On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 7:17 AM, David Nyman <david.ny...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 24 February 2010 07:03, Rex Allen <rexallen...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> With this in mind, I'm not sure what you mean by "two undeniably >> manifest perpectives." Only ONE seems undeniable to me, and that's >> 1-p. >> >> My proposal is that "seeming" is all there is to reality. It's all >> surface, no depth. However, using reason to build models with >> ontologies that are consistent with our observations provides the >> illusion of depth. > > The danger here is that we get distracted from real questions by > linguistic ones. What I'm saying is "manifest" is that there are two > distinguishable analyses available to us, one in terms of our direct > perceptual experiences, the other in terms of what those experiences > encourage us to infer about our environment, and our own place in it. > We can accept that these two accounts exist without committing > ourselves, prematurely, to questions of primacy, or ultimate > explanation or ontology. My recent questions and remarks have focused > on the puzzles inherent in the "seeming" existence of the two > accounts
"Seeming" is only an aspect of one of the two accounts. 1-p. There is no seeming in 3-p, which is of course the problem. But our knowledge of 3-p is strictly limited to what we infer from 1-p. So the two accounts are not on equal footing. We can doubt the reality of what we observe, but not *that* we observe. > and the variety of ways in which their possible relations > can be understood and reconciled. Of course, if the possibility of > intelligibility is dismissed in advance as "illusion", then not much > of interest will be found in the enterprise. But I would say that > such a view is premature. When would it not be premature? "The tendency to pursue 'ultimate explanations' is inherent in the mathematical and experimental method in yet another way (and another sense). Whenever the scientist faces a challenging problem, the scientific method requires him to never give up, never seek an explanation outside the method. If we agree - at least on a working basis - to designate as the universe everything that is accessible to the mathematical and experimental method, then this methodological principle assumes the form of a postulate which in fact requires that the universe be explained by the universe itself. In this sense scientific explanations are 'ultimate,' since they do not admit of any other explanations except ones which are within the confines of the method. However, we must emphasise that this postulate and the sense of 'ultimacy' it implies have a purely methodological meaning, in other words they oblige the scientist to adopt an approach in his research as if other explanations were neither existent nor needed." - Michael Heller, The Totalitarianism of the Method. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
