Very interesting. When I first studied chemistry, we learned chemical reactions as “A happens because of B, then C because of B, and so on.” in my later years, reaction mechanisms were explained in terms of balancing positive and negative charges. In other words, us chemistry students started off learning the hierarchical models and then advanced on to oppositional models… I never thought of this distinction until reading your article.
I’ve long been interested in dualist, yin-yang type models. Of course they are all oversimplified, but at least when you have a thought it encourages you to try and comprehend the opposite thought.
Well expressed. A good understanding we standing of physics. Not sure that oppositional thinking is better, but you demonstrate that changing your approach often improved understanding. So is there an opposition between understanding and ? .
Yes, understanding itself is the product of opposition. The beauty of the oppositional model is that it can explain everything in terms of everything else without collapsing into circularity. So the opposition between B and C can explain A and the opposition between A and B can explain C.
Sorry, but philosophy is not nearly that much enthralled with physics. I have a Masters in physics and worked as a philosophy professor for decades. Philosophy has tons of respect for and interest in physics, but nowhere near as much as your post suggests. Philosophy loves logic, mathematics, biology, cognitive science, psychology, and so on--plus much of literature.
I still disagree. It's an open question how physics recognizes even ordinary objects such as trees, since many notions like that are nowhere to be found in physics. It is better to say that a lot of philosophers think that for the vast majority of things that exist, there is some physical composition for them--although the notions of composition are varied and there's nothing simple about any of it. And there's not much reason to think physics, as a discipline, has what it takes to understand composition in general.
I'm much more sympathetic to the idea that most philosophers are physicalists, but spelling out that doctrine is notoriously hard, and there is little consensus on how to do it. And then there are the non-religious philosophers of mind who think that consciousness is somewhat akin to a fundamental force of nature, not reducible to those from physics, even though there's nothing religious here and no evidence for consciousness after death.
And most philosophers believe in abstract objects such as those found in mathematics, which makes them restrict their physicalism further.
When is the last time a philosopher proposed a theory of the universe’s origins or the nature of matter? For all intents and purposes these fundamental, discipline-defining questions have been outsourced to physics. And the philosophers who wade in are careful to stay within physics’s bounds; it’s a precondition of being taken seriously.
In any case, is it even worth arguing over the extent to which philosophy is enthralled with physics? My main point, after all, isn’t that philosophy is enthralled with physics but that it’s enthralled (to whatever extent) with the wrong thing about it.
Well, if someone is trying to figure out the nature of matter, it would be wise to stay pretty close to physics, right? Same for the origin of the universe.
What else would we use in our investigation? A priori judgment? Surely not; it’s track record in this sort of thing is anemic. For the two investigations you listed, it would be foolish to not rely heavily on physics.
Of course, that doesn’t mean swallowing whole everything every physicist says, or even the contemporary consensus amongst physicists. But it wouldn’t be wise to not stick closely with what consensus in physics has to say about those two tasks.
In addition, surely the physical universe is hierarchically organized. The term “compose” is certainly fluid enough so that “My chair is composed of molecules, which are composed of atoms, which are composed of various particles” is true. Trying to figure out what composition comes to—in this and other, quite different, cases (e.g., sentences are composed of words)—is a tough problem, one that we approach via investigations that rely on physics, biology, and a lot of other areas.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t other, additional, organizing principles for the physical universe. And perhaps those other organizing principles can be fruitful. If so, let’s see them worked out in detail. Otherwise all we have is “Well, it’s possible”.
I agree that philosophy’s track record is anemic. And so it’s no surprise that they’d hitch their wagon to Newton’s star. But once upon a time philosophers took scientific anti-realism seriously, along with the paradox of explanation, the riddle of induction, and the mystery of cause and effect, among other things that cast doubt on the scientific project. And I think that if they figured out why physics has been so successful despite these deep conceptual issues, they’d discover that they’ve barely scratched the surface of what an a priori methodology can do. That’s a big promissory note, of course, but it’s what this blog is devoted to.
Well, again, for the two projects you mentioned, one would have to be a fool to not stick closely to what physics has learned.
I didn’t say that philosophy’s track record is anemic. I think (and have defended in print) it’s very good in many significant respects but not good at the things we philosophers tend to focus on in our “big picture” thinking: the really famous problems. It’s a bit like trying to run a 3:00 mile: if all you care about is the end goal, you’ll view your project as a failure since you won’t succeed; but you’ll make tremendous progress along the way.
