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Anytime one attempts to abstract entities and features from reality in order to work with them - whether you're practicing philosophy, physics, medicine, writin
by jmcmichael 10y ago
Anytime one attempts to abstract entities and features from reality in order to work with them - whether you're practicing philosophy, physics, medicine, writing laws, coding animal behavior, or describing a database schema, one must base one's work on an ontology whether it be implicit or explicit. Many ontologies exist - arguably at least as many ontologies exist as conscious entities capable of conceptualization.
Your second statement assumes the affirmative to the question I asked; that the ontology of science does indeed serve as the only valid foundation for all other ontologies, unless I'm missing something. Philosophers call this the theory of 'causal closure'[1] It has many implications that you may or may not agree with in the areas of consciousness, free will, ethics, etc.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_closure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_closure
- fish55 10y agoVery interesting, thanks. I was thinking of logic as the foundation, but now I realize that I was actually thinking of a combination of logic and science.
- jmcmichael 10y agoYes, and logic + various epistemological disciplines besides science give us valid knowledge in other domains.
- fish55 10y agoI'm not sure about that. I was very persuaded by this essay, which makes exactly this distinction: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-INQUIRY-GB.pdf http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-I...
- jmcmichael 10y agoI don't think Latour's criticism of social theory applies to the causal closure of physics, or science's claimed exclusivity to describe fundamental ontologies; it criticizes the approaches of 20th century post-modernist critique. Are you familiar with his follow-up, 'Reassembling the Social'? I'm not, but in reading a summary it seems to propose better methods for comparing ontologies and systems.
- fish55 10y agoIt's been a long time since I read that. After posting the link, I reread it, and it seems I misinterpreted it somewhere along the way. I thought that it develops an opposition between "matters of fact" and "matters of concern", and that it breaks along the same lines of the discussion here, but it doesn't.