SUO: RE: Re: Question about Example in KR Book
JS: True
nominalists don't believe that the laws of physics are anything
more than summaries of past observations. They could never drive
a car because they couldn't predict what would happen if they
turned the steering wheel or stepped on the brakes.
Anybody who drives a car but claims to be a nominalist is
either a liar or a fool.
TJ: And this after all my recent work, in quite a few emails in this forum,
to correct the ever popular soundbite (as I call it) or straw man (as it is
more
traditionally called) image of the nominalist. (See, for example, my 8/5/03
email
to Jon on "Varieties of Recalcitrant Experience".)
Oh well. We've had the naive realist
in philosophy for quite awhile. Perhaps it's only fair that others return
the
name-calling favor. Only when serious people engage in caricature this
extreme,
it does a disservice to the rest of us. It suggests that such statements are
fair,
bottom-line,
after-you-wade-through-the-volumes-that-philosophers-have-written,
summaries of the position so characterized.
Some soundbite-length summings up are just that -- fair, bottom-line
summarizations.
There are now cartoon paperbooks available on serious topics and serious
authors,
many of them on philosophical topics and on philosophers. I've seen them on
Plato,
Wittgenstein, Freud, Chomsky and many others. These works are (in general)
fair bottom-line
summarizations. But I emphatically insist that John's bottom-line on
nominalists, above,
is not. It's the other kind -- a misleading caricature. I hope that others
in
this forum will heed my warning, and not be misled.
My apologies to John if I've taken a casual remark too seriously. But first
of all, I don't
know whether the remark was all that casual. In its full context, it seems
to
suggest that if nominalists were both intelligent and honest, they would see
that their
armchair philosophizing, while ultimately immune to refutation by means of
further
philosophical discussion, really does have practical real-world
consequences, and that
among these consequences are that the laws of physics can't be trusted and
that,
consequent on that, it's a dangerous thing to drive a car. That is no
real-world
consequence of nominalism as I understand it.
And secondly, I want to let others know -- many of whom do not have the
philosophical
background to already be aware of this -- that nominalism has a
centuries-long and honorable
history, extending all the way to the present day. I'll be glad to provide a
brief, or even
not-so-brief, bibliography if requested to.
If I had to apply one or the other label -- nominalist or realist -- to
myself, I would apply the former. The reason is that I think that nominalism
wears the
errors of its more extreme and naive advocates on its sleeve, whereas
realism's errors are more
dangerous because more difficult to discern. They are more difficult to
discern because the
metaphysics of everyday life is an unreflective realism, as witness Samuel
Johnson "refuting"
Berkeley by kicking a stone. (For the philosophically sophisticated, I
acknowledge that the
ontological issue between Berkeley and Johnson was idealism vs. materialism,
not realism vs.
nominalism. But the epistemology evident in Johnson's method of refutation
was an unreflective
and ebulliently self-confident realism.)
And, by the way, I do drive a car. I've thought about the real-world
implications of my
"armchair nominalism", and deny that it has the real-world implications that
John claims it does.
(Once again, emails I've posted to this group, back in July and August,
provide details.)
Tom
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org
[mailto:owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org]On Behalf Of
John F. Sowa
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 11:15 PM
To: cg@cs.uah.edu; SUO
Subject: SUO: Re: Question about Example in KR Book
Fred,
I agree with Popper's statement as a purely theoretical hypothesis:
"My thesis is that realism is neither demonstrable nor refutable.
Realism like anything outside logic and finite arithmetic is not
demonstrable; but while empirical scientific theories are
refutable, realism is not even refutable."
Exactly the same claim can be made about solipsism and nominalism.
It is possible to construct consistent theories about all observable
phenomena on a metaphysical foundation of pure solipsism, pure
realism, or pure nominalism.
What really matters is the metaphysics you use in everday life.
What metaphysics do you implicitly assume when the answer is
a matter of life or death?
A true solipsist, for example, would have no qualms about jumping
out of a window or walking in front of a speeding train. True
nominalists don't believe that the laws of physics are anything
more than summaries of past observations. They could never drive
a car because they couldn't predict what would happen if they
turned the steering wheel or stepped on the brakes.
Anybody who drives a car but claims to be a nominalist is
either a liar or a fool.
John