You seem to be saying that philosophers no longer take seriously scientific realism, the paradox of explanation, the riddle of induction, and the mystery of cause and effect. I disagree there too. It’s undeniable that interest in almost any topic comes and goes, over and over again, as philosophers periodically run out of things to say or simply get tired of addressing certain topics.
For instance, twenty years ago lots of metaphysicians were focused on the relation between time and existence, with gobs of articles written about presentism, eternalism, and the like. We don’t see anywhere near as many articles on those topics anymore, although I bet they will resume as soon as someone writes a new and influential piece that renews interest by finding something ostensibly new to say about it.
I think the track record for a priori philosophizing is simply terrible, although I realize that “a priori” is multiply ambiguous. It works in the mathematical/logical side of things, but other than that? I am highly skeptical, given its track record. If you want to resurrect it, then the only way forward is to offer lots of examples for non-trivial conclusions.
I just want to mention, in unintentional irony, that "dialectics" preceded Galileo, and Hegel's flavor of Dialectics, which was more explicitly "oppositional," was hand-wavingly around the time of Newton. My take on this conversation so far is a tension in reference frames more than in specific judgements.
Neither physics nor philosophy is unified, so the general claims made of them say more about which frame you are individually taking: that from which your claim is seen as reasonably true. My read of what reaches my eyes, heavily filtered by algorithm and access, reflects philosophers kissing the physicalist ring, but my sample will be several kinds of biased. There is something to be said for what a Philosopher thinks she must do to be seen by (perceived) scientist gatekeepers and heard by some audience on the other side. There is also Pluralistic Ignorance to account for, where the attitudes may vary wildly from the signaling.
If I am off about something here, especially with regards to "dialectics," you would be doing me a favor by pointing it out. My semi-pseudonym is related to my (I think successful) attempt to identify the dialectical Razor that is mutually dependent on Occam's, theoretically "equal" in parsimony. Likewise, the shortcomings of modern science can be understood by what "survives" Popper's Razor, not by subjecting to it, but by attaching to tools of falsification, ie. Arbitrary p-values presumed sufficient because "falsifying null hypotheses is falsification right? Right?" Herbert Blumer actually already created the remedial dialectical Razor (I would claim), but it personified the empirical world, and we know that's only allowed in the name of reductionism (selfish genes, systems 1 & 2 [not that Kanehman was reductive]), etc.
Semi-pseudonymous, eh? Very well then, Mr. of Hammock. That's very interesting about dialectics and Galileo. I don't much know that history, but the basic idea is of course quite old, going at least as far back as Heraclitus. It's also a staple of Greek mythology (esp. Hermes), non-Western philosophies and various religious traditions, like Kabbalah. In any case, I have my own take on it that may or may not align with Hegel's (who knows what he had in mind).
I suspect there are some similarities in our takes. It seems that you are saying oppositional framing is generalizable, implicitly without the need for abstraction per se. Part of my overarching framing "formalizes" that position: that maths revolved around what must be abstracted to be generalized, while Embodied processing and metaphors/analogies/concepts that recruit it are more generalizable before abstraction: weight, pressure, and noise, for example, are relative magnitudes with no guarantee a "measurement" of that magnitude would increase fidelity in any way. Between the two extremes are essentially equivalence principles where abstraction and generality, distributive and dialectical (among many other variables) are indistinguishable. This is where many laws of physics lie, for example, Newton's 3rd law can be framed equivalently as an mathematically abstracted, physically distributive fact, or a dialectically general fact about anything we could recognize as "interaction."
I would argue that top-down conception of bottom-up constructionism, what you call hierarchy, is a reference frame that reifies towards literal, terrestrial construction. Dialectical framing is middle-out and/or outside-in, with its own set of tradeoffs. I will stop there, somewhat arbitrarily, in part because I otherwise don't know when to stop! 🙃
Looking at places where “Physics” could use philosophy asking questions: How is a “Black Hole” supposed to go to infinity with gravitation force when otherwise “nature” never fails to break such a mathematical asymptote. How can momentum be conserved when mass is not (mass to energy and back) or how could a light beam travel a light speed and exert pressure on a satellite changing its momentum when it has no mass or alternatively how can energy be turned into momentum? How can concepts such as beauty (also recognized by animals (As reports that bears are seen watching a sunset) have a physical expression without being expressed in physics.
So maybe the an oppositional approach to physics could see the physical nature of reality being explained as an opposition to the Mathematics nature of reality. (Placing Addition in opposition to whatever physics is as a cause of Creation - or the Big Bang. Thus both are necessary and separate.)
