In the main thread, I remarked that a "logic of opinion" would provide the epistemological (and metaphysical) bases for Orwell's imagined Ingsoc. In the infamous "Ministry of Truth" scenes, O'Brien comments on Winston's weakness in metaphysics; and indeed, the Party are masterly metaphysicians... the opinion of the Party is reality, and whatever deviates from that opinion is false (though it might *become* true - truth and falsity are relative to the opinion of the Party, which can never change. Therefore, if what was false becomes true, it has always been true. This is also inherent in the logic of opinion).
This is relativism pushed to its extreme, yet it is entirely 'logical' once one accepts the basic hypothesis that there is no distinction between a "truth" and a "widely-held belief".
I'm not, of course, suggesting that this is a serious argument against relativism in general; but it does provide an interesting little though experiment: how would a relativist argue against the parallel between her beliefs and those of Orwell's Ingsoc?
i'm still unclear on how, whilst not being a scientific realist, you can still motivate this distinction between truth and widely-held belief, at least in the sciences. or whether you can be an anti-realist about something and still cling on to a strong notion of truth. even in its normative guise, you still to motivate it and ground the norm on sth, no? so we're back at the question i posed to you in the other thread.
I didn't motivate it, I simply showed that there IS a distinction (and the distinction was between "fact" and "widely-held belief", and not between *truth* and widely-held belief). As I said, it was a pedantic remark - you should rather argue that *there are no facts*, not that facts and opinions are the "same".
There are no easy answers - we have to accomodate radical doubt, we can't just banish it. Our varioius theories - however naive or elaborate - are generally underdetermined with respect to evidence; we can only rely on their success in predicting phenomena. Certain theories predict badly; these can be discounted (for example, "the Gods are physically present on Mount Olympus and can be seen by anyone who has the temerity to climb the mountain"). Others are remarkably efficient ("if you jump off a high building there's a good chance you'll hurt yourself"). This is already a step away from simple opinion - the "everyone knows that" collapses if it is shown systematically that what "everyone knows" is not actually the case.
The metaphysics of Ingsoc don't allow for the impact of the physical world, as the physical world is not mind-independent: who controls the mind, controls reality. In Oceania, the "outside world" is banished. Yet what would happen if, for example, an asteroid hit the London of 1984? What would happen if an epidemic struck? The metaphysical position of O'Brien rejects empiricism, yet can be controverted by empirical "facts". This *suggests* that the world is to some degree mind-independent; each successful prediction of certain physical phenomena from a certain kind of sense impression supports the view.
Of course, "widely-held beliefs" can change over time. But the pattern of change, and the driving force of empirical rather than purely theoretical verification, tend to suggest that our beliefs either correspond or do not correspond to the world. Yet once again, there is absolutely no sure argument against the purely Idealist view that everything - including the seeming pre-eminence of empirical verification - is a projection of Mind. It's a matter of preference, not certainty - but one can prefer to accept, for methodological ends, the hypothesis that there IS a mind-independent reality, and see how far it gets one.
or one can prefer to reject, for methodological ends, that there is a mind-independent reality or even dismiss the notion of a mind-independent reality as incoherent, and see where that takes them, no?
talking about facts presupposes the mind-independent world, so i suppose by rejecting a mind-independent world (or downplaying its importance to the point of triviality, but anyway severing the link between that and our sense-data) i reject talk of facts as well.
i suppose my line would be that there's no non-circular way of verifying whether our articulated beliefs do or do not correspond to the world. and then i would add that articulation relies on a great many conventions.
Of course. But then one has to square the rejection of mind-independent reality with the apparent impact of *something* on our belief-based predictions. Why, for example, should we *believe* that there is phlogiston or an ether, devise tests for our belief, and discover to our surprise that our tests don't give the expected results ?
weren't we in a way deciding upon a dual interpretation of what would count as a result though? for example we decided that some things in the experiment were relevant to answering the question posed, no?
