- #911
Philocrat
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Dr.Yes said:All disciplines are disciplines rooted in physics and the physical universe. They study the phenomena created by a physcial universe. The most amorphic topic can be traced to having roots in physics and the physical world. If the topic is truly detached from the physical world then the act of observing the subject is a physical act and firmly rooted in a physicallity.
All topics would benefit greatly through being explained by pure physics.
Yes, Dr. Yes, you'r substantially right, if not wholly so! And many people on this PF would equally agree with you, despite the current controversy over the 'UNEXPLAINABLE REMAINDER' heavily contested and implied on this very thread.
But philosophy has started to ask some very serious metaphysical and epistemological questions about this. Now, here are the problems:
1) NON-ELIMINATIVE REDUCTIONISM
The following staments suggest 'Non-eliminative realism':
(a) Water is H2O
(b) Man is matter
As argued by some philosophers, these reductive statements or propositions are non-elimnative in scope and in substance. This has the logical structure 'A is B'. That is, B does not pre-suppose the elimination of A, even after A has been reduced to B in the propostion.
2) ELIMINATIVE REDUCTIONISM
The following statements or propositions seem to suggest 'Eliminative Realism:
(b) Evil Demons are Viruses or Diseases
(b) Mind is Matter
On the other side of the argument it is argued that these reductive statements are eliminative in scope and in substance. Logically and quantitativelly, 'As are Bs' implies we can reductively do away with 'As', leaving in our reality only Bs. The same is true of 'A is B'. The question now is, why did we epistemologically venture into the notion of 'As' or 'A', when all there is to the human reality is the notion of 'Bs' or 'B'? Are we being metaphysically deceived into this epistemological pitfall? How did we get ourselves into this position in the first place?
NOTE: Note also that the problem with (1) is that it also pushes a prospective truth-tracker into the bottomless pit of Inter-scale or Inter-layer Reductionism that I mentioned in my previous posting above. If as you said 'All topics would benefit greatly through being explained by pure physics', if follows that a prospective truth-tracker must somehow track all the truths of a given term of reality across all layers or scales of reference or explanation. Up or down the pathway, he or she must grasp the language and logic of explanation in each layer or scale as he/she moves from one layer or scale to the next? Should everyone therefore learn physics (or the language of physics) as the last layer of explanation?
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