Veritas Aequitas wrote:Strawman!! Actually your point merely reflect your intellectual incompetence in this case.
As I have always emphasize, note the different perspectives between 'reality-in-itself' and the common and conventional sense.
Actually, it is your total incompetence to escape from the hole of contradictions in which you have trapped yourself. Disguising them as mere "different perspectives" does not make them vanish. While you cannot commit to a statement of what is the actual case, you demand very comfortably from others to provide what is their case, so you can play the skepticism charade.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:Your knowledge re what is science is very outdated. You must read up on the latest view on Science and the Philosophy of Science.
That's the rubber stamp of your dogmatism. Since you cannot provide counterarguments, you simply resort to invoking some books you have read that just happen to contain the ultimate truths. Read Bunge and then tell me about it.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
Show me proof that "Science give you realism" i.e. philosophical realism?
I am sure when Newton did science he would have claimed his conclusions gave him creationism and theism.
In any case, scientific realism do not jive with philosophical realism [re this OP].
More dogmatism from your part. You seem to take your "isms" as rigorous drawer box classifications and treat them as the expression of concrete, real, perfectly-defined things (note the paradox), instead of useful abstract approximations to the common features of particular philosophical stances, allowing to cross each other's boundaries, while still showing differences among them. That's why it is not necessary to build fixed walls between philosophical realism and scientific realism, they can get along well. I'm OK with being a realist, a philosophical realist or a scientific realist.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
This really reflect ignorance on your part and it is insulting your own intelligence to hold on to such a view.
What works with Science as I had repeated many times is whether the scientific conclusions are processed via the necessary requirements of the scientific framework, is accepted by the relevant peers and more so is useful to humanity.
A clear sign of intellectual feebleness is to riddle philosophical discussions with streams of Ad Hominem arguments.
Sure, it is the methodology of science that gives us trustworthy certainties, but its materialistic and realistic assumptions are part of its methodological and epistemological foundations. Science is inherently natural science, it only makes whole sense in a natural world of predictable regularities of substantial entities.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
Again you are ignorant to hold this view.
What is most realistic is the micro state of reality not the macro.
This is why Physicists are so focused on searching for what is the ultimate particle that grounds all of macro reality.
Again, Ad Hominem arguments only impoverish philosophical debate.
Note how suddenly you turn into an avid seeker of "reality", that's because you think quantum physics hold the ultimate truth of your idealism. It's my time then, to point out that you're just chasing illusions.
It's completely ludicrous to believe that science is close to abandoning the physical laws that govern the macroscopic universe. They still describe it with astounding accuracy, just as much as quantum mechanics describes the physical laws that govern the microscopic world. You might not found out yet, but what scientists are actually doing is looking for the overarching theory that unifies both, the so-called Theory of Everything. Whether that's possible or not is yet to be seen, but this point is undisputable: what we're talking about is still Physics, it is still materialistic, it is still realistic.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
Again you are very ignorant on this.
When QM was first introduced, Einstein, the realist, was very strong against the idealistic views of Bohr and others. But eventually Bohr and gang won out against Einstein the realist.
Bohr was a physicist and to claim him for the idealist gang is disputable, and famously did dispute it Henry Folse. While some of his philosophical views might have resounded to idealists, he ultimately believed an atom was a real entity and he still held the notion of causality. He was not deranged as Heisenberg, but in any case, whatever case one can make out of different interpretations of quantum mechanics, this is not a settled matter that turns the tide in favor of idealism, they are still interpretations in dispute:
Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics
Despite nearly a century of debate and experiment, no consensus has been reached among physicists and philosophers of physics concerning which interpretation best "represents" reality
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
If scientific truths ["roses"] are merely "polished conjectures" they cannot be anything better than whatever names you assign to them.
Scientific truths are never claimed to be "undisputed objective facts and testable certainties" at most they are all conditional to the scientific framework [FSK] which is ultimately conditioned to human conditions plus open to change and rejection, thus not facts-in-themselves.
Such relativism of science is often peddled by idealists, but no one disputes that water molecules are composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, or what is the mass of an electron. It is not that we should hold this as a "polished conjecture" that might change tomorrow conditioned to changes in the scientific framework.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
Again you are so wrong in this case.
If Kant stated "1 plus 1 = 3" in German in his book, whoever translate it will have to translate that literally.
You simply have no idea of how these types of translations work. It is not like the translation of inventory records.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
I believe you are not well verse philosophically of the tribalism [us vs them] between realists and anti-realists which is due their psychologically, primal, cultural, ideological and political stances and differences.
Serious philosophers don't engage in such hostile, irrational fanatism. It is only their dogmatic fans.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
Again note 'what is real' is QUALIFIED to the empirical and scientific framework.
Here is a good illustration of my claims re empirical realism subsumed within transcendental idealism.
Similarly scientific realism of an independent world is subsumed with a non-independent scientific framework constructed by humans.
Therefore all scientific truths of independent things cannot be ultimately independent.
By your admission, your "truth" is conditioned to an epistemological framework that conditions truths to the chosen epistemological framework, therefore you are actually not arriving to knowledge, but departing from one assumption and landing on it. Pure circular reasoning.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
You keep forgetting that Science and its scientific truths are only possible because of human activities in Science.
Science is a human endeavor, I have never denied this. But it is a human endeavor that seeks to obtain knowledge of an objective reality, independent of the human mind. It wouldn't be science otherwise.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
Note your strawman.
Where did I ever state "simple conjectures"? You are trying to resort to deceptions in this case, but the slide is so obvious.
I stated "POLISHED CONJECTURES" and if you don't understand this term, you are really ignorant of what is Science.
Conjectures are by definition, speculations. As such, they are simpler, less developed, than statements of facts. So, no matter how "polished" your conjectures are, they are still simple conjectures compared to statements of facts.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
Nope! Kant did not make any attempt to raise Metaphysics to the level of a Science.
