Reciprocating Bill
Posts: 4265
Joined: Oct. 2006
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| Quote (skeptic @ Aug. 25 2007,08:40) | ?? ? ? ? ? | Quote | | The concept of beauty does not exist outside of its context. Beauty is not an inherent/intrinsic property of an object, like (for example) mass is. |
This is Louis' narrowmindedness on display. Here you state opinion as if it where fact. If only you could accept that then you'd be able to understand that other people may believe differently from you. |
There is a sound basis for what Louis is saying - albeit one that also undercuts, to some degree, the assertion that reason and empiricism yield results that are simply "objective," free of subjective and conceptual commitments. What are often considered objective descriptions of physical systems are inherently entangled with the conceptual and intentional commitments of the observer (and here we need not even resort to quantum observer effects).
See, for example, Hilary Putnam's very interesting argument in The Many Faces of Realism.
Putnam invites us to imagine a pressure cooker on which the safety valve has jammed, causing the cooker to explode. Why did the cooker explode? We say that the cooker exploded because the valve failed to open. We don't say that the cooker exploded because an arbitrary section of the wall of the cooker, say one centimeter square, was in place and hence retained the steam, even though, from the perspective of physics, the stuck valve and this arbitrary section of cooker wall play identical roles: the absence of either would have allowed the steam to escape and averted the explosion.
Why do we insist that the faulty valve caused the explosion, and not an arbitrary area of the wall? Because we know that the valve "should" have let the steam escape - that is its function, what it was designed to do. On the other hand, the arbitrary bit of surface was not doing anything wrong in preventing the steam from escaping; containing the steam is the function of that patch of cooker surface. Hence, in the instance of this human artifact, there is an inescapably normative element to what superficially appears to be a simple physical explanation.
Putnam concludes that, in asking Why did the explosion take place - and knowing what we know and knowing what interests we have - our explanation space consists of the alternatives:
(1) Explosion taking place
(2) Everything functioning as it should.
What we want to know is why (1) is what happened, as opposed to (2). We are simply not interested in why (1) is what happened as opposed to an infinite collection of alternatives such as, 3) An arbitrary patch of surface is missing, and no explosion takes place.
In short, our interests dictate that the presence of a given area of the wall of the cooker, and countless other facts about the physics of the explosion, take their places as background conditions rather than causes of the explosion. This discrimination between causes and background conditions cannot be provided by an account of the explosion supplied by mathematical physics, because the normative, designed aspects of the cooker cannot be deduced at the level of physics. Consideration of causation in this sense requires knowlege of the history of the mechanism - the story of its origins and purpose - in addition to its present physical state. Hence an irreducible explanatory relativity must be introduced if we are to understand the cause of this explosion.
This is not, however, to say that there is no objective adjudication to be had regarding the truth of the assertion that the stuck valve caused the explosion. Quite the contrary. Once we have specified our interests, given the nature of our language, and, indeed, given our scientific practices (all of which help us discriminate foreground and background), it would be simply false to say that the wall of the pressure cooker caused the explosion - even though the physics of the explosion dictate that had that area of wall not been present the explosion would not have occurred. In fact, it is only once we have identified our conceptual commitments and our interests that the determination of the cause of the explosion at the level of our interests becomes an adjudicable, objective fact. Hence, unless one is to abandon the idea that the stuck valve on the pressure cooker caused the explosion is an adjudicable, objective fact (in a court of law, for example), one must acknowledge the importance of those interests and abandon the notion that an idealized, purely observer-independent perspective is inherently more correct or more useful. We want to know why what should have happened failed to happen - or why what should not have happened, happened, a statement of our values and perspective that cannot be deduced from physics. (In the instance of organisms, this "intentional" dimension of "function" maps onto the contingent story of descent with modification by means of natural selection - a notion that advocates of ID just can't seem to wrap their heads around).
If this is true for our notions of ordinary physical causation, all the more for purely subjective notions such as beauty, attraction and hotnitude, dimensions that are even more entagled with our interests - indeed are often expressions of our interests, and cannot be described or even meaningfully envisioned without consideration of the background conditions from which they emerge. Conversely, understanding of those background conditions (such as the facts of mammalian evolution) tells us a great deal about those subjective states.
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Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
- David Foster Wallace
"Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down."
- Barry Arrington
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