SUO: Re: Ontology, Epistemology, and Semiotics
Jay,
That's a good question:
JH> what do you think gives theoretical physics a special
> "nonsocial" ontological status? And would you distinguish,
> theoretical physics from, say, theoretical astronomy or
> cosmology/cosmogony?
But before I reply, I'd like to make a correction to my
earlier note: I meant to type "philosophia perennis",
but my fingers slipped and hit "a" instead of "s".
Re theoretical physics: The development of any science,
including mathematics is a social activity, which involves
all the human emotions -- e.g., the battles between the
Newton and Leibniz over who had priority in disovering
calculus. But Pierre's claim was that the subject matter
is nonsocial when considered separately from the development,
Pure mathematics, as a disembodied collection of structures
and propositions about them could be considered something
that resides in a Platonic heaven independent of any human
activity. So I would be willing to concede that an ontology
of math could be independent of any social aspects.
But I'm not quite so sure about theoretical physics. I was
willing to concede that point to Pierre to avoid getting
into too much discussion. However, some of the more recent
work in both relativity and quantum mechanics suggests that
even in theoretical physics, the observer must be considered
part of the formulation. But those are still open questions.
In any case, there does seem to be a difference between
physics, which addresses the ultimate principles that
govern the behavior of everthing, and the more specialized
sciences, which only address some selected part or aspect.
As soon as you narrow the scope from everything to something,
you have to ask the purpose for selecting one part instead
of another. And that gets us back to questions of purpose
and intention as an integral part of the subject matter.
If you considered cosmology as an observational science,
then it gets the questions of how measurement and purpose
determines the observations. But if you don't put any
limits whatever on the subject matter, then I agree that
the boundary between theoretical cosmosology and theoretical
physics begins to blur.
John