On the absurd hegemony of science

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Re: On the absurd hegemony of science

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Pattern-chaser wrote: August 23rd, 2020, 9:12 am
Sculptor1 wrote: August 21st, 2020, 10:09 am As far as your distinction; not sure there is one since science is a practice, its practice defines what it is.
Science is also a reservoir of learning, and I think it reasonable to compare this reservoir with the practitioners who use it (or claim to).

Sculptor1 wrote: August 21st, 2020, 10:09 am My basic objection is that it in no way forms an hegemony; would that it did.
We would have a more rational world being based on verifiable truth rather than rumour or faith.
As for the hegemony, the facts are there in our socieities and our world, to be observed. We could argue about matters of degree, but to what point? 🙄

We would have a more rational world, but would it be a world that is more acceptable to us humans, to live in? 🤔 Or would we prefer a world more in accord with our emotional and irrational needs? 🤔🙄 For myself, I would not wish to live in a world where Spock and Mr Data are considered role models.
Strawman.
Spock and Data are fictional.

I'd prefer, say, that Trump listened to the US's expert on infectious diseases, rather than give him the sack for telling inconvenient truths.
I'd also prefer that the rational fact of GW were on the table rather than the to and fro political wrangling that goes on concerning carbon footprints and carbon credits, and the irrational hysteria on both sides.
Suffice it to say, given the thread topic - science does not have the hegemony.
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Re: On the absurd hegemony of science

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Hereandnow wrote: August 22nd, 2020, 10:56 pm
Terrapin Station wrote

So if you were trying to figure out how to best hunt an animal, say, and you did that by observing its behavior--where it goes at different times of the day, how it reacts to sounds and so on, so that you can make predictions about the best way to hunt it, you wouldn't call that a scientific approach? Because you could do that without language, and certainly language (or logic) wouldn't be "constructing" it.
Making predictions without an understanding of a logical conditional? It is not the formal study of symbolic logic that is part of the hunter's knowledge, but the logical form of thought that allows assertions, negations, conditionals, and the rest. Remember, logic and all of its forms is derived from judgments we make every day. As children, it is modeled by everyone around us from a very early age. Of course, there is the feral child and it makes interesting speculation to ask how one like this might anticipate a storm, say, or know there is danger. the way this is approached is to say that we are given as part of our hard wiring the a logical ability, evidenced in the way we think and make judgments, but it takes experience to bring this out. Otherwise, it remains in latency.
You could buy the pragmatist epistemology that says all thought is essentially grounded hypothetical deductive method, which simply means you walk into a given circumstance, and the reason you know what to do is the ready to hand activation of a memory. Before you actually arrive at the mailbox, you are already prepared to engage, putting the fingers to the latch, pulling just so, and the rest. The situation is the present actuality of something familiar. Hard to put this is the small space of a post, but all language is like this, and all logical forms that eventually manifest are inherently anticipatory. To be conscious at all, is to anticipate. The excpetion to this, you might say, would be in meditation yoga, but here, of course, the whole idea is the termination of the self and its language.

At any rate, my idea here is that it is not logic and language so much as the whole of experience itself that needs to be recognized and theorized about in philosophy.
You're not really addressing anything I brought up though.

First I was wondering if you were saying what I described would count as science or not. You didn't address that.

Secondly, do you not buy that what I was describing could be accomplished where the person has no language? If you don't buy that, why not?

Third, I said that there was a difference between "is a construct of" and "is done with the aid of." You never addressed that when I first brought it up, but as I noted above, in the hunting scenario, even if logic is used in the observations, that's different than saying that the process is a construct of logic. You didn't address that here.
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Re: On the absurd hegemony of science

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Terrapin Station wrote
First I was wondering if you were saying what I described would count as science or not. You didn't address that.
Secondly, do you not buy that what I was describing could be accomplished where the person has no language? If you don't buy that, why not?
Your question was about whether one could hunt and not take a scientific approach in doing so, and if science presupposes language, and hunting is a kind of science and hunting can be conceived as a nonlinguistic activity, then such thing would be a counterexample to language being presupposed by science.

