Clark, you wrote:
"So you don’t need the idea of laws logically prior to the objects to make
sense of them. Just properties inherent to the objects. (There’d still be an
ontological question about some of these properties like overlap and
interactions of course — but in theory you could argue they inhere to the
objects rather than are independent of them)
Peirce’s solution really is to argue that symmetries are themselves real
independent of the objects."
I agree that the laws are not really 'logically prior' to the objects for that
would suggest that these laws have some ontological mode of their own even if
it is not material but mental.
But I don't think that Peirce argued that the laws/symmetries are real,
'independent of the objects' for wouldn't that be similar to 'logically
prior'??. My view is that the laws are real, as general operational forces but
they have no power/reality except as 'articulated' within the objects. [This
may be what you meant anyway].
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
From: Clark Goble
To: Peirce-L
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 11:23 AM
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Nominalism vs. Realism
On Jan 29, 2017, at 12:57 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com>
wrote:
I would not call it a "force," but I agree that the traditional debate is
about whether there is something real (hence "realism") that all rabbits have
in common to make them rabbits vs. "rabbits" merely being a name (hence
"nominalism") that we apply to many different individuals simply because we
happen to perceive them as having certain similarities. Even this way of
putting it arguably concedes too much to nominalism, because it implies that
the universal or general is a thing that is somehow identically instantiated in
multiple other things.
A good place where this debate appears is thermodynamics. It’s fairly well
known that defining a system with spatially extended objects with various
symmetries allows one to define the laws of thermodynamics. Now this is a very
nominalist conception of thermodynamics yet importantly it is one where the
laws arise out of the symmetries of matter. So you don’t need the idea of laws
logically prior to the objects to make sense of them. Just properties inherent
to the objects. (There’d still be an ontological question about some of these
properties like overlap and interactions of course — but in theory you could
argue they inhere to the objects rather than are independent of them)
Peirce’s solution really is to argue that symmetries are themselves real
independent of the objects.
Now this won’t work for foundational physics due to the crazy nature of
quantum mechanics. It’s much harder (IMO) to formulate a quantum mechanics in
terms of nominalism. People still try to do it of course, but it’s usually via
a ontological slight of hand where the foundational laws place isn’t dealt
with. You can see that slight of hand in say New Atheist arguments about why
there is something rather than nothing. The foundational laws of physics are
always part of this ‘before’ yet not seen as ‘something.’ Effectively they need
a real lawlike prescriptive feature of the universe prior to there being an
universe. Really this has the role God does for deists and the distinction
between a deist and an atheist blurs at best. Of course this was common even in
early modernism where extreme nominalists still put God into the picture.
Effectively a big reason why realism was a thing before was theology (whether
pagan for the neoplatonists or in the medieval era and renaissance God for the
Christians, Jews and Muslims and even for deists) So nominalism was a slow
development partially done as science became independent from religion. After
Newton it became possible to really conceive of all of reality in terms of
deterministic atom and a few laws so nominalism took off and became the
mainstream intellectual view.
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