Chapter 1. The Need for Metaphysics + Introduction

Transcription

1 Chapter 1. The Need for Metaphysics + Introduction According to Richard Taylor, metaphysics (and philosophy in general, I imagine) is not practical or empirical knowledge. Rather, it is or has as its goal--a kind of wisdom (or understanding). (This is one of two pictures of Richard Taylor in Google images.)

2 What good is this wisdom? Metaphysics (or philosophy in general) is needed because certain questions simply press themselves upon (some) thoughtful people. So metaphysics can satisfy our curiosity. Second, according to Taylor, it might help us to live a better life, either by helping us to rise above over-simplified world-views (See below) or parochial material and selfish desires, which lead us to pursue illusory satisfactions. [This is hint of the Buddhist strain that Taylor inherited from Schopenhauer, a German philosopher of the early 19 th century.] Some examples of questions that one might : What am I? A body? A soul? A composite being? Do I really die? (Schopenhauer thought this question was the source of metaphysics.) What is this world, and why is it such? (8) Must everything in fact have a reason to be the way it is, or is there at some level brute contingency or chance? What can one think about the gods? (8) 2

3 How does one try to answer such questions? There are easy ways authority and wishfulfillment the numberless substitutes that are constantly invented and tirelessly peddled to the simple-minded, usually with stunning success (7) Taylor has in mind ideologies and religions, belief systems with ready-made answers to all the hard questions. Wisdom is supposed to protect or insulate us from these glittering gems and baubles. (7) It is arguable that such ideologies do great realworld harm. E. g., doctrinaire free-market views and Ayn Randism (Alan Greenspan and the bubble.) Then there is the hard way, the way of the metaphysician. But what way is that? One starts with data beliefs of common sense that are firmly held. One notes problems or inconsistencies amongst the data. One then tries to come to a reflective, consistent balance amongst them. (This is Aristotle s method.) We may sooner or later have to abandon some of our common-sense data, but when 3

4 we do, it should be in deference to certain other common-sense beliefs that we are even more reluctant to relinquish, and not in deference to philosophical theories that are appealing. (3) Philosophy then seems the attainment of a sophisticated sort of consistency. Logic can help by determining which sets of beliefs are consistent. Logic alone can t tell you what beliefs to drop in an inconsistent set. One ought to be prepared to drop any datum (or theory, for that matter). Fallibilism. This method seems sound as far as it goes, but why are data restricted to common sense? For the last 500 years, the major source of difficulty for our common-sense data has been science. o Newtonian laws vs. freedom, mechanism vs. mind, fields vs. particles, unique Now vs. relativity of simultaneity, non-euclidean geometries vs our intuitive idea of space, chance in Quantum Mechanics o Why should these hard-won results of careful investigation not be considered 4

5 along with the unreflective deliverances of common sense? Taylor himself uses scientific results in his argument against dualism below. (tu quoque, ad hominem) Let us go back to a question that Taylor posed, the question of ontology: What is this world, and why is it such? To answer this question, it would seem that one has to decide between Eddington s two tables. Sir Arthur Eddington 5

6 Eddington s Table1 is the table of common sense. It is solid and continuously coloured on its surface. His Table2 is the table of basic physics. It is mostly empty space and not coloured. It merely reflects light of certain wavelengths, which we perceive as coloured. The latter is a complex relation; the former is a monadic property. Primary vs. secondary qualities, (the mass of an object vs the heat of a fire). This decision, if one really does have to decide, goes far beyond trying to evaluate the competing claims of common sense. Note that there are three possible solutions to the two tables question. 1. Table2 is the real table. I need not tell you that modern physics has by delicate test and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there (xiv) 6

7 2. Table1 is the real table. Eddington doesn t quite endorse or propose this solution, but he does say this: On the other hand I need not tell you that modern physics will never succeed in exorcising that first table--strange compound of external nature, mental imagery and inherited prejudice--which lies visible to my eyes and tangible to my grasp. (xiv) Eddington might be saying that tables (or more generally substances) are a part of our way of perceiving the world--a feature that we impose on our experience or use to order our experience (rather than something that we find in experience). Perhaps, that is, substance is a category (as Kant suggested). A modern cognitive psychologist might theorize, in much the same vein, that we have a substance module--a part of the brain the organizes the raw input of our experience into substances. In this 7

8 case, as Eddington claims, the category is wired into our perceptual system(s), and isn t optional. Bear in mind, however, that even if a category has been wired into our brains (by evolution, perhaps), what that category describes need not be a feature of the best scientific picture of the world. So one must consider the possibility that the world contains only table2 while we are constrained to find table1 in our direct or everyday (untutored) experience. As an example of what I mean (or, perhaps, just an analogy that might be helpful), we still see and speak of the sun rising in the east in the morning and setting in the west at night, even though we know that it does no such thing. The rising and setting of the sun is an appearance, generated by the Earth s rotation on its axis from west to east. 3. Somehow, we can have both. You speak paradoxically of two worlds. Are they not really two aspects or two interpretations of one and the same world? 8

9 Yes, no doubt they are ultimately to be identified [that is, held to be one and the same thing] after some fashion. (xiv) As we will see shortly, Leibniz s Principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals (InId) raises a prima facie problem for such an identification. Sir Arthur Eddington 9