Very interesting. When I first studied chemistry, we learned chemical reactions as “A happens because of B, then C because of B, and so on.” in my later years, reaction mechanisms were explained in terms of balancing positive and negative charges. In other words, us chemistry students started off learning the hierarchical models and then advanced on to oppositional models… I never thought of this distinction until reading your article.
I’ve long been interested in dualist, yin-yang type models. Of course they are all oversimplified, but at least when you have a thought it encourages you to try and comprehend the opposite thought.
Well expressed. A good understanding we standing of physics. Not sure that oppositional thinking is better, but you demonstrate that changing your approach often improved understanding. So is there an opposition between understanding and ? .
Yes, understanding itself is the product of opposition. The beauty of the oppositional model is that it can explain everything in terms of everything else without collapsing into circularity. So the opposition between B and C can explain A and the opposition between A and B can explain C.
Sorry, but philosophy is not nearly that much enthralled with physics. I have a Masters in physics and worked as a philosophy professor for decades. Philosophy has tons of respect for and interest in physics, but nowhere near as much as your post suggests. Philosophy loves logic, mathematics, biology, cognitive science, psychology, and so on--plus much of literature.
Right. They’re not enthralled with it. They’ve merely given it carte-blanche to declare that out of which everything in existence is constructed.
I still disagree. It's an open question how physics recognizes even ordinary objects such as trees, since many notions like that are nowhere to be found in physics. It is better to say that a lot of philosophers think that for the vast majority of things that exist, there is some physical composition for them--although the notions of composition are varied and there's nothing simple about any of it. And there's not much reason to think physics, as a discipline, has what it takes to understand composition in general.
I'm much more sympathetic to the idea that most philosophers are physicalists, but spelling out that doctrine is notoriously hard, and there is little consensus on how to do it. And then there are the non-religious philosophers of mind who think that consciousness is somewhat akin to a fundamental force of nature, not reducible to those from physics, even though there's nothing religious here and no evidence for consciousness after death.
And most philosophers believe in abstract objects such as those found in mathematics, which makes them restrict their physicalism further.
When is the last time a philosopher proposed a theory of the universe’s origins or the nature of matter? For all intents and purposes these fundamental, discipline-defining questions have been outsourced to physics. And the philosophers who wade in are careful to stay within physics’s bounds; it’s a precondition of being taken seriously.
In any case, is it even worth arguing over the extent to which philosophy is enthralled with physics? My main point, after all, isn’t that philosophy is enthralled with physics but that it’s enthralled (to whatever extent) with the wrong thing about it.
Well, if someone is trying to figure out the nature of matter, it would be wise to stay pretty close to physics, right? Same for the origin of the universe.
What else would we use in our investigation? A priori judgment? Surely not; it’s track record in this sort of thing is anemic. For the two investigations you listed, it would be foolish to not rely heavily on physics.
Of course, that doesn’t mean swallowing whole everything every physicist says, or even the contemporary consensus amongst physicists. But it wouldn’t be wise to not stick closely with what consensus in physics has to say about those two tasks.
In addition, surely the physical universe is hierarchically organized. The term “compose” is certainly fluid enough so that “My chair is composed of molecules, which are composed of atoms, which are composed of various particles” is true. Trying to figure out what composition comes to—in this and other, quite different, cases (e.g., sentences are composed of words)—is a tough problem, one that we approach via investigations that rely on physics, biology, and a lot of other areas.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t other, additional, organizing principles for the physical universe. And perhaps those other organizing principles can be fruitful. If so, let’s see them worked out in detail. Otherwise all we have is “Well, it’s possible”.
I agree that philosophy’s track record is anemic. And so it’s no surprise that they’d hitch their wagon to Newton’s star. But once upon a time philosophers took scientific anti-realism seriously, along with the paradox of explanation, the riddle of induction, and the mystery of cause and effect, among other things that cast doubt on the scientific project. And I think that if they figured out why physics has been so successful despite these deep conceptual issues, they’d discover that they’ve barely scratched the surface of what an a priori methodology can do. That’s a big promissory note, of course, but it’s what this blog is devoted to.
Well, again, for the two projects you mentioned, one would have to be a fool to not stick closely to what physics has learned.
I didn’t say that philosophy’s track record is anemic. I think (and have defended in print) it’s very good in many significant respects but not good at the things we philosophers tend to focus on in our “big picture” thinking: the really famous problems. It’s a bit like trying to run a 3:00 mile: if all you care about is the end goal, you’ll view your project as a failure since you won’t succeed; but you’ll make tremendous progress along the way.
You seem to be saying that philosophers no longer take seriously scientific realism, the paradox of explanation, the riddle of induction, and the mystery of cause and effect. I disagree there too. It’s undeniable that interest in almost any topic comes and goes, over and over again, as philosophers periodically run out of things to say or simply get tired of addressing certain topics.
