Celsus

Well, I'm not really sure what I should add at this point. Suggestions, Hugo?

Joel

P.S. What did you think of the Alan Sokal affair?

Hugo Holbling

My apologies for the delay - i've had ISP problems. I'll offer some comments below on what i thought of Dr. Gill's response; perhaps they'll give you something to go on?

About as much as i thought of the recent Bogdanov affair in physics.

Regarding Dr. Gill's response:

Although i was pleased to see that he found my rambling worthy of a reply, i must admit to having been disappointed. Rather than addressing my criticisms, he passed over most while asserting the old canard about the mythical conflict between science and religion. I am happy to accept that Dr. Gill does not have sufficient time to touch on every point, but i wonder that there was any need for this, for example:

We've been over the Galileo affair before and this is perhaps the most simplistic reading of it i've yet seen.

To answer Luise, i don't know why Dr. Gill decided to bring in a discussion (however brief) of truth, but it's no surprise to an informed reader that he subsribes to Putnam's ideas. Boyd's essay (to which Dr. Gill refers) is addressed by Laudan in his celebrated paper A Confutation Of Convergent Realism, calling such realist claims "a monumental case of begging the question." He concludes by noting:

I should not have to, but i may state the very obvious caveat that realism may turn out to be sound, but the point i tried to make (and which Gill avoided) is that belief in it is neither more nor less metaphysical than the belief in God we regularly see berated here. How White maintains such an influence today is beyond me, but i suspect a steady diet of Lindberg and Numbers would work wonders.

I'm afraid i'll need more convincing.

Luiseach

Perhaps for the same reason I bring it in...to be mischievous?

But seriously...I hope you wouldn't mind if I compose a response worthy of your attention sometime later this week? I want to gather my thoughts first before posting...I want to consider the quotation you included in your last response, namely

'My task here is [...] that of reminding ourselves that there is a difference between wanting to believe something and having good reason for believing it. All of us would like realism to be true; we would like to think that science works because it has got a grip on how things really are. But such claims have yet to be made out.'

lol!...my PhD supervisor just said that very same thing to me last week

Hugo Holbling

Sure, as long as you drop the caveat "worthy of my attention". Unfortunately i don't take myself seriously enough for it to be warranted.

Celsus

Oh come now, you can do far better than that. The Bogdanov affair was a couple of misfits who never intended to satirise, merely get degrees the easy way. Sokal managed to point out how stupid Derrida's understanding of Einstein was, or Bohr's metaphysical speculations were, among others, across an entire stream of leftist intelligentsia.
Can you clarify? In your opinion, does objective reality exist? Because if it does, then this critique of realism makes no sense.

Joel

Hugo Holbling

Perhaps your opinion of me is too high? I am not at all convinced that (so-called) postmodernism is defeated by this ruse. I suspect your question is better directed to Luiseach, since she is our resident literary critic.

You are the one who needs to clarify - i don't follow at all. Do you mean my remarks or Laudan's? Why is your conditional claim valid?

Celsus

Hi again Hugo,

Ok, to clarify:
If objective reality exists, then realism (generally) is the idea that reality can be known. Hence, there are means of arriving independently at this understanding of reality (science), and statements about reality would either be true or false. However, belief in God, which by definition is supernatural and beyond the realms of empirical investigation, does not fall under a similar means of independent confirmation. While science has applications via technology, theism has the rather shaky answered prayer, or arguments from incredulity, etc. Statements about whether metaphysical explorations about God/supernatural can be true or false are simply impossible--but if an objective reality exists, then (metaphysical?) explorations about reality can be rendered true or false. Hence if objective reality exists, then your critique that realism is unsound doesn't seem to make sense (to me).

Joel

Tyler Durden

..they sure ain't hatched yet. A posting by Vorkosigan a long time ago is in high order:Conclusion: he who cites Sokal's name in vain hopes of gaining a quick score is ignorant of philosophy.

Celsus, I wonder why the hell you are a moderator of the philosophy forum, and whose bright idea it was.

Tyler Durden

The belief in realism is a direct byproduct of theism, or belief in God. The need to ground our beliefs in something 'external,' something 'true,' has pervaded western thought ever since Plato, the need to discover and explicate 'first philosophy.'

Even though God is dead today, the uncritical atheist who remains a realist has yet to over come the shadow of his corpse.

"All that can be done with the claim that "only the world determines truth" is to point out the equivocation in the realists' own use of 'world'. In the sense in which "the world" is just whatever that vast majority of our beliefs not currently in question are currently thought to be about, there is of course no argument...The notion of "the world" as used in a phrase like 'different conceptual schemes carve up the world differently' must be the notion of something completely unspecified and unspecifiable--the thing-in-itself, in fact."- Rorty, World Well Lost

Spinoza was the first brave soul to argue that God was nothing more than the order of Nature. Nietzsche, John Dewey, and William James thought that the search of objective truth is not a matter of getting our beliefs to correspond better to the way things actually are, but rather gain intersubjective compromises and deal with the evironment better.

Nietzsche thought htat the search for the "way things really are in themselves" was a surrogate for God. He also thought that we will be stronger, freer, and better people if we could get rid of the pathetic moping for surrogates - quit looking for 'reality' or 'truth.'

Conclusion: 'tis far better to adopt a pragmatic attitude than hump the dead horse of correspondence theory of truth (i.e. realism)

Celsus

I'm not. If you checked the main page, you'll find I moderate Biblical Criticism and Archaeology, and don't appreciate your sarcastic remarks. I don't normally post in Philosophy, but Hugo asked me to have this debate, so here I am.

And with respect to the Sokal affair, see the link I cited above. Prominent people did deem it worthy of comment, including, among others, Steven Weinberg, Paul Boghossian, a whole book, etc. With respect to Vorkosigan, he pulled that response straight from the defenders' rebuttals (Latour, who was personally embarassed by Sokal's quotes of him for the first point, the journal editors for some of the subsequent ones). I suggest you read Sokal's own defense here, which is a much better analysis: It's titled "What the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not Prove" and reading it will do you good.

So I'll extend the question to you: Does objective reality exist?

Joel