Thursday, October 6, 2011
"Ducking challenges to naturalism"
I liked this piece, by Timothy Williamson, from the New York Times, "On Ducking Challenges to Naturalism." Among other things, Williamson observes that:
. . . If it is true that all truths are discoverable by hard science, then it is discoverable by hard science that all truths are discoverable by hard science. But it is not discoverable by hard science that all truths are discoverable by hard science. “Are all truths discoverable by hard science?” is not a question of hard science. Therefore the extreme naturalist claim is not true.
. . . [W]e should not take for granted that reality contains only the kinds of things that science even in the broad sense recognizes. My caution comes not from any sympathy for mysterious kinds of cognition alien to science in the broad sense, but simply from the difficulty of establishing in any remotely scientific way that reality contains only the kinds of thing that we are capable of recognizing at all. . .
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/10/ducking-challenges-to-naturalism.html
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Cf. Nicholas Rescher in his Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science (2000):
"The fatal flaw of any purported explanatory theory of everything arises in connection with the ancient paradox of reflectivity and self-substantiation. How can any theory adequately substantiate itself? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? What are we to make of the individual--or the doctrine--that claims, 'I stand ready to vouch for myself?' And how can such self-substantiation be made effective? All the old difficulties of reflexivity and self-reference come to the fore here. No painter can paint a comprehensive picture of a setting that includes this picture itself. And no more, it would seem, can a theorist expound an explanatory account of nature that claims to account satisfactorily for that account itself. For in so far as that account draws on itself, this very circumstance undermines its validity."
Of course "extreme naturalism" runs into well-known and insuperable difficulties with such phenomena as consciousness, intentionality, and normativity.
The assumption that physics, as an exemplar if not THE "hard science" could provide a "theory of everything" (TOE) has increasingly been abandoned by both physicists and philosophers of science. For example, Stephen Hawking no longer believes science is capable of providing a TOE, for
"reflection on Kurt Gödel’s famous incompleteness proof of 1931 has led Hawking to recant. In a more sober assessment he acknowledges that we can never be 'angels who view the universe from the outside,' but instead that both we and our models are 'part of the universe we are describing.' One might therefore expect any scientific theory we produce to be 'either inconsistent, or incomplete.' So in place of his earlier jocular ambition to know 'the mind of God' (i.e. to provide a complete naturalistic theory of the cosmos), Hawking now writes that he is glad he has changed his mind: 'I'm now glad that our search for understanding will never come to an end.'"
A strong "reductionist" program has likewise lost its pride of place, as the various sciences are no longer thought to be in some sense secondary to, or derivative from (or 'epiphenomenal' upon) physics (which makes it silly to continue to speak of 'hard' and 'soft' sciences). Scientific reasoning, methods, and epistemic standards, accordingly, vary from science to science (in which case scientific reasoning becomes a species more or less of 'practical reasoning'). Finally, the indispensable reliance on models, maps, and metaphors in science has weakened or changed the character of the "realist" nature of science....