QUOTATIONS #9

Mark Goldblatt --: It is necessary at the outset to define the three key terms: humanist, postmodernist, and talk. By a "humanist," I mean a person who believes that human beings can formulate true or false opinions about a reality that exists independently of their thoughts and language--and that the truth or falsehood of such opinions is gauged by their correspondence with empirical evidence analyzed in light of fundamental rational principles. By a "postmodernist," I mean a person who believes that the perception of a reality existing independently of thought and language is illusory, that what the humanist perceives as reality is in fact a linguistic construct of the phenomena of subjective experience that is continually adjusted in response to a fluid social consensus. Finally, by "talk" I mean to put forward opinions, or sets of opinions, in such a way that they may be either verified or falsified. Of the two possibilities, verification and falsification, I would lay particular emphasis on falsification since it is less provisional. (Falsification, in other words, is less contingent on evidentiary standards. For example, it only takes one black dove to falsify the proposition "All doves are white"; whereas, the standards of support required to verify the proposition inevitably vary.) To talk, by my definition, is to risk one's continued avowal of an intellectual position, to enter willingly into the so-called "marketplace of ideas" in which logical demonstration is recognized as the final arbiter between opposing viewpoints. My thesis, then, is that no such marketplace of ideas can ever truly exist between humanists and postmodernists because postmodernists neither pursue verification nor risk falsification in their exchanges. [Can Humanists Talk To Postmodernists?]

Arthur Fine --: The war between Einstein, the realist, and Bohr, the nonrealist, over the interpretation of quantum theory was not, I believe, just a sideshow in physics, nor an idle intellectual exercise. It was an important endeavor undertaken by Bohr on behalf of the enterprise of physics as a progressive science. For Bohr believed (and this fear was shared by Heisenberg, A. Sommerfield, W. Pauli, and M. Born - and all the major playors) that Einstein's realism, if taken seriously, would block the consolidation and articulation of the new physics and, thereby, stop the progress of science. They were afraid, in particular, that Einstein's realism would lead the next generation of the brightest and best students into scientific dead ends. [The ontological import of scientific knowledge: The Natural Ontological Attitude]

Henry Krips --: Einstein's position has roots in Cartesian as well as empiricist, and specifically Lockean, notions of perception. This realist position opposes the Kantian metaphor of the "veil of perception" that pictures the apparatus of observation as like a pair of spectacles through which a highly mediated sight of the world can be glimpsed. To be specific, according to Kant, rather than simply reflecting an independently existing reality, "appearances" are constituted through the act of perception in a way that conforms them to the fundamental categories of sensible intuition. As Kant made the point in the Transcendental Aesthetic: "Not only are the drops of rain mere appearances, but...even their round shape, and even the space in which they fall, are nothing in themselves, but merely modifications of fundamental forms of our sensible intuition, and....the transcendental object remains unknown to us". By contrast, the realism that I am associating with Einstein takes the point of view that, insofar as they are real, when we observe rain drops under ideal conditions we are seeing objects "in themselves", that is, as they exist independently of being perceived. In other words, not only do the rain drops exist independently of our observations but also, in observing them, what we see reflects how they really are. In William Blake's succinct formulation, "As the eye [sees], such the object [is]". According to this "realist" point of view, ideal observations not only reflect the way things are during but also immediately before and after observation. [Measurement in Quantum Theory ..... Kant, I., 1973. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan.]

Alberto Voltolini --: An intentional state such as a belief has two components, namely what makes it that kind of mental state (i.e. a belief rather than a desire, or a state of fear etc.) and what makes it a representational state, i.e. a mental state endowed with a certain representational content. (In the old-fashioned phenomenological terminology, this is the distinction between the quality and the matter of a mental state.) Moreover, according to whether we conceive the representational content either as relational, i.e. as depending for its own identity on the external reality(s) it is about, or as non-relational, i.e. as being what it is regardless of whether it is about an external reality, we get two ways of individuating one and the same intentional state. These ways made Putnam (1975) originally speak of a broad and a narrow psychological state. Taken in their simplest versions, externalism and internalism are the conceptions according to which, pending on the broad vs. the narrow identification of an intentional state, the content of such a state can legitimately be conceived only either as relational or as non-relational respectively. For externalists, the representational content of an intentional state depends on a reality lying outside the subject of such a state. For internalists, no external object or event which lies or occurs outside a subject's brain (or at most its body) is relevant for the individuation of the content of an intentional state. To be sure, however, different versions of both externalism and internalism are possible. [Internalism & Externalism]

