Science and Platonism

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

I don’t have the patience to read the sort of literature that is being talked about here. I’ve studied philosophy for nearly 50 years now, and I’m usually able to write about philosophical matters without using any words ending in “-ism”. When I read a passage thick with “isms” I strongly suspect that what I am reading is more an exercise in labelling or categorizing than in talking about a subject of any human importance.

If I want to talk about “dualism” for example, I will talk about whether the soul (or mind) is separable from the body. I don’t need the word “dualism” to raise that question and consider various answers. And I can’t think of when I have ever needed to use the term “idealism” or “realism” to get any important idea across to a reader or student.

To be sure, some “ism” words are handy where they are generally understood by non-specialists. “Materialism” has a generally understood meaning both as a metaphysical position and as a moral/social term, and “empiricism” has a generally understood everyday meaning (reliance on data rather than on sheer speculative reasoning). But in nine cases out of ten, it’s possible to avoid the “ism” word altogether and use everyday English to convey one’s meaning.

One reason why so many academics – philosophers (especially philosophers of science), psychologists, sociologists, education theorists, etc. – are such bad writers is that they have become incapable of writing English without jargon. Every doctoral candidate in Humanities and Social Sciences should have to sign a promise always to follow the principles of writing set forth in Strunk and White, before being given a Ph.D. And every journal should insist that every article is written in the style recommended by Strunk and White. But of course, that is not going to happen, because over half of modern academia is B.S., and clear writing would expose just how much of academic thought is B.S. Academics protect themselves from having their B.S. detected by writing in the way they do. Whole careers depend on it.

Meerkat gives me a passage from Scientific American (hardly a place where I’d expect to find a good discussion of philosophy of science, as opposed to popular science), which passage itself quotes a definition of Platonism from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. And neither the passage from Scientific American nor the passage from SEP is very clear. The SA passage reads:

@Meerkat_SK5

We will use platonism with a lower-case “p” here to refer to the belief that the objects within the models of theoretical physics constitute elements of reality, but these models are not based on pure thought… but fashioned to describe and predict observations."

This is unclear. “Objects within the models of theoretical physics” – I can’t tell how the word “object” is being used here. What’s an example of an “object” within a “model”? For example, is an “electron” an “object” within the “atomic model” of matter? I suspect that “object” – which in normal English suggests a clunky physical thing, e.g., “there’s an object on the radar screen” or “I feel some object in my eye”, is a poor word here, and that “element” or “component” would be a better word.

And again, “these models are not based on pure thought” – what does that mean? What’s the difference between “pure thought” and just plain “thought”? Does the writer mean that “models are not based on thought alone, but also on our experience of the world”? If so, then that’s what the writer should have written.

Regarding the SEP passage, consider: “there exist such things as abstract objects” – what does the SEP author include in “abstract objects”? Why doesn’t the author help the reader out with an example? In Plato’s “theory of Ideas” (leaving aside the question whether Plato himself asserted that theory), there are “ideas” or “forms” of things which are “abstract” (though Plato doesn’t use that term): the form of “threeness” or of “odd” or “even” or of “justice”, and these forms exist always, even if no physical embodiment of them is presently at hand. So Plato helps us by giving examples of his “abstract objects”; the SEP author fails to do so.

Much of what passes for “philosophy of science” is written like this. It’s not very clear, and not very helpful. Science is great, and traditional philosophy (Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Mill, etc.) is great, but modern philosophy of science is of questionable usefulness, and it’s certainly less clearly written than either of the other two enterprises.

Because I have so little sympathy with the entire subject of discussion, I can’t get interested in sorting out the dispute between Tim and Meerkat. I love the writings of Plato and have studied them for nearly 50 years, but discussions about whether some physicist or psychologist is “platonist” in some recent, contrived sense of the term, simply don’t interest me. So I will leave other people to wrangle over this stuff.

[Meerkat_SK5]

@Tim

If it came in dribs and drabs “over the weeks and months” (never, as @Roy pointed out, even explicitly mentioning “platonic idealism” until this thread), then it clearly was not a “clear definition”.

I did not need to say it explicitly because I was talking about the Orch-OR theory and Owen’s theory all this time without the need to explicitly label their works as “platonic idealism” . The contents of their theories gave a clear definition of platonism as well.

