"Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> Subject: Re
>Justin:Mach officially thought that theoretical entities were "elements,"
>neither
>mental nor physical.
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>CB: Sort of like heuristic devices.
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Hm. Not exactly. He wasn't Vaihiger, who was an out-and-out fictionalist.
The thought there were elements, jsut that they were not ultimately mental
or physical.
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CB: That's an interesting status, neither mental nor physical.
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>CB: Lenin categorizes Mach as idealist and dualist , a la Kant (i.e.
>"shamedface materialists", agnostics in Engels categories) .
Well, Kant is not a dualist. He is a transcendental idealist and and empirical realist (his own terms), which means, roughly--very very very roughly--that from within experience it's necessarily true that material objects exist outside in space (this is empirical realism), but apart from the transcendental conditions of experience (space, time, and causality, again very roughly), which are in a sense ideal, contributed by our minds, there is no knowledge of thingsa s they are in themselves.
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CB: Unknowable things-in-themselves, yes. However, I can see why Engels would designate such a notion as sort of half materialist and half idealist.
But there are things in themselves that affect us, we don't contribute them. So it's not easy to say whether K is an idealist in the sense that Lenin and Engels meant. Mach's views are nowhere nearlya s interesting, they are basically warmed over watered down Hume.
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CB: Remember , Engels and Lenin after him is saying that Kant is a fencesitter on materialism and idealism. Actually, Engels is probably thinking of Kant when is he gives the second half of his basic "scenario" of philosophy there are materialists and idealists ( first part), and there are those who say we can know the world and those who say we cannot ( like Kant).
>CB: Yes, Kant made an important scientific discovery too, that the solar
system has a history.
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Yes.
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>Justin: Einstein also thought that spacetime was real, which Mach did not.
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>CB: This is the generalized point of the existence of objective reality.
But this is meaningless. Realism has to be piece by piece or it makes no sense. Does spacetime exist? Do atoms exist? There's no geberalizing it, or you get to the silly argument that Rakesh ran the other day, that if I'm a realist I ought to believe that value is real because that's what realists do, believe that things are real. I don't believe that ghosts or phlogiston are real.
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CB: I agree that Lenin's definition of materialism as belief in an objective reality does not mean believing that anything and everything , like ghosts or unicorns are real. The project of science is to discover what is objective reality, to turn things-in-themselves into things-for-us , as Engels puts it ( and they do extend the Kantian metaphor in their exposition). As you may recall, they also do not maintain that we have any interesting absolute truths in that regard but only a series of progressing relative truths, approaching the things-in-themselves like an asymptotic curve approaches a line.
I have an interesting new understanding of the law of value from Michael Perelman's discussion of devalorization for when " value" cools off and comes back for discussion.
>Lenin claims that Mach doesn't believe in objective reality. Just sense
>data, as you say , like Hume. The " We really only have direct experience
>of sense data" rap.
He _said_ he rejected that view, that's why he talked about "elements."
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CB: I can believe that. But "elements" that are neither mental nor physical would seem to sort of be "sensations" which are at the connecting point between the physical and the mental. Either that being neither mental nor physical is a rather odd place to claim exists.
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>So, Mach is a positivist , too, as everything relies on immediate sense
>data.
Well, he's a proto-positivist to be sure. I'm not sure taht is why, though. The logical positivists also followed Mach in denying taht onecould talk about the ultimate nature of theuniverse as sensations. Carnap's Logical Construction of the World starts from sensation, but Carnap insists that the choice of starting pointa s mental or physical is arbitrary; one can also construct the world from physical primitives.
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CB: My understanding was that positivism starts with Compte ( spelling) in the early 1800's, but I don't dispute the history of specifically Logical Positivism.
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>Einstein is anti-positivist too, as I think you mentioned his stubborn
>comment concerning an experiment not confirming relativity.
I think this is right, but it is more complex than that. Verificationist arguments of the sort put forth by the positivists played an important part in the concrete development of relativity theory. In fact. logical positivism came into be historically as an attempt to generalize the method of relativity physics. You can get a short very clear version of this in a few chapters of Larry Sklar's Westview book, Philosophy of Physics, a marvel of exposition.
jks
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CB: Thanks. This is interesting. I'm must say that that fact that positivists are actually idealists is a complex and paradoxical argument, and I realize that by their activities they seem like about the most materialist you can get, with their strict adherence to experience.
I don't know if you recall that Sklar taught the intro philo class I took a "while" ago.
I should say that the issue of what is positivism seems tricky to me because they seem to be militant materialists with their emphasis on what is essentially observation and experience. It must be made clear that Engels-Lenin materialism does require use of the senses in observation. On the other hand , Engels-Lenin theory of knowledge holds that science is the project of discovering patterns that are not apparent to the senses directly, but operate "behind" what we sense directly. The point is this critique of positivism does not throw out data and sense experience as necessary for determining what objective reality is at all ( not saying you said it did)