At 10:39 AM 9/18/2014, Benjamin wrote:
Only humans (at least here on Earth) do sociology, psychology,
biology, chemistry, or physics. I have no evidence that elementary
nature does even simple physics, or even wears a lab coat.
HP: I agree. These are all fields in which humans make models of
their experiences. They may agree on their models but still disagree
on different epistemologies, realism, nominalism, eliminative
materialism, and so on. These epistemologies are interpretations of
their models with respect to what they believe exists or what they
believe is real.
Epistemologies are not empirically decidable, e.g., not falsifiable.
True belief in any epistemology requires a leap of faith. There are
degrees of faith, skepticism being at the low end. In my own view as
a physicist, nominalism requires a much safer leap of faith than
realism. However, I often think realistically. I see no harm in it as
long as I don't see it as the one true belief.
BU: Being alive, instantiating life, is far from enough to do
biology. Instantiating mathematical structure is far from enough to
do mathematics.
HP: Again, I agree. That does not mean that "doing math" is the same
as "doing physics". Mathematics is the best language that we use to
describe physical laws. There is an inexorability in physical laws
that does not exist in the great variety of mathematical concepts and rules.
> [HP] No one has discovered a point or a triangle or a number, the
infinite or the infinitesimal, in Nature
BU: In your sense, nobody has discovered a physical law in nature
either. Rules, constraints, norms, distributions, etc., are not
animals, vegetables, minerals, or particles. Therefore by your
standards they are not real.
HP: Here I disagree. You are not distinguishing mathematical rules
from physical laws. Mathematics provides the most exact symbolic
language in which the laws are described. Symbolic rules are not like
physical material forces. Specifically, laws are inexorably time and
rate-dependent. Logic and mathematics do not involve time and rates.
That is why I say that "only humans do mathematics" (manipulate
symbols), which they do at their own rates. Humans cannot "do forces
and laws". Forces act at the lawful rates whether we like it or not.
By saying that X is "real," Peirce means that X is objectively
investigable as X. You won't use the word "real" in that way.
HP: I do not understand. What I call real depends only on my
epistemic assumptions, and I am not at all sure that defining "real"
is important to have a good model. What we need to understand is what
Wigner called the "unreasonable effectiveness" of our mathematics in
describing laws. There is no good reason for this effectiveness.
Wigner quotes Peirce: " . . . and it is probable that there is some
secret here which remains to be discovered."
Peirce, as a chemist (1887) also agreed with Hertz's epistemology (1884):
"The result that the chemist observes is brought about by nature
[Hertz: "the image of the consequents of nature"]; the result that
the mathematician observes is brought about by the associations of
the mind. [Hertz: "consequents of images in the mind"] . . . the
power that connects the conditions of the mathematicians diagram with
the relations he observes in it is just as occult and mysterious to
us as the power of Nature that brings about the results of the
chemical experiment." [W:6, 37, Letter to Noble on the Nature of
Reasoning, May 28, 1987. (1897)]
Hertz: "As a matter of fact, we do not know, nor have we any means of
knowing, whether our conception of things are in conformity with them
in any other than this one fundamental respect [Peirce's "power that
connects"].
Howard
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