This is what I took you to be saying. You mentioned making predictions specifically. A prediction is a logical conditional: you predict based on what you have observed in the past, and make an inference based on this about what will happen in the future. This has the logical form of a conditional proposition: If..., then....; so, if the rabbit ran that way, then it will encounter a lake and will have clear alternatives....Such a prediction pulls out memories about likes, rabbits, and all, what they have been like in the past, plus knowledge that rabbits don't swim, and everything else, then projects them onto the given situation.

Now, all of this has an obvious logical form in the description I gave(I hope this is clear) for conditionals' logical form of if..., then,...is the very form of modus ponens itself (though not exhaustively so). But in the actual practice, is this logic and language essential? What about spontaneous, nondiscursive "doing", carrying out something. I did bring this up in the example pf the feral child/person, the cow lifting its head looking for greener pastures, but not explicitly saying to itself anything of a logical nature at all. So, if it can be shown that what these kinds of entities are doing is both scientific in nature and nonlinguistic/alogical, then this would counter the idea that science presupposes language and logic.

Can one make a non logical affirmation that the rabbit could go this way and not that? First, there is a contradiction built into this, for assertions are inherently logical. So, it would not be an assertion at all. We say a cow is an instinctual creature, but instinct is not really an analytic term, that is, it doesn't really describe what happens in the event, the anticipating, the alternatives understood; it comes to the oint that in questions as tto whether such an affair is sans logic, that the description it self requires an ascription of logic to the hunter. the hunter must "understand" but what is this if not either an underlying but very clear logical presence, or, in the case of a feral mentality, a nascent logicality. This is why I brought up the idea of latency.

I bring in my comments about the hypothetical deductive (HD) method, which is essentially, the scientific method. HD is a method, and the reason I say a mere post cannot possible cover this is because its complicated. Logic is the form of thought, but so is time. To explicitly NOT put too fine a point on this: experience (my OP baseline of what a true ontology must really be about) is alwasy in time, has time as an inherent structure, and this means experience has a conditional a its core, If...,then,... The point I'm making is that in science, this too, and even, especially this, is presupposed by science, yet not part of the way science conceives the world.
Third, I said that there was a difference between "is a construct of" and "is done with the aid of." You never addressed that when I first brought it up, but as I noted above, in the hunting scenario, even if logic is used in the observations, that's different than saying that the process is a construct of logic. You didn't address that here.
See the above. "With the aid of" and "a construct of" are both logical, linguistic, experiential affairs.
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Re: On the absurd hegemony of science

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Sculptor1 wrote


Strawman.
Spock and Data are fictional.

I'd prefer, say, that Trump listened to the US's expert on infectious diseases, rather than give him the sack for telling inconvenient truths.
I'd also prefer that the rational fact of GW were on the table rather than the to and fro political wrangling that goes on concerning carbon footprints and carbon credits, and the irrational hysteria on both sides.
Suffice it to say, given the thread topic - science does not have the hegemony.
That is, in philosophical thinking, science does not have hegemony. In the world of practical matters, science reigns over all. Further, even in philosophical matters, the scientific method is doubted. Such a thing would be impossible.

