Understanding where science fits in – metaphysically,
epistemologically, morally, aesthetically and otherwise – is our
culture's characteristic philosophical problem; we’ve been working on
it since Descartes. The hardest part is to reconcile a physicalistic
ontology with the apparently ineliminable multiplicity of discourses
that we require when we try to say how things are. Some hold we’re
suffering from pluralism, nihilism, solipsism, relativism, idealism,
deconstructionism and other symptoms of the "French disease". I plead
not guilty. It seems to me that scientific Structural Realism is quite
compatible with the view that events fall into revealing and reliable
patterns not just at the level of micro structure but at many
different orders of aggregation of matter. The heterogeneity of our
discourse would then correspond to the heterogeneity of levels at
which the world is organised, and both might well prove irreducible.
We forget too easily that many of our techniques rely on
approximation.
Everything could be physical, but we hold there are many different
kinds of physical things. Some are protons; some are constellations;
some are trees or cats; and some are butchers, bakers or candlesticks.
There are the proprietary generalisations we use to explain behaviour
and each such generalisation has a proprietary vocabulary to express
it. Nothing can happen except what the laws of physics permit; but
much goes on that the laws of physics do not talk about. There may,
as Orn asserts, be divine stuff and experience. I am crude enough to
believe the world could do with some buckets of this and that better
organisation of our material being could help in bringing about the
conditions necessary. My friend might look at this the other way
round, though I'm by no means sure he does. My contention is that
science requires fellowship and a guard against the libidinal economy
as surely as we need magnets to guard against out plasma touching
anything outside the torus from which we hope to derive fusion power.
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