David Morey asked the MOQers:
How does the MOQ describe science? Does science study SQ? Does science discover
SQ processes that take place in the world beyond the confines of direct
experience? If not how should the self-understanding of science be corrected or
redescribed in MOQ terms?
dmb says:
This could be a really great question, a great way to discuss the difference
between SOM and the MOQ, but there is a glitch in it that needs fixing first.
In the MOQ, there is no such thing as the world beyond the confines of
experience - or rather if there were we couldn't know anything about it. How
would it be possible for us to go beyond the world of experience? In the MOQ
(and for James), experience and reality amount to the same thing because there
is no sense in talking about what might be beyond our limits.
I think one of the best ways to get at the question is to frame it in terms of
metaphysical realism or scientific realism - that's more or less the SOM view
of truth and reality - and then pragmatists like Pirsig and James can be put on
the other side along with certain kinds of anti-realists. Here are the opening
lines to a Stanford article called "Challenges to Metaphysical Realism".
"According to metaphysical realism, the world is as it is independently
of how humans take it to be. The objects the world contains, together
with their properties and the relations they enter into, fix the
world's nature and these objects exist independently of our ability to
discover they do. Unless this is so, metaphysical realists argue, none
of our beliefs about our world could be objectively true since true
beliefs tell us how things are and beliefs are objective when true or
false independently of what anyone might think.
Many philosophers believe metaphysical realism is just plain common
sense. Others believe it to be a direct implication of modern science,
which paints humans as fallible creatures adrift in an inhospitable
world not of their making. Nonetheless, metaphysical realism is
controversial. Besides the analytic question of what it means to
assert that objects exist independently of the mind, metaphysical
realism also raises epistemological problems: how can we
obtain knowledge of a mind-independent world? There are also prior
semantic problems, such as how links are set up between our beliefs
and the mind-independent states of affairs they allegedly
represent. This is the Representation Problem.
Anti-realists deny the world is mind-independent. Believing the
epistemological and semantic problems to be insoluble, they conclude
realism must be false."
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