As to your comments about Trump, go ahead, speak your mind. See if things hold up. Inconvenient truths?
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Re: On the absurd hegemony of science

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Hereandnow wrote: August 22nd, 2020, 4:55 pmRead through those quotes. One thing I do not say in these posts, and this is because I am explicitly trying to avoid the off putting name dropping, is that I hold the position that Heidegger's (and other derivative views) phenomenological ontology is the only one that satisfies the condition of at once encompassing all that "is" and avoiding the tedious, what Rorty might call, hypostatization of language. Heidegger considers all non phenomenological ontologies as merely ontic, or pre ontological, and here, in the everydayness of science and daily affairs, one can use the term at will, but it will not be authentic philosophical ontology. I try to put Rorty and Heidegger together: what IS, is a ready hand, pragmatic field of possibilities and choice. I cannot even begin to understand what materialism is about outside of the pragmatic meaning it has in the, to borrow from Heidegger, primordial grounding.
Of course, to oppose this view is to argue its explanatory deficits.
Husserl distinguishes between formal ontology, which deals with being (existence/reality) as a whole, and material/regional ontology or ontologies, which deal with particular parts of being. The ontologies of the sciences are regional or local or special ontologies, as opposed to universal or global or general or basic/fundamental ontology.

QUOTE>
"According to Heidegger, the question of the meaning of Being, and thus Being as such, has been forgotten by ‘the tradition’ (roughly, Western philosophy from Plato onwards). Heidegger means by this that the history of Western thought has failed to heed the ontological difference, and so has articulated Being precisely as a kind of ultimate being, as evidenced by a series of namings of Being, for example as idea, energeia, substance, monad or will to power. In this way Being as such has been forgotten. So Heidegger sets himself the task of recovering the question of the meaning of Being. In this context he draws two distinctions between different kinds of inquiry. The first, which is just another way of expressing the ontological difference, is between the ontical and the ontological, where the former is concerned with facts about entities and the latter is concerned with the meaning of Being, with how entities are intelligible as entities. Using this technical language, we can put the point about the forgetting of Being as such by saying that the history of Western thought is characterized by an ‘onticization’ of Being (by the practice of treating Being as a being). However, as Heidegger explains, here in the words of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, “an ontic knowledge can never alone direct itself ‘to’ the objects, because without the ontological… it can have no possible Whereto” (translation taken from Overgaard 2002, p.76, note 7). The second distinction between different kinds of inquiry, drawn within the category of the ontological, is between regional ontology and fundamental ontology, where the former is concerned with the ontologies of particular domains, say biology or banking, and the latter is concerned with the a priori, transcendental conditions that make possible particular modes of Being (i.e., particular regional ontologies). For Heidegger, the ontical presupposes the regional-ontological, which in turn presupposes the fundamental-ontological."

Martin Heidegger: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/
<QUOTE

First of all, there is no being (Sein) qua existence (Dasein) or essence (Sosein) which isn't the being of any being(s) (Seiendem). There is no Being behind or beyond the totality of entities.

What I don't like about his (phenomenological) ontology is its anthropocentrism. His concept of Dasein is the concept of (subjective) human existence; and with his Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein (question of the meaning of being) he's doing either linguistics/semiology—what is the meaning of "being"?—or ethics/axiology—what does being mean to me/us? / what is the value of being?—, so he's no longer doing ontology in Aristotle's sense.
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Re: On the absurd hegemony of science

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Hereandnow wrote: August 23rd, 2020, 1:59 pm
Sculptor1 wrote


Strawman.
Spock and Data are fictional.

I'd prefer, say, that Trump listened to the US's expert on infectious diseases, rather than give him the sack for telling inconvenient truths.
I'd also prefer that the rational fact of GW were on the table rather than the to and fro political wrangling that goes on concerning carbon footprints and carbon credits, and the irrational hysteria on both sides.
Suffice it to say, given the thread topic - science does not have the hegemony.
That is, in philosophical thinking, science does not have hegemony. In the world of practical matters, science reigns over all. Further, even in philosophical matters, the scientific method is doubted. Such a thing would be impossible.