Bertrand Russell --: Physics assures us that the occurrences which we call "perceiving" objects, are not likely to resemble the objects except, at best, in certain very abstract ways. We all start from "naive realism," i. e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it most means to be objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will. Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false. [An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth]

John Gregg --: I have argued that things are abstractions. We create all things, we infer unity and mid-level individuation in the world. Seen in this light, consciousness has a much bigger job than just painting the apple red. It must create reality much more broadly, including the apple itself. Just as there are no red photons, there are no rocks, cars, dogs, or numbers. Nature presents us with a wash of particles, a continuous flux of quantum stuff, and we overlay this flux with stories about cars and rocks. [Realism: To what extent is the world out there the way it seems?]

Ernst Mach --: The goal which it [physical science] has set itself is the simplest and most economical abstract expression of facts. When the human mind, with its limited powers, attempts to mirror in itself the rich life of the world, of which it itself is only a small part, and which it can never hope to exhaust, it has every reason for proceeding economically. In reality, the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole but only in that aspect of it which is important for us, the rest being intentionally or from necessity omitted. In mentally separating a body from the changeable environment in which it moves, what we really do is to extricate a group of sensations on which our thoughts are fastened and which is of relatively greater stability than the others, from the stream of all our sensations. Suppose we were to attribute to nature the property of producing like effects in like circumstances; just these like circumstances we should not know how to find. Nature exists once only. Our schematic mental imitation alone produces like events. [The Economical Nature Of Physical Inquiry]

Chih-i (or Chiyi) --: One may say neither that the one mind is prior and all dharmas posterior nor that all dharmas are prior and the one mind posterior.... If one derives all dharmas from the one mind, this is a vertical relationship. If the mind all at once contains all dharmas, this is a horizontal relationship. Neither vertical nor horizontal will do. All one can say is that the mind is all dharmas, and all dharmas are the mind. Therefore the relationship is neither vertical nor horizontal, neither the same nor different. It is obscure, subtle and profound in the extreme. Knowledge cannot know it, nor can words speak it. Herein lies the reason for its being called "the realm of the inconceivable." [Chih-i (or Chiyi, 538-597), founder of Chinese T'ien-t'ai Buddhism, quoted by Jacqueline I. Stone, Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism, Kuroda Institute, University of Hawai'i Press, 1999, p. 179]

Henry J. Folse --: However, while Kuhn and like minded critics of the empiricist consensus effectively overthrew the consensus view that had dominated philosophy of science from the 1930's to the 60's, Kuhn's own alternative was never crowned its successor within philosophy of science. It is now generally recognized by most philosophers to be inadequate as an account of many of the features of science to which Kuhn himself called attention. Thus in the last forty years philosophy of science has gone from a field formerly dominated by a single "received view" to an arena of volatile debate with no single dominant contender for a new acceptable model of scientific knowledge. This fact has made it one of the most lively and pivotal domains of philosophy, for the issues now occupying center stage in philosophy of science touch upon basic questions of epistemology, metaphysics, and axiology. Through these debates the nature of philosophy of science has changed tremendously from the attempt to build a formal model of an idealized perfect science quite apart from any historical account of what scientists really do, to the attempt to build a philosophically acceptable view of science based upon a detailed historical examination of the actual patterns of reasoning employed in concrete episodes in the advance of science. En route these discussions have called into question such basic presuppositions as the belief that there is some pattern of reasoning which justifies acceptance of scientific theories, that there is some methodology called "the scientific method," that science has anything at all to say about the nature of reality, and that science can be examined apart from the social, cultural context in which it actually evolves. Because of the central role that science plays in contemporary culture, these upheavals in philosophy of science have reverberated in a variety of disciplines including history, political science, sociology, art, religious studies, and other disciplines too numerous to name. [Introduction To Philosophy Of Science]

