SUO: *Date 21 Mar 2002 -- Ontological Warps
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| And if he is told that something is the way it is, then he thinks:
| Well, it could probably just as easily be some other way. So the
| sense of possibility might be defined outright as the capacity to
| think how everything could "just as easily" be, and to attach no
| more importance to what is than to what is not.
|
| Robert Musil, 'The Man Without Qualities',
| Translated with a Foreword by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser.
| Pan Books, London, UK, 1979. English edition first published
| by Secker & Warburg, 1954. Originally published in German as
|'Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften', 1930 & 1932. (Vol. 1, page 12).
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| I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at
| abstractions which are the simply-located bits of material, and at
| other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific
| scheme. Accordingly, the real error is an example of what
| I have termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.
|
| ANW, SMW, page 58.
|
| Alfred North Whitehead,'Science and the Modern World',
| Lowell Lectures 1925, Free Press, New York, NY, 1967.
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| In its turn every philosophy will suffer a deposition.
| But the bundle of philosophic systems expresses a variety of
| general truths about the universe, awaiting coordination and
| assignment of their various spheres of validity. Such progress
| in coordination is provided by the advance of philosophy; and in
| this sense philosophy has advanced from Plato onwards. According
| to this account of the achievement of rationalism, the chief error
| in philosophy is overstatement. The aim at generalization is sound,
| but the estimate of success is exaggerated. There are two main forms
| of such overstatement. One form is what I have termed, elsewhere,
| the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness". This fallacy consists
| in neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual
| entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain
| categories of thought. There are aspects of actualities
| which are simply ignored so long as we restrict thought
| to these categories. Thus the success of a philosophy
| is to be measured by its comparative avoidance of
| this fallacy, when thought is restricted within
| its categories.
|
| The other form of overstatement consists in a false estimate
| of logical procedure in respect to certainty, and in respect
| to premises. Philosophy has been haunted by the unfortunate
| notion that its method is dogmatically to indicate premises
| which are severally clear, distinct, and certain; and to
| erect upon those premises a deductive system of thought.
|
| ANW, PAR, pages 7-8.
|
| Alfred North Whitehead,
|'Process And Reality: An Essay In Cosmology',
| Gifford Lectures 1927-28, Corrected Edition,
| Edited by D.R. Griffin and D.W. Sherburne,
| The Free Press, New York, NY, 1979.
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| I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
| And all I see, multiplied as high as I can cipher, edge but
| the rim of the farther systems.
|
| Walt Whitman, 'Leaves of Grass'
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