primitives. To put it crudely, arithmetical relations aren't required to *do* or *be* anything in the sense that "atomic" entities and relations are customarily deployed in reductionist theories; they merely serve as a minimally-adequate theoretical basis of a general derivation (or emulation, as Bruno puts it) of computation. Thereafter, the task becomes one of justifying "everything" that follows, on general epistemological grounds. 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