As to your comments about Trump, go ahead, speak your mind. See if things hold up. Inconvenient truths?
Where is your hegemony of science please?
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Re: On the absurd hegemony of science

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Steve3007 wrote: August 21st, 2020, 4:41 am
Richard Feynman wrote:Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds
But of course ornithology is still useful. Just not to birds.
Ornithology is useful to birds because ornithological knowledge is useful to bird conservation.
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Re: On the absurd hegemony of science

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Consul wrote: August 23rd, 2020, 4:38 pm
Steve3007 wrote: August 21st, 2020, 4:41 am
But of course ornithology is still useful. Just not to birds.
Ornithology is useful to birds because ornithological knowledge is useful to bird conservation.
Anthropology is useful to people. Scientists should know what the basis of their statements mean, and some of the history of epistemology and empiricism. They would do well to be versed in Popper's work and Kuhn too.
Feyman was a smart guy. This statement is BS.
Like I said above. Any bird that understood ornithology would rule the skies.
Feyman was just dead wrong.
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Re: On the absurd hegemony of science

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Consul Wrote
First of all, there is no being (Sein) qua existence (Dasein) or essence (Sosein) which isn't the being of any being(s) (Seiendem). There is no Being behind or beyond the totality of entities.
If you could make any sense of what beings are without an analytic of being, what substance is, what materiality is; I mean, if substance, for example, as a functioning ontological concept is supposed be the furthest one can go in the search for an explanatory foundation for all things, an authentic comprehensive philosophical ontology, then there should be no meaningful questions begged, yet we know that logically prior to this is the system of meaning making, human dasein, an analyzable basis of all concepts and experience; that is, one cannot even think of substance without thinking of the concept of substance. What is this? Such a thing, as with all concepts, was abstracted from experience.

What I don't like about his (phenomenological) ontology is its anthropocentrism. His concept of Dasein is the concept of (subjective) human existence; and with his Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein (question of the meaning of being) he's doing either linguistics/semiology—what is the meaning of "being"?—or ethics/axiology—what does being mean to me/us? / what is the value of being?—, so he's no longer doing ontology in Aristotle's sense.
But it's not anthropocentric. That would be a "regional" term belonging to the way we generally think of things, to use his language, proximally and for the most part; ontic, not ontology at all. The question in my mind is simple: what logically presupposes what? Only hermeneutics can say this. There is no foundation of the Aristotelian kind at the level of ontology. Analytic philosophers don't like to hear this, but Kant was never refuted, only ignored.
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Re: On the absurd hegemony of science

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Sculptor1 wrote
Where is your hegemony of science please?
My complaint is that no science can provide an explanatory basis for things in general, but people think like this all the time. They think the world is what science says it is and beyond this, there is only what the pending "paradigmatic scientific revolutions" will eventually yield.

This kind of thinking doesn't even provide the proper starting place for a true explanatory basis of the world. One has to ignore what science says, that is, suspend this (epoche) and look to what science presupposes in order to get to a foundation. And what one finds in this approach is that all things properly analyzed presuppose something they are not; they are endlessly deferential. I say cat and you ask me what this is, and I have other ideas int he waiting, and for those I have other ideas, and this never stops. foundations all are deferential, so there are no foundations. Science's world of empirical concepts are the same.

The only true foundation is the endless deferential nature of all knowledge claims, and instead of substance or materiality, we have no archemedian point to "leverage" meaning. The advantage this brings to the understanding is it undoes this blind confidence in scientific thinking at the foundational level (certainly not regarding how to send people to Mars or make a better cell phone). the upshot is the encouragement of an all inclusiveness of ontological priorities: there is no longer any privilege given to traditional ontologies, keeping in mind that privileging of this kind forces interpretations of our affairs to be "of" or "issue from" the privileged idea. The mysteries and the affectivity and all the things that human experience IS, are restored to a nonreductive place.
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Re: On the absurd hegemony of science

