On 6/12/2014 8:03 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
That said, we might still at this stage wish to point out - and
indeed it might seem at first blush to be defensible - that such
fictions, or artefacts, could, at least in principle, be redeemable in
virtue of their evident epistemological undeniability. Indeed this is
FAPP the default a posteriori strategy, though often only tacitly. It
might even be persuasive were it not that no first-person
epistemological consequence has ever been shown to be predictable or
derivable from basic relations defined strictly physically, as
distinct from computationally, nor indeed is any such consequence
appealed to, ex hypothesi, in accounting rather exhaustively for any
state of affairs that is defined strictly physically. (The single
candidate I can adduce as a counter example to the latter, by the way,
is the collapse hypothesis which, far from being such a consequence,
is rather an ad hoc interpolation.)
But that's an instructive example. It shows that there is no absolute barrier to such
explanation. And with the further development of decoherence theory it not be so ad hoc.
I think the barrier itself is an illusion engendered by criteria of explanation that are
not met even by the most widely accepted theories.
Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