For instance, twenty years ago lots of metaphysicians were focused on the relation between time and existence, with gobs of articles written about presentism, eternalism, and the like. We don’t see anywhere near as many articles on those topics anymore, although I bet they will resume as soon as someone writes a new and influential piece that renews interest by finding something ostensibly new to say about it.
I think the track record for a priori philosophizing is simply terrible, although I realize that “a priori” is multiply ambiguous. It works in the mathematical/logical side of things, but other than that? I am highly skeptical, given its track record. If you want to resurrect it, then the only way forward is to offer lots of examples for non-trivial conclusions.
I just want to mention, in unintentional irony, that "dialectics" preceded Galileo, and Hegel's flavor of Dialectics, which was more explicitly "oppositional," was hand-wavingly around the time of Newton. My take on this conversation so far is a tension in reference frames more than in specific judgements.
Neither physics nor philosophy is unified, so the general claims made of them say more about which frame you are individually taking: that from which your claim is seen as reasonably true. My read of what reaches my eyes, heavily filtered by algorithm and access, reflects philosophers kissing the physicalist ring, but my sample will be several kinds of biased. There is something to be said for what a Philosopher thinks she must do to be seen by (perceived) scientist gatekeepers and heard by some audience on the other side. There is also Pluralistic Ignorance to account for, where the attitudes may vary wildly from the signaling.
If I am off about something here, especially with regards to "dialectics," you would be doing me a favor by pointing it out. My semi-pseudonym is related to my (I think successful) attempt to identify the dialectical Razor that is mutually dependent on Occam's, theoretically "equal" in parsimony. Likewise, the shortcomings of modern science can be understood by what "survives" Popper's Razor, not by subjecting to it, but by attaching to tools of falsification, ie. Arbitrary p-values presumed sufficient because "falsifying null hypotheses is falsification right? Right?" Herbert Blumer actually already created the remedial dialectical Razor (I would claim), but it personified the empirical world, and we know that's only allowed in the name of reductionism (selfish genes, systems 1 & 2 [not that Kanehman was reductive]), etc.
Semi-pseudonymous, eh? Very well then, Mr. of Hammock. That's very interesting about dialectics and Galileo. I don't much know that history, but the basic idea is of course quite old, going at least as far back as Heraclitus. It's also a staple of Greek mythology (esp. Hermes), non-Western philosophies and various religious traditions, like Kabbalah. In any case, I have my own take on it that may or may not align with Hegel's (who knows what he had in mind).
I suspect there are some similarities in our takes. It seems that you are saying oppositional framing is generalizable, implicitly without the need for abstraction per se. Part of my overarching framing "formalizes" that position: that maths revolved around what must be abstracted to be generalized, while Embodied processing and metaphors/analogies/concepts that recruit it are more generalizable before abstraction: weight, pressure, and noise, for example, are relative magnitudes with no guarantee a "measurement" of that magnitude would increase fidelity in any way. Between the two extremes are essentially equivalence principles where abstraction and generality, distributive and dialectical (among many other variables) are indistinguishable. This is where many laws of physics lie, for example, Newton's 3rd law can be framed equivalently as an mathematically abstracted, physically distributive fact, or a dialectically general fact about anything we could recognize as "interaction."
I would argue that top-down conception of bottom-up constructionism, what you call hierarchy, is a reference frame that reifies towards literal, terrestrial construction. Dialectical framing is middle-out and/or outside-in, with its own set of tradeoffs. I will stop there, somewhat arbitrarily, in part because I otherwise don't know when to stop! 🙃
Yeah, we should definitely compare notes. I’d love to see an extended version of what you’re describing.
Looking at places where “Physics” could use philosophy asking questions: How is a “Black Hole” supposed to go to infinity with gravitation force when otherwise “nature” never fails to break such a mathematical asymptote. How can momentum be conserved when mass is not (mass to energy and back) or how could a light beam travel a light speed and exert pressure on a satellite changing its momentum when it has no mass or alternatively how can energy be turned into momentum? How can concepts such as beauty (also recognized by animals (As reports that bears are seen watching a sunset) have a physical expression without being expressed in physics.
So maybe the an oppositional approach to physics could see the physical nature of reality being explained as an opposition to the Mathematics nature of reality. (Placing Addition in opposition to whatever physics is as a cause of Creation - or the Big Bang. Thus both are necessary and separate.)
Perhaps consciousness could be understood as the friction between physical and mathematical modes of representation.