Again, thanks for the post — Cris
You're most welcome, and thanks for your comments.
I had the impression that you liked both forms of dualism. — g0d
The problem with Cartesian dualism is the very idea of there being a 'thinking substance'. It is an impossible abstraction, and has lead to enormous confusion. Husserl has a great criticism of that in Crisis of European Sciences. But it is what ended up as 'the ghost in the machine'. Whereas in hylomorphic dualism, mind is 'what grasps meaning'; not a substance or object of any kind; much more subtle.
[The mind] thus falls into confusion and contradictions, from which it conjectures the presence of latent errors, which, however, it is unable to discover, because the principles it employs, transcending the limits of experience, cannot be tested by that criterion. — Kant
This is from 'the antinomies of reason'. It is about the fact that there are questions traditionally regarded as metaphysical, which can never be resolved, like whether the world has a beginning or whether there is a first cause.
The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet; and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them. Afterwards the mind, proceeding farther, abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names. In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with ideas and language, the [21] materials about which to exercise its discursive faculty: and the use of reason becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment, increase. But though the having of general ideas, and the use of general words and reason, usually grow together; yet, I see not, how this any way proves them innate. — John Locke
Right - there's a succinct statement of the 'blank slate'. In IETP, on Kant's metaphysics, we read that
Empiricists, such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, argued that human knowledge originates in our sensations. Locke, for instance, was a representative realist about the external world and placed great confidence in the ability of the senses to inform us of the properties that empirical objects really have in themselves. Locke had also argued that the mind is a blank slate, or a tabula rasa, that becomes populated with ideas by its interactions with the world. Experience teaches us everything, including concepts of relationship, identity, causation, and so on. Kant argues that the blank slate model of the mind is insufficient to explain the beliefs about objects that we have; some components of our beliefs must be brought by the mind to experience.
...Kant gives a number of arguments to show that Locke's, Berkeley's, and Hume's empiricist positions are untenable because they necessarily presuppose the very claims they set out to disprove.
This is the sense in which Kant criticizes the empiricists. The gist of it is, to even make the arguments that they make, the empiricists are already assuming the very faculties which they believe they can account for in terms of experience. 'According to the Rationalist and Empiricist traditions, the mind is passive either because it finds itself possessing innate, well-formed ideas ready for analysis, or because it receives ideas of objects into a kind of empty theater, or blank slate. Kant's crucial insight here is to argue that experience of a world as we have it is only possible if the mind provides a systematic structuring of its representations. This structuring is below the level of, or logically prior to, the mental representations that the Empiricists and Rationalists analyzed.'
Notice that Locke is arguing that if ideas were truly innate, then we wouldn't have to learn them, and children and idiots would already possess them. But I think it's a rather simplistic interpretation of what 'innateness' means. The 'categories of the understanding' and the 'primary intuitions' which Kant points to, are not necessarily available to conscious inspection - in that sense, innate - but they're innate in the sense that they provide the structure whereby "making sense of experience" is possible. Likewise, I think that universals are like the real constituents of the mind's capacity for reason - in that sense they're innate, but innate in the sense of being the native constituents of reason, not as fully-formed ideas. On the other hand, child prodigies, etc, really do seem to have an innate talent or recollection. In either case, it's not nearly so simple as Locke makes it out to be.
It is said that 'science relies on reason' but really it relies even more on what is tangible or instrumentally-detectable; it is nothing like rationalism in the sense that a Leibniz or rationalist philosophy understands, which sought to intuit an order wholly transcending the order of the sense; something which is practically unintelligible to a modern.
— WayfarerIsn't it more complicated than that?
— g0d
It is extremely complicated, but the fact remains that 'empiricism' means 'demonstrable in objective experience', right? 'Modern science emerged in the seventeenth century with two fundamental ideas: planned experiments (Francis Bacon) and the mathematical representation of relations among phenomena (Galileo). This basic experimental-mathematical epistemology evolved until, in the first half of the twentieth century, it took a stringent form involving (1) a mathematical theory constituting scientific knowledge, (2) a formal operational correspondence between the theory and quantitative empirical measurements, and (3) predictions of future measurements based on the theory. The “truth” (validity) of the theory is judged based on the concordance between the predictions and the observations. While the epistemological details are subtle and require expertise relating to experimental protocol, mathematical modeling, and statistical analysis, the general notion of scientific knowledge is expressed in these three requirements.
Science is neither rationalism nor empiricism. It includes both in a particular way. In demanding quantitative predictions of future experience, science requires formulation of mathematical models whose relations can be tested against future observations. Prediction is a product of reason, but reason grounded in the empirical. Hans Reichenbach summarizes the connection: “Observation informs us about the past and the present, reason foretells the future.” - E G Dougherty.
So all science has predictions (on the left hand side) and results (observations and experimental results, on the right hand side). It can be distinguished from philosophical reasoning that is aimed at effecting a transformation of insight, as was traditional philosophy; science is results-oriented and instrumental in nature. Not wrong on that account, but also not necessarily efficacious in any sense other than those.
This is a fascinating quote, but note that it frames the religious person in terms of longing, sorrow, and fear who merely glimpses something Higher now and then. What is not mentioned is a general sense of well-being. To be sure there is plenty of vanity in the world, but we can choose our spouses, friends, books, etc. Can we not get better at life as we get better at riding a bike? — g0d
I don't think it's all or nothing. One can 'live in the world' as many a good Christian, Buddhist or Hindu might do, but still feel that sense of the radical insufficiency of natural life. The feeling the post talks about is an intuition of radically transformed way of being; but it concludes that, certainly, not everyone has this sense, which is also true. I quoted it to illustrate what I think having a spiritual/religious type of outlook amounts to, rather than believing in a sky-father type of God, as it's a sense which could equally apply to Buddhists, who don't believe in God.