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Hereandnow wrote: August 24th, 2020, 1:19 am My complaint is that no science can provide an explanatory basis for things in general, but people think like this all the time. They think the world is what science says it is and beyond this, there is only what the pending "paradigmatic scientific revolutions" will eventually yield.
Can you articulate so much as one practical disadvantage or hurt that is caused by thinking this way?
Hereandnow wrote: August 24th, 2020, 1:19 am This kind of thinking doesn't even provide the proper starting place for a true explanatory basis of the world.
Can you point out so much as one "proper" starting place for a "true explanatory basis of the world" that has successfully satisfied basic human curiosity and basic human needs to the degree than science has?
Hereandnow wrote: August 24th, 2020, 1:19 am And what one finds in this approach is that all things properly analyzed presuppose something they are not; they are endlessly deferential.
So what? Why should anyone care?
Hereandnow wrote: August 24th, 2020, 1:19 am The advantage this brings to the understanding is it undoes this blind confidence in scientific thinking at the foundational level (certainly not regarding how to send people to Mars or make a better cell phone).
How is this an advantage? Can you articulate so much a single improvement to anyone's life that follows from suddenly lacking this "confidence"?
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Re: On the absurd hegemony of science

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Hereandnow wrote: August 24th, 2020, 1:19 am
Sculptor1 wrote
Where is your hegemony of science please?
My complaint is that no science can provide an explanatory basis for things in general, but people think like this all the time. They think the world is what science says it is and beyond this, there is only what the pending "paradigmatic scientific revolutions" will eventually yield.
Science only describes the world and in that description explanations emerge.
But what else is there?
There is no explanation for things in general what ever that means.
WHy are "THEY" to whom you refer? Without some sort of evidence you are just trying to caricature "some people", unspecified.
At least science extropolates from evidence. That is maybe something you could take from science?

This kind of thinking doesn't even provide the proper starting place for a true explanatory basis of the world.
A bold statement, with nothing behind it.
One has to ignore what science says, that is, suspend this (epoche) and look to what science presupposes in order to get to a foundation. And what one finds in this approach is that all things properly analyzed presuppose something they are not; they are endlessly deferential. I say cat and you ask me what this is, and I have other ideas int he waiting, and for those I have other ideas, and this never stops. foundations all are deferential, so there are no foundations. Science's world of empirical concepts are the same.
You seem to be struggling here.

The only true foundation is the endless deferential nature of all knowledge claims, and instead of substance or materiality, we have no archemedian point to "leverage" meaning.
It's amusing to me that you think you know "the only true foundation", but have failed to demonstrate what that is, and why it might be better than verifiablity and falsification.
The advantage this brings to the understanding is it undoes this blind confidence in scientific thinking at the foundational level (certainly not regarding how to send people to Mars or make a better cell phone). the upshot is the encouragement of an all inclusiveness of ontological priorities: there is no longer any privilege given to traditional ontologies, keeping in mind that privileging of this kind forces interpretations of our affairs to be "of" or "issue from" the privileged idea. The mysteries and the affectivity and all the things that human experience IS, are restored to a nonreductive place.
A bit of a word salad here. You start this passage with an "it", without a clear idea of what this "it" is. I assume you mean " endless deferential nature of all knowledge claims". What about "American IS great again"? What about "vaccines are evil"? What about "there is no global warming"; "the ozone layer is fine"; "CFCs are harmless"; " polio, typhoid, typhus, measles, AIDS, scrofula, and plague are the works of the devil and evil spirits"?
"ALL" is a very big category!
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Re: On the absurd hegemony of science

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Hereandnow wrote: August 23rd, 2020, 1:24 pm
Terrapin Station wrote
First I was wondering if you were saying what I described would count as science or not. You didn't address that.
Secondly, do you not buy that what I was describing could be accomplished where the person has no language? If you don't buy that, why not?
Your question was about whether one could hunt and not take a scientific approach in doing so, and if science presupposes language, and hunting is a kind of science and hunting can be conceived as a nonlinguistic activity, then such thing would be a counterexample to language being presupposed by science.

