On May 28, 2011, at 11:38 AM, david buchanan wrote:
> dmb says:
> Again, I'll remind you that you repeatedly cited an enthusiastic William
> James fan to dispute William James. The quotes you post as evidence for your
> notion of reification do not support that notion at all.
Marsha:
Here's more...
"Everything in the world that we conceive of and experience is related to the
mind. When that world is reified however, it appears to exist absolutely, in
its own right; and this mental distortion may lead one to wonder how nature can
be comprehensible to the human mind. Einstein, who routed absolute space and
time from the universe, still clung to an absolute ontology. The centrist view
presented here, which might be called _conceptual relativity_, fundamentally
challenges the realist ontological assumptions underlying virtually all of
Western science. Theory, in the form of conceptual designation permeates our
experience. As theory is not purely determined by some intrinsic nature o
reality, there is no one conceptual system that uniquely accounts for the
myriad of natural phenomena. Objects exist relative to the theory-laden
consciousness that experiences them.
"From a centrists perspective, ontological absolutism is based on the mental
distortion known as reification. Reification in science is quite similar to
the same process in everyday life. This stands to reason, since scientific
inquiry itself bears so much in common with ordinary mental activity. Einstein
made the following distinction between the two: "The scientific way of forming
concepts differers from that which we use in our daily life, not basically, but
merely in the more precise definition of concepts and conclusions; more
painstaking and systematic choice of experimental material; and greater logical
economy.
"The process of reification, as we have noted previously, forms the basis for
everyday realism, and it is present eve in young children. According to the
child psychologist Jean Piaget, a child first constructs a concept related to
the world and then projects it out into the world. The concept is externalized
so that it appears to be a perceptually given object or property, independent
of the subject's own mental activity. As we can see from our own experience,
the phenomena that we perceive in the external world appear to exist
independently of our perceptions and conceptions. Here is perhaps the most
fundamental reason for believing in an objective universe independent of
consciousness: that is simply how the world appears. But does the world in
fact exist the way it appears, or is its mode of existence incongruous with its
mode of appearance?
"Everyday and scientific realism differ, however, in the types of things that
are reified. Where as the former chiefly reifies objects and properties that
appear to our senses, the latter reifies the existence of noumenal entities
that lie behind appearances. Thus, subatomic particles, electromagnetic
fields, and the zero-point energy of the vacuum are assumed to exist
independently of the theories in which they are conceived. That is, they
really exist "out there" in the objective world, independent of human existence.
"The tendency of reification among mathematicians is particularly interesting.
Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh comment in their book 'Descartes' Dream: The
World According to Mathematics' that many modern mathematicians regard their
discipline as a system of deductive structures in which deduction moves from
axiom to conclusions, and the axioms are "simply playthings." This attitude
suggests a formalists view of mathematics one the Davis and Hersh assert is
generally instilled into today's students. Yet in a later chapter they claim
that nearly all mathematicians hold Platonist conception of mathematics nearly
all the time. This view asserts that mathematics exists independently of the
world; it exists prior to and apart from the universe, and and it will go on
even when the cosmos comes to an end. Thus, the world of mathematics exists
independently of the mathematician, whose job is to discover and record what is
already there. What is this telling us? It would seem th
at most mathematicians, when they philosophize about mathematics, profess a
formalist view, but the rest of the time (especially when they are actually
doing mathematics) they revert to a realist stance. This may well be true of
many scientists as well. The natural tendency of reification, which we have
had since childhood, is extremely difficult to eradicate from our habits of
thinking and perceiving."
(Wallace, B. Alan, 'Choosing Reality, : A Buddhist View of Physics and the
Mind',2003,pp.120-123)
___
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