A TRANS-PRAGMATIC TRUTH PARADIGM

FOR SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY,

AND PHILOSOPHY

Raphael Neelamkavil. Ph.D., Dr. phil.

1. OBLIGATION TO PRAGMATISM AS A NEGATIVE TRIGGER

My concept of universally real trigger-causation in all existents is philosophically and scientifically indebted to the most glaringly universal instances of the ‘effects only’, ‘use only’, ‘limited space’, ‘limited time’, ‘limited causal roots’ type of pragmatic bases of the functioning principles of most philosophical and scientific schools and disciplines and their effects on all aspects of life.

In spite of such effects, the majority of humanity, especially the scientific community – does not learn to bring about a radical re-definition of the pragmatically defined concept of attainable truth. This is the proof of the relevance of a re-formulation of the same by the science of philosophy and by scientific philosophy in the realization and growth of science, technology, etc.

Just within the pragmatic attitude lives and functions a big majority of the humanity. Specifically, the scientific community acts consciously by inhibiting wholesome ideas, actions, and changes in the usually pragmatic functioning of (1) every possible realm of knowledge, including the human project of thinking, feeling, curing, facilitating, etc. or (2) any other realms of life in any given environment and society.

The only given justification has been the urgency (1) to experience “the realizably” theoretical and practical effects of all ideas, actions, and changes as early as possible, (2) to have the awaited “long-term effects” at the earliest, (3) to have it in abundance “in the here-and-now”, etc.

Pragmatism has been the backbone of almost all, most basic and less basic, definitions, practical procedures, etc. in logic, mathematics, physical sciences, biological sciences, human sciences, etc. Pragmatism acquires constantly new definitions in history of science and philosophy.

By ‘pragmatism’ is meant not exactly and not only the philosophical school under this name. Of course, this philosophical school extols the effects-only and use-only theory beyond the emphasis it assigns to theoretical breadths and depths. In general, such emphasis plays an exaggerated role in determining the forms of access to what humanity needs in terms of life and truth. It is mainly the sciences that effectively inhibit any efforts beyond pragmatism.

The suggested new paradigm beyond pragmatism would be: The more the certainty and generality of the theoretical breadths and depths assured by the axiomatic foundations – the greater the truth of the specific, the individual, and the delineated results of such a founded philosophy and science within life and knowing.

I shall explain in other words the pragmatic state of the sciences. After all theoretical and experimental search, truth is being concluded to – albeit for a short time and with some or much assurance of probabilistic tenability – in a manner that is FULLY representative of the state of affairs sought to be represented.

The representation of an objectual process in a truth statement is taken to directly correspond or correspond enough to reality, when the theoretically antecedent instruments are universal enough to produce the knowledge about anything specific. But the antecedents are never universal enough, if the theoretical foundations are not broader than the theoretical grounding available in the positive sciences or formal sciences.

This sort of truth-representation is what knows, feels, cures, and facilitates life today, purportedly “in all respects”. Hence, pragmatism is merely be about the method of approaching truths and activities. But it has not been sufficiently about concluding something from a swarm of structures of theoretical generality and superiority, which should have worked in terms of theoretical and practical applicability in all possible specific cases available in any theory that is trans-pragmatic.

2. EXAMPLES OF OVEREMPHASIS ON PRAGMATISM

One example where the attitude of more general theoretical justification is missing is in the diverse theoretical constructs in physics. Anyone can characterise one of the many reasons as the blind and pragmatic acceptance, by many physicists, of the velocity of light as sacrosanct everywhere in the cosmos. In fact, we have been able to prove the velocity of light only with respect to our part of the universe, and have accepted it as the highest for all parts of the cosmos solely because we have not been able to detect one of higher value.

This is due to the overemphasis on pragmatism in science. Using such a limit velocity in science for technological success is a necessity, but insisting on it even in the broadest possible theoretical situations is cheap adherence. In this respect, the matter that none can accept is the way in which Einstein’s postulation of c as the reference velocity to measure and calculate other but lower velocities becomes accepted as the final proof of the very postulation!

What else is it but the consequence of strict pragmatism in the method and procedure of inquiry without enough antecedent theoretical broadening in the foundations, method, and procedure? This has debilitated science and philosophy of science for almost a century and a quarter. How to dispense with such pragmatism in science and philosophy?