Mark Georgeson --: If you stare at a rotating disc for a little while and then stop the rotation, the disc will appear to be rotating backward, even though it is actually stationary. Similar illusory movement can be seen after looking at a waterfall, or the credits rolling at the end of a movie. This striking phenomenon -- the "motion aftereffect" -- has been known for hundreds of years, and is one of many visual aftereffects that have intrigued students and scholars of perception. Aftereffects reveal a gap between appearance and reality, and remind us that what we see is determined by how visual information is coded in the brain, and not simply by how things "really are". [adapted from (Current Biology 2004 14:R751) in Science Week's "Neuroscience: On Tuning in the Visual Cortex"]

Martin Eimer --: A number of powerful multisensory illusions demonstrate that the senses are inextricably linked, and that our perception of visual, auditory or tactile events can be altered dramatically by information from other senses. When a sound is accompanied by a visual stimulus at another location, people tend to perceive this sound incorrectly at the same position as the visual stimulus --the ventriloquism effect. When two objects are lifted that differ visibly in size, but are equal in weight, the larger object is felt to be heavier --the size weight illusion. When people see a life-sized rubber model of their hand being touched at the same time as their own hand, which is hidden from view, they experience the touch on the rubber hand, and often report that the rubber hand feels as if it was their own. . . . . As a general rule, our sensations tend to be dominated by the modality that provides the most detailed and reliable information about the external world. Because vision provides highly accurate and detailed spatial information about three-dimensional properties of external objects, it is used to guide spatial judgements in other modalities as well, and can therefore influence (and sometimes distort) our spatial perception of auditory and tactile events. Recent research has begun to uncover the neural basis of such interactions between sensory modalities in spatial perception. [adapted from (Current Biology 2004 14:R115) in Science Week's "Neurobiology: Visual Experience and Spatial Perception"]

Susan Blackmore --: We must be clear what is meant by the word 'illusion'. An illusion is not something that does not exist, like a phantom or phlogiston. Rather, it is something that it is not what it appears to be, like a visual illusion or a mirage. When I say that consciousness is an illusion I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion. [There Is No Stream Of Consciousness]

James Stump --: The worldview is the "final controlling factor in all thinking whatever". These are strong words. I turn to the history of science for their defense. A study of the history of physical theory provides ample data for establishing the existence of a dialectical movement between science and metaphysics. The direction of new scientific theories was influenced by and justified by a metaphysical framework that had already been in place. But then with the advance of the wildly successful science, this metaphysical framework underwent revision. This revision, in turn, altered the constraints imposed by metaphysics and allowed for further development in the science -- which again affected the metaphysics... and so on. Science and metaphysics are seen to advance hand-in-hand, reciprocally influencing each other. [Science, Metaphysics, and Worldviews]

Piet Hut --: Science, like most human activities, is based on a belief, namely the assumption that nature is understandable. If we are faced with a puzzling experimental result, we first try harder to understand it with currently available theory, using more clever ways to apply that theory. If that really doesn't work, we try to improve or perhaps even replace the theory. We never conclude that a not-yet understood result is in principle un-understandable. While some philosophers might draw a different conclusion, as a scientist I strongly believe that Nature is understandable. And such a belief can neither be proved nor disproved. Note: undoubtedly, the notion of what counts as "understandable" will continue to change. What physicists consider to be understandable now is very different from what had been regarded as such one hundred years ago. For example, quantum mechanics tells us that repeating the same experiment will give different results. The discovery of quantum mechanics led us to relax the rigid requirement of a deterministic objective reality to a statistical agreement with a not fully determinable reality. Although at first sight such a restriction might seem to limit our understanding, we in fact have gained a far deeper understanding of matter through the use of quantum mechanics than we could possibly have obtained using only classical mechanics. [Edge, The World Question Center, 2005]