Yes. But this still presupposes thhat there are phenomena which either 'correspond' to the prediction or 'don't correspond' to it...
not really, only that there are things we can claim to notice that we can claim that they either correspond or don't correspond to our expectations. don't we still need to do a lot of "interpretation" of what we judge to be the brute data, in order to derive our conclusion?
Hmmm - difficult to say if you don't give examples. The Michelson-Morley experiment would all the same strike me as a counterexample - the data was uninterpretable given the beliefs of the experimenters.
i thought lorentz-fitzgerald gave a hypothesis explaining the michelson-morley results. erm examples from religion: the 'filioque' that separates (among other things) the catholics from the orthodox. the sex of the angels. whoops, that should've been in the other thread.
Yes, they did. Not very successfully; though there are still a few folks with axes to grind who'd conjure a preferred frame out of the ether.
But if the world is a product of our minds, why did the MM experiment fail at all? It corresponded to the beliefs about the world current at the end of the 19th century; Lorentz-Fitzgerald length contraction was a pretty "counter-intuitive" addition.
maybe it didn't correspond to the beliefs about the world so well after all, or rather it rather it just triggered some people to come up with an argument against the view of the current view of the world that was deemed convincing by an increasing number of people as time passed. (plus other people such as planck already had other ideas, it was just a matter of them imposing their ideas by acceptable means and arguments). a certain physicist who then broke all methodological rules by simply postulating an unjustified set of assumptions and giving a sexy look of the world didn't help matters, on the back of explaining another phenomenon (for which he later got a nobel prize) didn't help things either.
Doesn't talking about "beliefs about the world" imply that there's a world to have beliefs about?
Of course, you could argue that the belief that there IS a world is one of the "beliefs about the world". But if there is no world, on what do our minds depend?
does beliefs about god imply that there's a god?
and why do our minds have to depend on sth?
Good point.
As to the "ontological foundations" of mind... I can understand a solipsism of 'only one mind', but a collective solipsism would wreck itself on the problem of "other minds"
Re : « belief in God vs. belief in the physical world”
If we’re to believe Quine (and there are good reasons for doing so), physical objects are as ‘mythical’ as are the Gods of Homer. If this is the case, why should Quine (and others of equally remarkable philosophical skill) consider that the myth of physical objects is “epistemologically superior to most”. Quine argues that this is due to it having “…proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience”.
The myth of physical objects (and the derived myths – in other words, the “natural sciences”) are indeed more efficacious than are the competing myths; fundamentally (or historically) this is due to its status as a theory of ‘sensory impression’ – we perceive physical objects *because* the world is, and is composed of, physical objects; we perceive ‘the same object’ at different times *because* physical objects persist through time etc. etc. Of course, this is naïve realism – “what we see is what there is” – but in its most primitive form it requires no further belief than the belief that what we perceive is *real*.
The perception of apparent ‘physical objects’ is permanently and universally open to our everyday experience; the *myth* of physical objects follows from our experience that a certain ‘kind’ of sensory impression invariable follows a sensory impression of another ‘kind’ (it’s fundamentally linked to the myth of ‘causation’ – indeed, the myth of causation is a basic element of the myth of physical objects). In this, the myth of physical objects is far easier to believe than the complexities of most supernaturalist accounts – ‘magical thought’ is far less efficacious than is ‘physical thought’.
The term ‘efficacious’ should alert us to the pragmatic reasons for preferring the myth of physical objects: the refined or elaborated version of the ‘myth’ allows us to predict outcome, and thus gives us a ‘handle’ on the physical world that far surpasses the most outrageous claims of the mystics. Indeed, the weakness of their predictive capabilities is a major reason for rejecting the claims of the supernaturalists.
I would challenge all here to cite one example of a ‘supernaturalist prediction’ that has the same force as “if you heat water to 100°C under normal atmospheric conditions, it boils”.
it efficacity is a very pragmatic and possibly relative notion though, no? as for the water example, you may want to look into superboiling. there are cases in normal atmospheric pressure where water will fail to boil at 100 C. you may want to look into Hasok Chang's "inventing temperature" (sorry this is a bit unfair on my part, since i was reading the book for my dissertation but you couldn't know that). maybe you'd need to change your example to 'get table salt which fails to dissolve in water' or sth similar. i think actually hasok has stuff on his website, maybe even a video of water failing to boil.
mm not sure, because the decision that water has a stable boiling point was one that was agreed upon and corroborated by lucky accidents and sweeping under the rug of contrary cases.