Additionally, the declaration that the observed source-independence of luminal velocity is somehow a basis for accepting a background ether for luminal velocity to hinge upon, is again another instance of overmuch pragmatism in the method and procedure of theorization without restricting strict pragmatism to drawing conclusions.

A second example of strict pragmatism is the way in which some absolutely spherical geometries and their topologies were and are even now being used to geometrize the universe. They tend even to conclude from such a presupposition that the universe is spatially and temporally isotropic, and then tend to dispense with the effects of the locally causal temporal dimension on the universe.

Yet another example is the blind acceptance of the pragmatically probabilistic interpretation of quantum physics as the essence of all physics and of all physically existent reality, whereby most physicists attempt to accept a merely epistemic sort of causality in physical reality and call it “probabilistic causality”, and then start using it as if it were physical-ontological causality.

What we can understand (probabilistically, epistemically) need not be the same as how nature is out there! What in fact is the probabilistic causality that acts in physical processes with some parts of it being causal and other parts not causal or even acausal? Is not such a concept of causality a silly idea of causation based on epistemic determinism getting converted into ontological determinism, which then is converted into the actual nature of existent processes? The unnecessarily pragmatic ways of fixing scientific practices is the main reason behind it.

3. A TRANS-PRAGMATIC PARADIGM OF TRUTH

In preparing a short introduction to the following critical presentation of the aftermaths of pragmatism, let me put in gist the new paradigm that is necessitated here: (1) Truth is not merely a subject-object act. (2) Truth is not merely an act of tending towards. (3) Truth is much more an act of epochal finalizing of constant insertion of foundational breadths and depths in the state of affair / process being inquired into, based on the most universal of all conceptual foundations and driving them down onto the particular, but based fully and always on the foundations of the total in a mutually related context.

That is, strict pragmatism should be exercised only at the instance of concluding to the final, strictly contextual, statement and action, and that too under the provision of further constant inquiry and enhancement of the descriptions, conclusions, etc.

My contention concerning strict methodological pragmatism is that, although the pragmatic attitude has its rights over thought and practice, it (1) inevitably foregoes many fundamental (most broadly based on the totality of all existents) aspects of reality, environment, and life and, (2) in consequence, unbridles back onto the same reality, environment, and life the epistemically guided ontological aftermaths of the negligence of the said fundamental theoretical aspects and necessities of reality and of knowledge – and consequently of course onto life and the human ideal of comprehension of reality and life.

Hence, it is high time that philosophy and science eliminate as much as possible the defective, strictly pragmatic attitude from their foundations while safeguarding some of the necessary aspects of pragmatism merely when they create advantages via accessing conclusions and actions, without causing philosophical, scientific, and human-life tragedies.

4. SOME CONSEQUENCES OF PRAGMATISM ON SCIENCE AND LIFE

As there are countless disadvantageous aftermaths of pragmatism in knowledge and life, some of them may be cited in the following:

(1) International, national, and local politics purposefully manipulating natural resources, economies, societies, religions, and nations for power and wealth, even to the extent of impoverishing the majority of a continent or nation.

(2) National and international poverty alleviation programs and techniques which increase the rich-to-poor differences by perpetuating pragmatically charitable corruption in industrial, educational, health, and governmental ventures.

(3) Educational systems and methods becoming partially aimed at creating a vast majority of cheap labourers for the industry especially in poor nations, by fast-paced and obscurantist information-encrypting of sciences, humanities, and languages in educational institutions, without reference to the history of future-oriented achievements in discoveries, ideas, theories, events, programs, etc.

(4) Most media entities creating sensational partial truths as the short-time highest truths at the behest of politicians, industry, research & development, or at least against them, meant finally for easy financial gains and thereafter for practising political and scientific amnesia at the same truths.

(5) The pharma and health industry adopting and justifying as sacrosanct the mechanist-causalist manners of producing medicaments and treating patients – encouraged mainly by the successes of naturally necessitated urgency in such interventions – and producing chemical medicines so non-holistically (i.e., in ways that do not involve material interactions more minute and life-based than in chemical interactions) that the methods of production and treatment necessarily have more than intended side-effects creating ever more patients.

(6) Industries, technological companies, media entities, media producers, and a few nations specializing in hyperbolically creating and satisfying unhealthy and unessential psychological and physical needs and increasing easy production of commodities for quick-growth in economy, resulting in universal pollution of genes and life-forms.