Ronald C. Pine --: Kant's philosophy ...prepared the way to think about the possibility that there are many "real" events, other worlds, happening all the time right in front of us, so to speak, even though we are incapable of directly experiencing them. It would soon be commonplace for scientists to believe that there are many realities beyond the perceptual window allowed by Newtonian conceptual filters. Kant was right about our normal perceptual window. It is Newtonian. Every observation scientists make, whether it be in an Earth laboratory or of deep space, will be framed wtihin a normal three-dimesnional window. Although Kant himself believed this would never be possible, it would soon be commonplace to believe that there could beindirect methods of deucing other realities, that observations made in our normal mode could indicate or point to a world totally different from what we normally observe.... Ironically, in his attempt to establish Newtonianism as a priori, Kant prepared the way for us to think the unthinkable: that we could conceptualize, understand, and even have knowledge of new unimaginable realities, that our common notion of three-dimensional space, our normal experience of the unidirectional flow of time, and our thoughts about causality could be but a human point of view. (197f.) [Science and the Human Prospect]

G. J. Mattey --: Kant wished to distinguish "ideality" from "idealism." An idealist believes that only thinking things and their representations exist. Kant maintained, on the contrary, that there are existing things which are not the same as representations, but which are only known through representations. We call the representations "bodies," to be sure, but bodies correspond to existing beings. "Consequently, I grant by all means that there are bodies without us, that is, things which, though quite unknown to what they are in themselves, we yet know by the representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us, and which we call bodies" (Prolegomena, First Part, Remark II). Kant compared his move to that made by those who distinguish primary and secondary qualities. Stripping the secondary qualities from an object does not remove the object. So, stripping the primary qualities from it will leave some residue as well. "The existence of the thing that appears is thereby not destroyed, as in genuine idealism, but it is only shown that we cannot possibly know it by the senses as it is in itself" (Prolegomena, First Part, Remark III). The fact that the residue remains means that Kant has not turned the world of the senses into illusion. We can distinguish between "truth and dreaming" by appeal to coherence, which is the basis of our judgments. This ability is independent of the way in which we understand bodies. On the other hand, to claim that things in themselves are like bodies engenders a real illusion, "in which I proclaim to be universally valid what is merely a subjective condition of the intuition of things and certain only for all objects of sense" (Prolegomena, First Part, Remark III). So the ideality of space and time actually prevents illusion, rather than fostering it. Kant held that Descartes and Berkeley were the true idealists. That Descartes should be called an idealist is puzzling, since he held that bodies exist independently of the mind. But Kant thought that Descartes also acknowledge that this could not be proved, and so he was an "empirical" idealist. (Kant also calls it "dreaming" idealism here, because it makes representations, dreams, into things, at least possibly. In the Critique of Pure Reason he calls it "problematic" or "skeptical" idealism.) Berkeley flat-out denied the existence of anything but spirits. Kant called his idealism "mystical and visionary." He converts things into representations, by denying that mind-independent things exist at all. Both these types of idealism are refuted by Kant's own "transcendental" or "critical" idealism, or so he claimed. [Kant Lecture Notes]

Garth Kemerling --: For Aristotle, then, logic is the instrument (the "organon") by means of which we come to know anything. He proposed as formal rules for correct reasoning the basic principles of the categorical logic that was universally accepted by Western philosophers until the nineteenth century. This system of thought regards assertions of the subject-predicate form as the primary expressions of truth, in which features or properties are shown to inhere in individual substances. In every discipline of human knowledge, then, we seek to establish the things of some sort have features of a certain kind. Aristotle further supposed that this logical scheme accurately represents the true nature of reality. Thought, language, and reality are all isomorphic, so careful consideration of what we say can help us to understand the way things really are. Beginning with simple descriptions of particular things, we can eventually assemble our information in order to achieve a comprehensive view of the world. [Aristotle: Logical Methods, Philosophy Pages]

