176

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2500975&forum_id=2#25065349)

unnghnn the scholarly sweet treats

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2500975&forum_id=2#25065549)

I am a bit troubled by what seems to me to be a conflation between the basic posture of scientific realism--which, in your parlance, admitted at one point of the existence of protons simpliciter--and what you read as Dewey's reconciliation of scientific progress with scientific realism. You mention at the outset that we can still be realists about unobserved scientific phenomena should we adopt Dewey's position, but Dewey's position, as I'm reading it, seems best characterized as a way of denying that the debate really exists, or otherwise as merely denying realism.

After all, says Dewey, all we need is to introduce the concept of an instrumentality, and both realism and the principal objection to realism--that realism posits really-existing objects that account for scientific phenomena--can be saved. And yet it seems to me that, in order for us to 'save' realism, Dewey's instrumentality must, at a minimum, retain the very feature of realism that subjects it to irrealist critique in the first instance.

So many questions will be along the line of: isn't Dewey's defintion of an instrumentality just a vacuity? If we define the instrumentality as just that scientific object that, if it existed, would explain all of our scientific observations relevant to that instrumentality, how is this not fundamentally a concession to the irrealist? It seems to me that Dewey's concept of a scientific instrumentality has no more content than 'wherever you go, there you are'; in other words, Dewey's position seems tacitly irrealist.

So my questions are going to be along the lines of: don't scientific realists claim the existence of protons simpliciter, with the caveat that, hey, we might be wrong? If they do, isn't Dewey's solution to the caveat just a way of conceding that the objects of science are irreal, if we define them as just those real things that: (1) do not exist simpliciter; and (2) explain phenomena but not really anything else? That seems to be to be almost textbook irrealism. So I'll want you to tell me: if I'm an irrealist, why can't I claim Dewey as being in my camp?

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2500975&forum_id=2#25065924)

i will say as a general point that i have read many papers in my career that seem to claim that we can, or that some thinker does, have it both ways. this is almost always false; one or both sides of the debate will probably leave unsatisfied with this solution. if the debate is about realism (whether moral realism, metaphysical realism, whatever), the realists will almost always be unhappy with the way in which someone has it both ways

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2500975&forum_id=2#25065948)

that like, 10 minute conversation alone gave me an entirely new way of approaching my classes from then on. basically, the key to success in philosophy is to approach problems from a position of radical modesty, or otherwise to be smarter than everyone else. interestingly, those who should be in the first camp (me) often start out thinking they're in the second, and the few who should be in the second almost always think they should be in the first. russell's letter to frege was a cute exception to that, though

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2500975&forum_id=2#25065988)

my suggestion is the following: the five judges, individually, offer a cursory rating in this thread with a few comments. later on, in tinychat, when the papers are presented, we ask questions emerging from these comments. this'll give the writers a little time to prepare and make it a little more of a dialogue. afterwards, the judges can confer and offer a collective rating of the paper and the presentation/response.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2500975&forum_id=2#25065726)

sounds good man.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2500975&forum_id=2#25065765)

something smells of kebabs in here...is it you, xerxes?

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2500975&forum_id=2#25065853)

This paper is well-written, strong scholarship, and teaches me a lot about Dewey's views on the philosophy of science, a topic with which I am not very acquainted. However, I wonder if it is a little too uncritical with Dewey, or, put another way, whether it fails to vindicate Dewey's view vis-a-vis the current debates within which it situates that view.

MIGtp makes - among others - the following statements:

1. Dewey believes in the objects of particle physics (here I take "believes in" to mean "posits as part of an ontological scheme") *insofar as* they produce certain behavior, and not as natural kinds.

2. Anti-realism is the view that empirical adequacy does not imply some deep truth about the joint-carving capacities of our theories.

It is difficult for me to see how these two in tandem do not make Dewey an anti-realist.

Now MIGtp attempts to evade this criticism of Dewey by suggesting that Dewey's mid-tier "hypothetical objects" have some roughness to them which a final, completed science might not. Or maybe there is no final, completed science; in which case they just lack something natural kinds have. But why posit these hypothetical objects at all? What purpose do they serve? Moreover, why should explanatory adequacy suffice as a measure of their existence, if not for the existence of other, more real(?) objects? It seems to me Dewey, under this presentation, might be giving us not the best of both worlds but the worst of both: the anti-realist's dissatisfaction with explanatory adequacy as a measure of deep ontology and of the world's structure, and the realist's ontological promiscuity.

In responding to this criticism I urge MIGtp not to accidentally beg the question against either party in the current debate. For example, the paper's penultimate sentence reads ". . . our set of natural kinds." The realist, of course, does not merely think that there is some subjective, human-determined view of natural kinds, but that there are some objectively real ones out there.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2500975&forum_id=2#25065944)

"More importantly, that an atom can be better understood today as a nucleus with orbiting electrons, rather than as the earlier plumb pudding model, is not grounds for dismissing the existence of the atom as that referent accountable for certain molecular properties "

the secret language is: "i'm full of shit and just filling the space on the page".

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2500975&forum_id=2#25068454)

Jesus how about we judge them based on merit.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2500975&forum_id=2#25066067)

no but seriously i propose that each 10 minutes late = -1 LSAT equivalent from score

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2500975&forum_id=2#25066163)

in general i want you to know that you seem v. bright by comparison to the typical phil UG. i thought it was a good little rumination

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2500975&forum_id=2#25066189)

paper covering rock is basically the central premise of shitlib

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2500975&forum_id=2#25066768)

congrats mig - nice essay btw.

however, i will be poasting my finished product later tonight. if you don't want to read it fine. but i will still poast it. i think mig deserves at least one product to compete with since he put all this work into writing.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=2500975&forum_id=2#25066240)