I'm only a tropical fish realist Nom. I did my chemistry in much the same way as I might look after such fish or do gardening, relying on books and advice. These days even New Scientist is telling us we are only structural realists and posit varying realities. WTF is real - the atom, proton, quarks, strings?
Locke retains as an ideal the notion that scientific knowledge is demonstrative and certain, an ideal he shares with the two main targets of his Essay, the Aristotelians and the Cartesians. Yet in another, ultimately more important sense, his reaction is progressive. Impressed by empirical methods and cognizant of their poor fit with the Aristotelian ideal, he defines a distinct kind of knowledge, one inferior to genuine scientific knowledge but appropriate to human sensory capacities. In so doing, he develops an epistemological basis for the new, experimental philosophy. The dominant scientific theory of his day, the corpuscular hypothesis (i) takes observable bodies to be composed of material particles or corpuscles, (ii) takes impulse (action by surface impact) to be the primary if not the sole means of communicating motion, and (iii) attempts to reduce qualities at the level of observable bodies, such as color, to the primary, that is, inherent properties of the particles composing those observable bodies, restricting inherent properties to size, shape, number, and motion, and holds that all other qualities and operations are explicable in terms of that restricted set of properties. Realism is only a hypothesis. Locke was sharp enough not to be arsed with the philosophers' stone and to know not any old argument would do. The issues are examined without reference to Locke in a David Deutsch paper - free here: http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.7439&usg=AFQjCNG7V3FzB1FPO0gsSkkgz4aO1zJxVA 24 Nov, 16:36, nominal9 <nomin...@yahoo.com> wrote: > I think he is... but I wonder what self-proclaimed "realists" like > Archytas, think? Locke was pretty close to being a nominalist, > however....must have gotten it from his Oxford education... much as he > reportedly disliked it's(Oxford's) classic bent..... > > http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to epistemology@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to epistemology+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