I did actually state "normal atmospheric conditions"; I should perhaps have been even more explicit...
Nonetheless, these are all red herrings - I asked for a supernaturalist prediction with equivalent force (at sea level, under normal atmospheric, gravitational and chemical conditions)
actually i was thinking of superheating, which occurs at normal atmospheric conditions. no vacuum no other stuff.
you may want to check this:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/chang/boiling/index.htm
I thought superheating was a phenomenon...
anyway, can one superheat red herrings ?
if you're looking for the same as heating, maybe the rain-dance could fill the spot. or maybe praying when presented with an illness (use of the placebo effect)
Are you seriously suggesting, Haris, that rain dances and prayers for the sick can be shown to bear a statistically-significant relation to recovery from illness and precipitation?
are you seriously suggesting, David, that most of the pills in circulation bear statistically-significant relations to recovery from illness, and that furthermore the boundary for what counts as statistically significant is nothing but arbitrary?
As to the bounds of statistical significance - I sincerely hope, if ever you're seriously ill, that you will therefore demand to be treated by a Christian Fundamentalist faith healer
why thanks, i suppose i will try anything in no particular order, if ever i'm very seriously ill. so what do you mean by 'medicine is technology, not science'? that technology is allowed to not produce much whilst science isn't?
That last sentence takes some reading!!!
(I can't help it, I've got a thing about split infinitives - I put it down to a classical education)
Technology is, au contraire, expected to "produce" - but in the economic, rather than the epistemological sense - and NEVER underestimate the power of economics (even ivory towers have to be paid for). The economic influence on medicine (and particularly pharmacology) is staggering - we get what pays, not what works.
Indeed, money is one of the chiller winds that blows on the cosy world imagined by academic relativism - it's all well and good patronising the cute beliefs of "lost Amazonian tribes" and smelly shamans by according them equivalent status with QM (though I doubt that they could ever be as mystical and magical as most interpretations of QM!!!), but the real winners of intellectual relativism are big businesses... public opinion belongs to he who has the deepest pockets.
"i will try anything in no particular order, if ever i'm very seriously ill."
I CALL ALL HERE PRESENT TO BEAR WITNESS: if ever we hear that Haris is seriously ill, we will claim the right to treat him with a sequence of any kind of magical or medical cures - and Tristan will provide us with a nice little algorithm by which cures can be selected from a database in a sequence dictated by their greater non-resemblance to the previously-selected cure.
I vote we seed it with "voluntary euthanasia" as the first cure.
[or that we give him nothing at all, so that he dies of a homeopathic overdose]
hmm, given that big businesses try to convince us that they have 'the real thing' rather than any sort of relatvie stuff, then i wonder who's the guilty party.
you'll have to at least give me water for me to die of homeopathic overdose, unless homeopathic medicines start coming out in spray forms. otherwise, you have my blessing for anything you want.
Dear sid,
i thought that the fact was that two half spheres (hemispheres) make a whole (brain). given the meaning of the word hemispheres, it may even be an analytic truth.
but then if you want to see that as evidence that two are better than one, then of course you have my blessing in getting a big knife and start splitting things in two. as regards arguments from authority, even if that is from www.energy.gov-which may be particularly open to SSK analyses of the role of extra-scientific interests.
( energy.gov seems simply to be the department of energy of the U.S.)
Haris - when I talk about BB, I'm talking from bitter and shameful experience... there is a very conscious & deliberate policy of manipulating opinion.
Why do you think they took me on?
For God's sake Sid, develop a sense of proportion. "BB" = "big business"; as for the rest, you aren't important enough to take so much trouble.
Get over yourself.
My comment was evidently addressed to Haris, and followed our exchange.
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