Hey Marsha, You do realize that these quotes conflict with the assertion that reification IS conceptualization.
You may have won the battle but you lost the war in this regard. just pointing that out. -Ron ----- Original Message ---- From: MarshaV <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, May 29, 2011 4:36:30 AM Subject: Re: [MD] Keep on duckin' 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) ___ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
