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"Effectively disproven" with regard to religion. I'll take a stab at this, because it's a personal grievance of mine. As a result of the Enlightenment, empirici
by prometheus76 5y ago
"Effectively disproven" with regard to religion. I'll take a stab at this, because it's a personal grievance of mine. As a result of the Enlightenment, empiricism became the de facto standard for verifying or justifying what is "real" or "true". But empiricism is blind to many things that we still interact with in our everyday lives, and consider "real" and that we have ongoing beliefs about.
Numbers are an example. Numbers are a strictly metaphysical set of categories and rules, and they can relate to physicality, but there is no physical evidence for the idea of "seven", for example. Logic is another example. Cities are another example.
Ok, cities might need a little explaining to show what I mean, because you say "A city is physical!" and I say yes, but it's also metaphysical. I'll reduce it from city to a mayor to explain more clearly. Does the mayor exist? If you walk into the city office, you can meet with the mayor. So the mayor is real. However, if you go to the bar with the mayor and he starts talking about his car insurance or his marriage after a couple of drinks, you're no longer talking to the mayor. You're talking to Steve, who acts as the mayor during the day, but is also a person with a private life. Now, if Steve dies that night on his way home from the bar, does the mayor cease to exist? Well, in a way, yes, but in a few days, a new mayor will be appointed and in the meantime there will be an "acting mayor". So is the mayor real?
We could say the same for a city. It has physical boundaries, and if you don't pay your water bill "to the city", then the "city will turn off your water". Is it some entity called "city" who comes to your house and turns the valve? No. It is a member of the city's "body" that comes and turns off your water. So is the city "real"?
Marriage is another example. A couple that is married acts differently than a couple who is not married, and if the marriage ends, that can have drastic, real effects on the people in the marriage. So is marriage "real"?
- jstanley 5y agoI mean... OK. But those are just names for things that are useful to think about. Saying marriage is real isn't the same type of thing as "Korean fan death is real" or "God is real".
- galaxyLogic 5y agoRight, I think "metaphysical" sounds too mystical for most people. A better word is "abstract". Numbers are abstract things. You don't have to believe in them because in a sense they don't exist, they exist only as a definition. Anybody can come up with a definition but the usefulness of doing so is based on whether the definition is self-contradictory or not and whether there are useful rules of deriving more abstract things out of them. 1 + 2 = 3. Fortunately abstract things like numbers can be made semi-concrete by representing them in a physical medium such as pen and paper or computer-memory. Then we can observe how they behave and verify event by observation the soundness of our rules for manipulating them. 1 + 2 seems to always be 3.
- prometheus76 5y ago"Just names for things that are useful to think about" for which you have no empirical evidence, but they are identities/categories that you find useful, interact with, and that exist through time. Are they real?
- technothrasher 5y agoThis just sounds like one big confusion of the map for the territory. What you are describing are abstract concepts. The fact that concepts are not 'real' in that they are not physical entities isn't much of an indictment of empiricism, nor does science claim to employ empiricism alone without any foundation of conceptual rationalism.
- prometheus76 5y agoWhat is the empirical evidence for conceptual rationalism?
- inasmuch 5y agoI had no intention of treading into the real-or-not quagmire. I thought I safeguarded myself against that with the concession that I consider belief in general science exactly that—a belief. But perhaps that was unclear. The 'disproven' part was also deliberately parenthetical and only indirectly linked to religion, with the used notions of proof and veracity both subject to the aforementioned concession. Forgive my defensive parsing here, but it's important to me that I don't present myself as someone who feels he 'knows the truth'. My intent was to say that I don't.
- prometheus76 5y agoWhat I was trying to point to, with a fumbling attempt was pointing to your idea of "scanning your mind for scientific data that might be wrong" and coming up empty, was that just the idea that scientific empiricism is the only or most reliable way of establishing what is "true" is actually a presupposition that is a result of the Enlightenment, and is not the basis for traditional societies when they are determining "how we know what we know" and "what is the hierarchy of meaning"? I was just trying to point out to you that you might be open-minded regarding what evidence you are willing to consider, but just he point that you consider evidence as a way of establishing truth is a presupposition that can, and should be examined.
- inasmuch 5y agoOoh, okay. I gotcha. Thanks for clarifying!
- meroes 5y agoEmpiricism is autoreliable. And is perhaps the only thing that is. It continually reconceptualizes our understandings and produces its own reliability. See how things like the indifference assumption of statistical mechanics is now empirically generated. Empirical science in limited domains can explain its own reliability and justification. But what you’ve done is none empirically assert numbers are “this”. Cities are “this”. No non-empirical claims have the same weight as empirical science. It’s not that empirical science should talk about things it does not yet know, rather we shouldn’t make claims like yours. We should only go as far empirical science says if you want to match empirical science’s reliability, and it doesn’t say numbers are metaphysical categories.