Conjectures and Refutations

Well well well ... With great joy I have witnessed the beginning of a lively discussion between two sharp minds ... Avid, wise as he is, has joined me at the Platonic camp, while Hassaan, brave as he is, has opted for another route.. The discussion has now reached at a point at which I deem it to be necessary to intervene… I am thankful that my initial view has been the object of mild criticism, for it allows me to respond to these conjectures, thereby introducing further substantiation for my Platonic account of epistemology.

Before I start off… Well done (Hassaan) for mentioning the curvature of space-time, an implicit consequence of the gravitational red shift, both results of the postulates of the theory of general relativity that Einstein introduced at the beginning of the last century… Yet, you ought to be careful not to draw flamboyant generalizations from your watch inference… I maintain that the curvature of space-time does not render the concept of time redundant… Even if we buy your argument about the absence of time as an inevitable consequence of the curvature of space-time (which I am not), it is another big (too big, I believe) step to infer the concurrence of past, present and future from the absence of that very principle… I can elaborate on that if you want (In fact, Avid mentioned a couple of interesting objections to your view in his concluding paragraph that I very much comply with), but I shall now proceed to the core of my argument… (In case you are interested I highly recommend to read upon Ernst Mach, the character who provided the philosophical framework for both the special and general theory of relativity, being amongst the main factors that led Einstein to discover the necessity for the speed of light to be absolute (first famously at the age of 16 in his immortal thought experiment concerning a beam of light))

Now, Hassaan, you do link together some great ideas and concepts, yet you present them in a logical order (provided there is one), that makes it extremely hard to follow your line of argumentation. You clearly do take a Humian stance at one point, for you disagree that the realization of the missing shade of blue does require some form of a priori knowledge about the missing shade…. (Hassaan: “the point i was trying to make, forgive me if i failed, was that his ability to recognize the missing colour does not stem from the meno or from a priori knowledge... “)

You then go on and contradict Hume by arguing that he is wrong to regard his example of the realization about the missing shade of blue as being unimportant (Hassaan: “Hume, our friend also said that this type of our event shouldnt call on us to edit our general maxim or whatever. in fact. it should bloody edit our thinking. what he did was give an example of a man and some colours and he didnt realize that he was actually describing something quite important..” )

I am sure you are aware that it does considerably weaken your argument if you start to disagree with what you’re defending half way through… Yet, I do not want to attack your line of reasoning by virtue of appealing to the inconsistency within your argument (although I could, and effectively already did, but I stop here cause I’m nice).... NO! I aim to take on the underlying principle behind your argument (I take it from what I have read that you are proposing some sort of empirical argument (Hume) about epistemology… (Which you ought to be if you disagree about the necessity of the man to resort to knowledge of the forms as a means to derive at his knowledge about the missing shade of blue))

NOW, listen up EVERY1! What the whole discussion essentially boils down to is the conflicting beliefs about the ontology of laws of nature… WHY? Because that’s were Hume and Plato fundamentally disagreed … According to PLATO, laws of nature (such as the first and second law of thermodynamics) DO exist! They PRESCRIBE the way nature OUGHT to be. A law dictates the way in which objects MUST behave!

According to HUME, all that there is are RECURRING PATTERNS within nature, merely describing empirical regularities… As we saw last week, he famously argued that we cannot infer laws of nature from these empirical regularities (as the problem of induction has shown)…

Do make sure you understand that distinction, for what I am about to tell you will not make a great deal of sense otherwise…

In modern debates within the philosophy of science, these two schools of thought are generally referred to as the Regularists (those who believe in Hume’s argument), and the Necessitarians (those who go with Plato).

On the Necessitarians account, there is something MORE to a physically impossible event’s non occurrence and something MORE to a physically impossible state of affair’s non existence. What is physically impossible is not merely non-occurent or nonexistent. These events and states of affairs simply COULD NOT occur or exist (this is what is often referred to as “nomological” or “nomic” necessity (ancient Greek “nomos” for law)).

In Contrast, when Regularists say that some situation is physically impossible (e.g. particles travelling faster than light), they are NOT making the claim that there could not be such a situation. They are making simply the factual claim that there timelessly is no such situation (i.e. the situation is non-occurent or non-existent in past, present and future times).