This is what I took you to be saying. You mentioned making predictions specifically. A prediction is a logical conditional:
Stop there for a moment. What does this have to do with language?
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Re: On the absurd hegemony of science

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Hereandnow wrote: August 21st, 2020, 9:08 am
Gertie wrote
What the scientific method relies on is that there is a real world of stuff which our mental experience relates to, and we can know something about that stuff. Not perfectly or comprehensively, but well enough to pass the tests of inter-subjective agreement and predictability.

And that has given us an incredibly complex, coherent and useful working model of a material world we share.

But you're right to say science doesn't know how to go about explaining mental experience - which all its claims are based in. Bit of a paradox that one. And imo suggests the fundamental nature of the universe is uncertain. Philosophy of mind is coming up with all kinds of speculations about the mind-body problem, but they remain inaccessible to testing - unless you have a surefire method?

Materialism has its own untestable philosophical hypotheses about how mental experience might be reducible to material processes, including philosophical thinking. If you think you have a better philosophical case, can you lay it out as simply and clearly as poss? (Serious request)

Because it's easy to spot the flaws with the all the hypotheses, not so easy to conclusively argue which one should be accepted as correct.
It is not about testing and verification and reliability and the like. These are fundamental to all we do (put your socks on. How did you do that? A repeatedly confirmed theory about the way physical things behave, about moving the arm and hands in this way to produce a specific event. The method of science is unassailable and is simply the method of living and breathing.

And to the waste bin with mind body matters. This is a false ontological problem because it can only make sense if you can say what mind and body are such that they would be different things ontologically--but the very nature of an ontological question goes to a question of Being, what IS, and here, there are no properties to distinguish. In existence there are many different things, states, all distinguished by what we can say about them. We don't believe these differences constitute differences OF Being, just differences IN Being.

Regarding the serious request:

To establish a truly foundational ontology, one has to look where things that assume a foundation have there implicit assumptions. All science is a construct of language and logic before it is ever even gets to constructing tests tubes and telescopes, so the question then is, what is language and logic? the OP says these belong to experience, and experience has a structure, and this structure is one of time. Past, present future. Thought and its "method" has a temporal structure, the anticipating of results when specified conditions are in place (hence, the success in repeatedly tying my shoes properly). Science is, technically speaking, all about what-will-happen if there is this, or that in place, or if one does this or that. Science doesn't have a problem; we ARE the scientific method in a very real way, in every anticipation of our lives there is a history of a learned associations between what we do and what will happen. This is what cognition is.

Time is the foundation of Being, but it is not Einstein's time (an empirical concept based on observation) but structural time, the structure of Being itself in the experience that produces existence, OUR existence, that is, which is a temporal one. time that structures our experience is not beyond experience and Einstein conceived of relativity in the temporally structured world of experience. Outside of this structure this time does not exist (unless it is in some other such experientially structured time, as with God, but this is an arbitrary idea).

Science's failure to be sufficient for philosophical thinking is not in the method, but in the content. I mean, even if I went full subjective into the deep recesses of my interiority and actually found God and the soul, this would be IN time, in an ability to anticipate the next moment, bring up memories, see that the usual is not the case here in order to have a contextual setting that I can recognize God as God. The rub lies with science's paradigms that are exclusively specialized and empirical and ignore the phenomenon of experience as it is. It takes parts of experience and reifies them into being-foundations. To me this is akin to taking knitting, a specialized "part" as well, and defining the existence in terms of the yarn and needle.

Philosophy is supposed to take the most basic and inclusive perspective in which one has pulled away from the "parts" and attempts to be about the whole, and the whole is experience structured in time, and then the matter turns to WHAT is there. Everything. Nothing excluded: love affairs, hatreds, our anxieties, our ethics, tragedies, and so on: all conceived structurally in time and as the WHAT of existence. All is, to use a strange term, equiprimorlial, meaning no one is reducible to any other. Our affairs are not reducible to physical realities, but physical realities belong to a specialized language scientists use, or we all use in a casual way. Evolution is not in any way held suspect, to give an example. It is a very compelling theory. But other actualities are not reducible to this, do not have their explanatory basis in this.

