This message from John Collier after the colophon of the past discussion
was rejected by the server last Friday; discussants willing to respond
are kindly asked to do it off line. ----Pedro
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Asunto: Fwd: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
Fecha: Fri, 05 Nov 2010 18:15:52 +0200
De: John Collier <colli...@ukzn.ac.za>
Para: Pedro Clemente Marijuan Fernandez <pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es>
At 02:29 PM 05/11/2010, Stanley N Salthe wrote:
Replying to Loet. Well,= I may or may not be be a nominalist
(which kind?) in the sense that I believe that qualia are actual
as universals, and that evolution has created entities -- us --
that can experience them, or focus them, acutely. This is the
same as universals created by language -- such as 'space', 'heat',
etc., all of which do relate to experience but not to specific
objects.
Well, generals (even nominalistic ones, if such exist) never refer to
specific objects. Nominalists like Berkeley and Hume (or Ockam, for
that matter) take it that all generals are reducible to particulars,
and hence have no independent existence or reality. Generals are just
convenient classifications of particulars. So red is just a grouping
of experiences that we find convenient. Quine takes much the same
view, though he insists that the classes correspond to real physical
objects (he takes the physical to be that which we can know through
the senses, which for him is pretty much everything). Quine is a
scientific realist (our scientific theories are roughly accurate,
inasmuch as they have been tested), and a metaphysical realist (the
world plays an indispensable part in the truth of our theories, and
our best theory could still be false). He is not, however, a
Scholastic realist, who believes that generals are real. So there are
three kinds of realist, each different, and not such that one clearly
entails another. Only Scholastic realists are necessarily
anti-nominalist. It is hard for me to see how a Scholastic realist
could not be a metaphysical realist, but they don't have to be a
scientific realist (they might think, for example, that some
theological theory gives the best explanation of the world).
Stan thinks that qualia are actual, which goes beyond say, Peirce, who
thought that they are real but not actual (for him only what exists --
seconds at least -- is actual). For him qualia do not exist -- they
are more like abstractions resulting from our sensory and mental
process. Qualia are signs of other things, but their material aspect
-- what we experience -- is not actual. (Incidentally, this can
explain why the so called "hard problem" of consciousness of David
Chalmers is based on an error -- taking to exist what is only real.)
However it is real inasmuch as qualia as generals (given their
potentiality for signification) can't be reduced to an arbitrary
classification of experiences. The generals we attach to qualia
through their us as signs result from hypotheses, so red as a class is
a hypothesis that red things really do have some traits that mean they
should be grouped together. This hypothesis is testable and
falsifiable. Should it be falsified, then red is not a true general.
However it is dubious that all generals could be falsified -- this
would pretty much require extreme stupidity on our part (leading to
failure of evolutionary survival), or else a chaotic universe (I mean
in the sense of probability theory, not in the sense of deterministic
chaos, which involves deep but patterned properties).
However, I also believe that each species of sentient beings has
its own 'take' on actuality, lives in its own 'umwelt', and so my
sense of, for lack of a better term, a 'numinous realm' may be
conditioned by my own sense organs, and further conditioned again
by my cultural heritage. Thus, I am constructed as:
{physico-chemical world {biology {primate {culture {my
experience}}}}}, showing the layers of information affording me.
This is not antirealist per se, since we can have some accurate ideas
which correspond to real generals in the world (universals), but we
shouldn't expect all of our ideas to be accurate in this way. Even
ideas like red are falsifiable (they may have no basis in reality). It
is certainly not something that implies nominalism, though extreme
versions of it could. I think that Stan's version is usually called
constructive realism.
I hope this clarifies these abstruse philosophical points rather than
adding to the confusion. As Loet says, the issue is tangential, and
nothing scientific turns on it (except for the goals and practice of
science and it role in inquiry, ironically).
I have a lot more I could say about these matters, but that will have
to be enough for now.
My best,
john
Professor John Collier, Acting HoS and Acting Deputy HoS
colli...@ukzn.ac.za
Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South
Africa
T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031
http://collier.ukzn.ac.za/
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