Why am I making these distinctions? Because it is elemental to understand the general view of both positions in order to fully grasp the major drawbacks of the Regularists account:

Major Drawback Number 1: EXPLANATION! If we long for the explanation of certain phenomena in nature, Regularists can not provide us with a sufficient account as to why certain things ought to behave in a certain way… For example: WHY DO WE DIE? All a regularist could say is that he has witnessed a recurring pattern in nature that has led him to believe that all humans are mortal… He could never rightfully argue that every living being OUGHT to die at some point… Thus, merely DESCRIBING certain phenomena won’t do us any good in the long run..Platonic necessitarians, on the other hand, don’t face these kind of difficulties… Given the notion of necessity, they could rightfully argue that it is physically necessary for humans to behave in such a way… Death, on that account, is not DESCRIPTIVE, but PRESCRIPTIVE!

NOW, Major Drawback Number, wait for it …… 2! INDUCTIVE INFERENCES!You should all be intrigued by that irony…. The person to establish the problem of induction (Hume), now faces the very problem that he has infamously set out to establish, while Me and Plato can (once again) provide for an answer for major drawback number 2…. Brilliant… ANYWAYS…

The problem for the regularist goes as follows: If we can only make factual claims that a certain situation is timelessly not possible, then we will never be allowed to draw inferences from past to future phenomena, for we have no idea of how the future is going to look like… We are not entitled to infer that the next raven will also be black, as we have not yet OBSERVED that raven… Contrarily, Plato does not face that intricacy as he can simply argue that laws express physical necessities between properties…

Those are the common arguments raised against Regularists… And they’re KILLING!!! Recently, Necessitarians, including the philosopher Fred Dretske, have raised even further objections against the Regularist account of epistemology... Yet, outlining those would probably go a step too far (if we haven’t been too far already), as they do require us to have some background in the philosophy of science… (Nevertheless I am happy to elaborate on them for a bit if you wish… Especially because Dretske’s argument is absolutely ingenious in my opinion)

YET, I believe we have reached a point at which we ought to do justice to all the regularists in this world, for I have been so harsh on them so far… THERE IS A METAPHYSICAL PRICE that us necessitarians are compelled to pay if we accept Plato’s argument: we ought to accept THE INEXPLICABILITY OF THE THEORY OF FORMS… One of the greatest necessitarian proponents, D. Armstrong, famously put: “The inexplicability of the necessitation just has to be accepted. Necessitation, the way that one form brings another along with it as Plato puts it in the Phaedo (104d-105) is a primitive, which we are forced to postulate”

For it is so utterly breathtaking, let’s quote Plato’s Phaedo on that occasion: Take a deep breath, now read: “For it seems to me that if anything else is beautiful besides Beauty itself, it is beautiful on account of nothing else than because it partakes of Beauty itself. And I speak in the same way about everything else.”

For those of you who have not quite followed, consider the following example… Helen of Troy is a material particular, who is “tied to” the eternal Form of Beauty in virtue of what Plato calls “partaking”. It is exactly that PARTAKING IN BEAUTY what makes Helen BEAUTIFUL. Thus, particulars have the properties they have because they PARTAKE OF forms, which are those universal properties.

SO….. we slowly do reach the end for today (don’t be too sad, I’ll be back soon)… if you DO actually intent to take anything away from this essay, take the following:

(1) Plato’s realism about universal properties (Forms) is the metaphysical doctrine underpinning the Necessitarian view on laws.

(2) A law of nature is a necessitation relation between universal properties (F-ness necessitates G-ness)

(3)Individual particular instantiations of, say, Boyle’s law (PV = k) “partake” of the special necessitation relation between the universal properties of F-ness = ”having pressure P”, and G-ness = “having volume V”.

(4) There is a price to be paid if we accept Plato’s theory: As Armstrong points out, a little mystery does remain… Yet, I maintain that this is the closest that we can ever get to the truth… And hey, a little mystery injected into our bland daily routine is not too bad I suppose… “The Forms up in heaven are related in a certain way, and as a result, a uniformity is produced on earth. Such a doctrine is extremely mysterious. The mystery is only a little reduced by bringing the Forms to Earth and letting them exist only in their instantiations.”

On another related note: “Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato (Whitehead)”

Yours truly,

IL DIVINO