It is science's hegemony that leads us to a position that denies the world's "parts" their rightful ontological status. And if any hegemony should rise, it should be based on what it IS, its "presence" as an irreducible actuality. Of course, this is the presence of affectivity (affect), the very essence of meaning itself.
Thank you.

I struggled a bit forming a (to me) coherent clear idea of your basic claim and supporting arguments. Rather than pick over the whole thing, it's perhaps simplest to focus on this part which is where you seem to end up -
and the whole is experience structured in time, and then the matter turns to WHAT is there. Everything. Nothing excluded: love affairs, hatreds, our anxieties, our ethics, tragedies, and so on: all conceived structurally in time and as the WHAT of existence. All is, to use a strange term, equiprimorlial, meaning no one is reducible to any other. Our affairs are not reducible to physical realities, but physical realities belong to a specialized language scientists use
,


OK this I think I understand, and hopefully is the gist of your position. I'm taking this to be your claim re the actual ontological state of affairs.

But I would call this monist idealism. Only experience (structured in time) exists. The universe does not independently exist as a thing in itself, only as an experiential state. It's not just a claim that we experiencing beings can only KNOW about the universe in the form of experience, the claim is that only experience exists. Yes?


If so, how do you escape solipsism - or don't you?

If not, if your ontology includes what we call bodies an brains and trees and rocks, then further justification is required. If that is the case, can you clearly and concisely spell that justification out?
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Re: On the absurd hegemony of science

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Faustus5 wrote
Can you articulate so much as one practical disadvantage or hurt that is caused by thinking this way?
Take a look at the end of my post to Sculptor1 above. Science is, like all disciplines, pardigmatically fixed, certainly open to research, but research rests with precedent. As we all know, this is a good thing, the scientific process, the hypothetical deductive method (note the deductive part indicating that prior to any research whatever, one is already equipped with interpretative assumptions. Only nothing comes from nothing) and it is certainly not method that is being called into question, if this is what you mean by "thinking this way". The disadvantage lies in, first, the plain fact that ontology simply goes deeper than empirical analysis and the point is to try to find what this bottom line really is in ontology, and second, science as a foundational ontology creates, as all such ideas, an interpretative bias toward what science says in all things. One may say, well, science has this matter of the nature of thought, affectivity, ethics, knowledge well in hand, but within such a claim is a general dimissal of things that are there, in the fabric of the world, metaethical questions,existential questions, religious questions, and the like. Science cannot discuss anything with prefixed by "meta" for such things are by definitions, beyond observation, yet they are also undeniable. Our "genuine" foundation in all things is not fixed,but open, and this openness IS the right ontology.
Can you point out so much as one "proper" starting place for a "true explanatory basis of the world" that has successfully satisfied basic human curiosity and basic human needs to the degree than science has?
If it were a matter of solving problems science has set for itself, then there is no doubt that science has no competition. Step out of these scientific themes and move into ethics, religion, existential crises, care, anxiety, mystery, (keep in mind that while Wittgenstein would not about foundational mysteries, metavalue, he certainly put these unspeakables in his thesis) structures of experience, and so on, and there is a new sense of revelation. Such, to use borrowed language, thematizing of the world is not within the purview of empirical science at all, for philosophy is an apriori affair.
So what? Why should anyone care?
Because the world is infinitely more interesting than anyone can imagine if all there is is what would call the implicit nihilism of scientific theory in forming a philosophical ontology.
How is this an advantage? Can you articulate so much a single improvement to anyone's life that follows from suddenly lacking this "confidence"?
I would turn the question back to you: If you disagree with the above, then you must think that science IS a proper source (not method, for method is not in question here) for the kind of foundational thinking I have been talking about. I would ask you to tell me how its paradigms address the expanse and depth of being human.
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