(7) Constitutions of nations and justice-dispensation systems formulated in ways that normally foster or at least merely facilitate the exigencies of the powerful and rich and possibly get favoured in return.

(8) Governmental law-enforcement arms which work on old-fashioned and corruption-facilitating machinery and, from time to time, can milk the rich and powerful by way of protection of their pragmatic socio-economic attitudes.

(9) The more than two centuries of spread of chemical fertilizing methods of agriculture by blocking the spread of great natural cultivation methods and researches into them, callously titling the latter “unscientific”, and thereby chemically cluttering the whole cultivable and life-worthy earth.

(10) The millennia-old mammoth culinary science and eating culture that encourage tasty junk consumption at home and outside, successfully encouraging and perpetuating the enjoyment of quick pleasure from the one end of the tongue to the other.

(11) The way in which human beings, for millennia, exhaust and emaciate themselves in pursuit of quick joys, vastly unaware of the merely brain-based connotative nature of quick joys.

(12) The methods of finance acquisition and offspring-maintenance in families, societies, nations, and religions, oriented at self-perpetuation and attaining – for that same reason – nothing of it.

(13) Eco-compatibility efforts all over the nations by governments themselves, that help further industrialize under cover of grand holistic statements and schemes.

(14) Economic, educational, cultural, health, and other diverse forms of solution of problems of humanity, in which policy makers never go for the deepest roots of maladies: e.g., the real reason why people build houses on and cultivate (e.g., occupying and cultivating steep hill-sides, thus inundating the high ranges), is not merely craving, but the high rate of population growth, and yet no government acts in this direction ethically and democratically via education.

(15) The manner in which the very oppressed groups become much like the oppressor groups and indulge in pragmatic tactics against their own status, and consume the effects of such self-poisoning.

(16) The universal ignominy to what the experiences and the universal phenomenon of rational reflections of the old and dying are – including those of former scientists, technocrats, and scholars.

(17) The wide-spread technocratic and allopathic health-scientific methods of nipping all nature-infused living methods by blanket-terming them as unscientific.

(18) Religions’ millennia-old and continuing promise of a quick and miraculous transfer to a body-less state similar to that of a supposedly vacuous Absolute, instead of the more possible and reasonable “continued growth” of love-bodies as fully well caused by the same kind of growth during the lifetime of individuals and societies in imitation of an infinitely active love-bodied Source.

(19) A section of scientists and philosophers wilfully presupposing that anthropomorphized expressions and theologies based on them are the meaning of religion and spirituality, and basing their science, technology, medicine, and philosophy, etc. on notions that counteract these vicious concepts that should not have been the meaning of religion and spirituality.

(20) Some or many of those involved pragmatically in the above thought patterns and sciences trade their guns against supposed realities that do not exist in the sciences and in the world out there, thus beating in the air to kill some form of ideas that do not exist where they think them to exist.

The most suitable examples today in theoretical sciences are Russell, Wittgenstein, and many others in the early half of the 20thcentury, and Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, and a host of others in the latter half of the 20th century and thereafter. The ways in which the likes of these experts have unquestioningly been using the already existing pragmatism in physics, cosmology, and philosophy is symbolic and emblematic of pragmatism as a cut-throat methodology in effect.

Technological examples are the ways in which Newton’s physics and mechanistic chemistry, biology, economics, etc. are being used today to facilitate money-flow into the industry by disregarding their health-related and environmental aftermaths.

Bibliography

(1) Gravitational Coalescence Paradox and Cosmogenetic Causality in Quantum Astrophysical Cosmology, 647 pp., Berlin, 2018.

(2) Physics without Metaphysics? Categories of Second Generation Scientific Ontology, 386 pp., Frankfurt, 2015.

(3) Causal Ubiquity in Quantum Physics: A Superluminal and Local-Causal Physical Ontology, 361 pp., Frankfurt, 2014.

(4) Essential Cosmology and Philosophy for All: Gravitational Coalescence Cosmology, 92 pp., KDP Amazon, 2022, 2nd Edition.

(5) Essenzielle Kosmologie und Philosophie für alle: Gravitational-Koaleszenz-Kosmologie, 104 pp., KDP Amazon, 2022, 1st Edition.