Rather he merely ask the question whether it can or not [knowing well it cannot].
Kant ultimately proved metaphysics cannot be raised to a level of science.
Nope. He actually engaged in the opposite. He thought metaphysics before him was problematic and the spectacular achievements of Newtonian science had surpassed the possibilities of philosophy. Kant came to the rescue in the light of the crisis in philosophy and the Enlightenment in general:
Immanuel Kant
From this Kant concludes that metaphysics is indeed possible in the sense that we can have a priori knowledge that the entire sensible world – not just our actual experience, but any possible human experience – necessarily conforms to certain laws. Kant calls this immanent metaphysics or the metaphysics of experience, because it deals with the essential principles that are immanent to human experience.[...] In this way, Kant replaces transcendent metaphysics with a new practical science that he calls the metaphysics of morals. It thus turns out that two kinds of metaphysics are possible: the metaphysics of experience (or nature) and the metaphysics of morals, both of which depend on Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
Your thinking is too crude.
Within classical Science there is no doubt that the moon is a mind-independent object.
But with the emergence of Einstein relativity theory and the observers effect, doubts were creeping in.
However with QM in the picture, [as qualified] there is a strong claim there is no independent moon.
Note, to counter QM Einstein raised the question,
No, that's just the derailed interpretation of idealist philosophers. Quantum mechanics has nothing to say about the the effects of observation on the Moon, there's no experiment or theory showing that the Moon as we know it will cease to be the same moon when humans are not observing it. The descriptions of QM apply only at the quantum level and yet, they are descriptions of the behavior of real things that can be calculated with mathematical accuracy.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
If you are well read you would be well aware of the above issue.
As a dogmatic realist it is unlikely you will accept the truth, there is no independent moon from the QM perspective.
The QM perspective is about the behavior of fundamental physical particles, it does not apply to the behavior and properties of the Moon!!
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
Your "what is the actual case" perspective is classical Science which in a way is empirical-idealism.
The "what-is-the-actual-case perspective" is simply taking the ontological position of what is objectively real. What is objectively real is a material world, which science can describe, and that includes classical science and quantum-level science.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
As I had argued, if your approach is;
- using my sensible faculties along with my intellect, relying on methodological and epistemological tools, to work around the manifest image and arrive to the scientific image. It is this complex exercise of systematic rationality that relies on trustable methods that leads us to ontological realism and materialism as the only tenable positions.
then what you are claiming is not an 'absolute' external independent objective reality, but rather that it is dependent on your human activity, human institution -science etc, thus ultimately dependent on the human conditions.
In this case if you claim the above is ontological realism and materialism, it can only be human dependent "ontological realism and materialism" because your above approaches and processes are all ultimately dependent on the human conditions.
Therefore your "ontological realism and materialism" is not the philosophical ontological realism and materialism, where the moon exists absolutely independent of humans.
Your argument confuses the method of inquiry and knowledge-dependency with ontological-dependency. My awareness of the existence of things is not necessarily tied to their existence. I can use rational knowledge to discover that things exist or existed independent of them becoming objects of my perception and knowledge. That's why it is a discovery: they were there before I came to know them. This is what makes ancestrality a central issue of scientific discourse:
Quentin Meillassoux wrote:It is the discourseof empirical science which, for the first time, gives meaning to the idea ofa rational debate about what did or did not exist prior to the emergenceof humankind, as well as about what might eventually succeed humanity. Theories can always be improved and amended, but the very fact that there can be such dia-chronic theories is the remarkable feature madepossible by modern knowledge. It was science that made it meaningful to disagree about what there might have been when we did not exist, and what there might be when we no longer exist – just as it is sciencethat provides us with the means to rationally favour one hypothesis over another concerning the nature of a world without us...
[...]Once again, the fundamental point at issue is not the fact that science is spontaneously realist, since the same could be said of every discourse, but rather the fact that science deploys a process whereby we are able to know what may be while we are not, and that this process is linked to what sets science apart: the mathematization of nature.
As a subject, I recognize myself in other subjects that necessarily belong to the set of objects of the world, therefore it is the worldly conditions where I navigate as a subject that impose over your so-called "human conditions", not the other way around. The subject is not the center, and Kant's Copernican revolution is actually a Ptolemaic regression:
Quentin Meillassoux wrote:Kant presents his own revolution in thought under the banner of the revolution wrought by Copernicus – instead of knowledge conforming to the object, the Critical revolution makes the object conform to our knowledge. Yet it has become abundantly clear that a more fitting comparison for the Kantian revolution in thought would be to a ‘Ptolemaic counter-revolution’, given that what the former asserts is not that the observer whom we thought was motionless is in fact orbiting around the observed sun, but on the contrary, that the subject is central to the process of knowledge.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
I am not promoting Rorty's pragmatism in this case.
What I am highlighting is Rorty's argument that philosophical realism is a mess [due to Descartes' et. al] and not tenable [he relied on Wittgenstein, and others].
Do you agree with his arguments if you have read his book.
It seems you're not very much aware of what is implied in Rorty's pragmatism. Anyway, I know enough of Rorty and I have no further interest in him. I don't agree with his radical anti-foundationalism and I don't have to. In any case, his own project rejects the notion of necessity of truth, or justified belief, therefore it would be futile to present his rejection of realism as a verifiable conclusion, instead of as the deployment of his relativism and subjectivism.
Veritas Aequitas wrote:
Do you understand Meno's Paradox in the first place and the realistic philosophical issues behind it?
As many other philosophical paradoxes, Meno's is just another silly pseudoproblem, which is only of interest for those involved with sophistry. Right off the bat, it is ridiculous and a complete waste of time.