Dear Clark, lists - But aren't formal and material causes just re-baptized in physics as constants (of laws), as types of forces or particles, or as boundary conditions?
Best F Den 22/09/2014 kl. 15.59 skrev Clark Goble <cl...@lextek.com<mailto:cl...@lextek.com>> : On Sep 21, 2014, at 9:13 PM, Clark Goble <cl...@libertypages.com<mailto:cl...@libertypages.com>> wrote: On Sep 18, 2014, at 8:49 AM, Gary Fuhrman <g...@gnusystems.ca<mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca>> wrote: Clark, in reference to the Peirce passage you quoted about the “community of quasi-minds”, you said that “While we could obviously and perhaps should discuss this purely as efficient causation, I love how Peirce discusses it instead in terms of signs.” But it’s not at all obvious to me how or why we could or should discuss this purely as efficient causation. To me, the material and formal (if not final) causes of the fact determined by this process appear much more prominent than the efficient causes. Typically physicists and most physical scientists avoid material and formal causes in the Aristotilean sense. They become more the properties or information that changes. Since the focus is on those changes of state the focus is really on efficient causation with little focus on material or formal changes - they are simply bracketed and left uninvestigated usually. When they are investigated by truly theoretical physicists and occasionally philosophers things get tricky. One could well argue, for instance, that most of string theory is really a theory about material and formal causes for instance. While I honestly don’t think most physicists are instrumentalists like Feynman, I do think they adhere to a certain instrumentalist ethos that says one should leap into the abyss of worrying about ultimate stuff beyond what we can empirically talk about clearly. (Which is why string theory has long been so controversial, IMO) The reason this is important is of course how physics conceives of formal and material causes tends to view them as somewhat illusionary. That is they are emergent phenomena but there’s always the assumption of a true reduction to basic physics is in theory possible. (This is different from the reductionism of description that I take Frederik was addressing a few weeks ago) So to a physicist to only real form and material are the ultimate constituents of the universe, whether they be strings, quantum fields or whatever they turn out to be. And the reason talk of formal or material causes is pointless is because we don’t know the ultimate constituents (or if people think they do, it’s merely talk about strings) I’m not saying this is the only way one could talk about this sort of thing. But I do think this is, in practice, the way physicists and to only a slightly lesser extent chemists think about all this. Biologists are a different beast of course. ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu<mailto:peirce-L@list.iupui.edu> . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu<mailto:l...@list.iupui.edu> with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
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