Dan quoted from Wikipedia on Anti-realism:
"The term was coined by Michael Dummett, who introduced it in his paper Realism
to re-examine a number of classical philosophical disputes involving such
doctrines as nominalism, conceptual realism, idealism and phenomenalism. The
novelty of Dummett's approach consisted in seeing these disputes as analogous
to the dispute between intuitionism and Platonism in the philosophy of
mathematics. ...According to intuitionists (anti-realists with respect to
mathematical objects), the truth of a mathematical statement consists in our
ability to prove it. According to platonists (realists), the truth of a
statement consists in its correspondence to objective reality."
Dan said to dmb:
I am the one who threw idealism into the mix. And yes of course I understand
the MOQ is neither. When you mentioned anti-realism I read idealism, rightly or
wrongly. I know that to professional philosophers who are much more learned
that I am the terms have a difference but to me they fall under the same
umbrella. ...Now it seems to me that anti-realism has more to do with
mathematics than metaphysics so I was unsure why it is being brought into the
discussion.
dmb says:
There is a dispute between realists and anti-realists in mathematics, science,
morality and all kinds of other areas. And, as it says in the quote you shared,
in mathematics the Platonists are realists (with respect to numbers). Plato
himself was a realist with respect to Ideas or Forms and he is the king of
Idealism or Rationalism. This is a very good reason not to equate idealism with
anti-realism. Idealists and materialists have different views about what's
"real" but both can be considered realists and they both can subscribe to the
appearance-reality distinction and the correspondence theory of truth, where
true ideas are the ones that represent the way things "really" are.
That Stanford quote on "Constructive empiricism" tells us, for example, that
scientific realism claims "to give us, in its theories, a literally true story
of what the world is like" whereas the constructive empiricist holds that
"acceptance of a scientific theory involves only the belief that the theory is
empirically adequate." So, yes, constructive empiricism makes no claims about
what is literally 'true' story about what the world is like. It says our
conceptual models can be empirically adequate or not, they can successfully
organize the relevant data or not, but it stops short of making any
metaphysical claims about these models corresponding to the "real" reality
beyond those appearances.
The stance called constructive empiricism is very similar to (ZAMM, page 262)
Pirsig's lesson about Poincare and
alternative geometries. He says it doesn't really make any sense to "ask
whether the metric system is true and the avoirdupois
system is false; whether Cartesian coordinates are true and polar
coordinates are false. One geometry can not be more true than
another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is
advantageous."
Or, as I'd like to put it, geometry shouldn't be taken as True in the sense
that it corresponds to an objective, mind-independent reality but it's
pragmatically true in the sense that it agrees with experience. Pragmatic
truths are the ones that work in practice, the ones that work when you can
actually use them for some purpose. What we get in the MOQ are just empirical
claims, not metaphysical claims. In the MOQ, the primary empirical reality is
prior to language, outside of language, and so it offers no definite claims
about the "real" reality. It can be known in experience but as soon as we start
talking, we're dealing with concepts and not the primary empirical reality.
Idealists say ideas are reality and materialists say physical things are
reality but the MOQ says reality cannot be defined.
Ironically, the MOQ isn't metaphysical in the sense. Like the man said, it's a
contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity.
Hope that addresses most of your concerns.
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
