> On Jan 9, 2017, at 2:25 PM, Clark Goble <cl...@lextek.com> wrote: > Here metaphysics seems important if only to show what hidden premises > undergird our thinking. It’s also possible that he might mean approaching > metaphysics in a somewhat transcendental approach akin to Kant’s various > transcendental arguments. i.e. for this to be true these must be true. Yet if > one does that form of argument one quickly realizes a certain undecidability > inherent to working backwards. That is more than one metaphysics can usually > account for the phenomena in question. It’s this thinking (criticizing) of > metaphysics that is important. How the pragmatic maxim with its emphasis on > difference and testing for meaning isn’t completely clear to me.
Just to add to that one can find Peirce making exactly these sorts of critiques of metaphysics in science such as the assumption of action at a distance or the idea that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. The latter in particular seems falsifiable and thus open in theory to test. The former is a bit trickier but presumably if we found some mediated substance then that would falsify it too. (How to deal with mediation by virtual Feynman particles makes me wonder how to deal with it though)
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