Chris Eliasmith --: Phenomenalism [is] the monistic view that all empirical statements (such as the laws of physics) can be placed in a one to one correspondence with statements about only the phenomenal (i.e. mental appearances). A view held by A.J. Ayer which was shown by Roderick Chisholm to be untenable. Chisholm showed that [it] would not be possible to translate physical statements into phenomenal statements because phenomenal statements are dependent on physical descriptions of the observation conditions and conditions of the perceiver. [Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind]

Immanuel Kant --: Idealism consists in the assertion, that there are none but thinking beings, all other things, which we think are perceived in intuition, being nothing but representations in the thinking beings, to which no object external to them corresponds in fact. Whereas I say, that things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i. e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses. Consequently I grant by all means that there are bodies without us, that is, things which, though quite unknown to us as to what they are in themselves, we yet know by the representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us, and which we call bodies, a term signifying merely the appearance of the thing which is unknown to us, but not therefore less actual. Can this be termed idealism? It is the very contrary. [Prolegomena to any future metaphysics; How is pure mathematics possible?]

by Michael Bakaoukas --: Grote (1869: VII 331 ff) and then Joel (1921: 726) were the first scholars who attempted to interpret Gorgias from a modern philosophical point of view. They put forward a Kantian interpretation according to which Gorgias distinguished between the phenomenal and the noumenal. An interesting Kantian interpretation of Gorgias' texts is adopted by Grote (1869: VIII 331 ff) and joel (1921: 726). According to them, the Gorgianic word 'being' refers to ultra-phenomenal or noumenal object of which Gorgias denied the existence (not being). In this regard, according to Hamberger (1914: 53, 55) Plato misunderstood the Gorgianic theory on the relationship between noumenal and phenomenal objects. Newiger (1973: 186) emphasises the same interpretative line. But, as Chiapelli (1890) points out, we should translate the Gorgianic "not being" into "unknowable material Being", for the distinction between "phenomenal" and "noumenal" is foreign to all ancient thought before Plato (cf. Untersteiner, 1954: 164, n. 2). A modern philosophical interpretation is also adopted by Mansfeld, stated as follows: "The point of Gorgias' argument seems to be that the only knowledge ... is absolute or unqualified knowledge, i.e., knowledge of things as they are in themselves. Personal knowledge, being relative and not of things as they really are in themselves, is not knowledge in the required sense ... is not absolute knowledge of things as they really are but personal knowledge of things as they are experienced. This knowledge cannot be communicated to someone else" (Mansfeld 1985: 252). In this regard, Mansfeld (1985: 258) holds that "some of Gorgias' points ... are philosophically immensely interesting because they deal with the problem of private vs public knowledge." Recent interpretations of Gorgias' texts treat Gorgianic arguments as serious and valid. For example Schiappa and Hoffman say that "we ought to treat the On What is Not as a work of careful argumentation and not of inconsiderable philosophical significance" (Schiappa and Hoffman, 1994: 160). According to them, Gorgias refutes successfully the Parmenidean premise "if one can mention (o) or can think of (o), then (o) exists." Along this line of reasoning, Gorgias refutes the claim that what is thought of is necessarily existent (DK B3 79); that is he argues "against the existence of thought-about-objects" using a reductio ad absurdum. Namely, the Parmenidean premise "if one can mention (o) or can think of (o), then (o) exists" is refuted, for we can think of non-existent things like chimera or chariots running over the sea. Hence, there is no "identity relationship between things-thought-about and things-that-are" (Schiappa and Hoffman, 1994: 157-8). [Gorgias the Sophist on "Not Being" - How to interpret Gorgias]

Erwin Schrodinger --: The great thing [about Kant's philosophy] was to form the idea that this one thing -- mind or world -- may well be capable of other forms of appearance that we cannot grasp and that do not imply the notions of space and time. This means an imposing liberation from our inveterate prejudice. [Mind and Matter]

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