@Tim

The question that concluded my OP was about platonic forms, and this question is about platonic forms (and more specifically, one of their properties).

Right and you defined what you meant by “platonic forms” by framing it in the context of platonic idealism. Then, once I provided evidence for that meaning of platonic forms, you restructured your OP in a way that was almost entirely different from what you presented.

For this reason, I am not going to answer your question again, especially when it is now irrelevant to what I have been arguing about all this time.

[Tim]

@Meerkat_SK5

I did not need to say it explicitly because I was talking about the Orch-OR theory and Owen’s theory all this time without the need to explicitly label their works as “platonic idealism” .

Stricken as non-responsive to my “dribs and drabs” point. I would note that you did not even attempt to address my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th points.

@Meerkat_SK5

The contents of their theories gave a clear definition of platonism as well.

Citation needed!

Please give a citation to exactly where Penrose&Hameroff, and Richard Owen, respectively, “gave a clear definition of platonism” in their writings.

@Meerkat_SK5

Right and you defined what you meant by “platonic forms” by framing it in the context of platonic idealism.

Actually, I framed it in terms of both “platonic idealism” and Plato’s writings:

@Tim

I (and I suspect others), have been dismissing this Platonic Idealism …

The link for “Platonic Idealism” (following Wikipedia’s own redirect) links to Wikipedia article on Plato’s “Theory of Forms”.

@Meerkat_SK5

Then, once I provided evidence for that meaning of platonic forms …

False!

Not one of your witless citations and quotes provided any scientific evidence of platonic forms.

Most of them didn’t even mention “platonic forms”, “platonic idealism”, or anything else even vaguely related to platonism.

The few that did were assertions not evidence, most notably the unsubstantiated claims of that “crackpot” Hameroff in his quantum woo chapter.

@Meerkat_SK5

… you restructured your OP in a way that was almost entirely different from what you presented.

False!

I did no such thing.

The only thing I did was, after you brought up the property of independent existence, was to elaborate the properties attributed to the “platonic forms” I had discussed in my OP. I would note that nowhere have you either provided any evidence that these are not the properties of platonic forms, nor have you provided any evidence of a contradictory set of properties.

@Meerkat_SK5

For this reason, I am not going to answer your question again, especially when it is now irrelevant to what I have been arguing about all this time.

False!

The claim that scientific evidence of a property of a platonic form is “irrelevant” to the question of whether there is scientific evidence of a platonic form is in fact utterly stupid!

It is your witless and ineffective hand-waving that is irrelevant.

@Tim

Answer the damn question:

@Tim

Let’s start with immutability.

To provide “scientific evidence” that quantum wave functions are “platonic forms” you MUST provide scientific evidence that quantum wave functions are immutable. (Then you will need to provide scientific evidence for the other properties.)

Can you provide scientific evidence for this?

If not, then everything you have to say is irrelevant.

[Roy (34-year veteran)]

@Eddie

The SA passage reads:

@Meerkat_SK5

We will use platonism with a lower-case “p” here to refer to the belief that the objects within the models of theoretical physics constitute elements of reality, but these models are not based on pure thought… but fashioned to describe and predict observations."

This is unclear. “Objects within the models of theoretical physics” – I can’t tell how the word “object” is being used here. What’s an example of an “object” within a “model”? For example, is an “electron” an “object” within the “atomic model” of matter? I suspect that “object” – which in normal English suggests a clunky physical thing, e.g., “there’s an object on the radar screen” or “I feel some object in my eye”, is a poor word here, and that “element” or “component” would be a better word.

If @Eddie had looked at the article, he would have found that example:

Perhaps the most influential positivist was late 19th-century philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach, who refused to accept the atomic model of matter because he could not see atoms. Today we can see atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope but our models still contain unseen objects such as quarks. Philosophers as well as physicists no longer take positivism seriously, and so it has no remaining influence on physics, good or bad.

So @Eddie’s suspicion is wrong - the objects referred to are physical things (albeit not clunky) such as atoms and quarks, and not components. Maybe one day he’ll realise that it’s better to spend a few seconds scanning a source than to spend a few minutes writing a post exposing his failure to do so.

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Roy

So @Eddie’s suspicion is wrong - the objects referred to are physical things (albeit not clunky) such as atoms and quarks, and not components.

They’re still components of the model, as well as being things, but I’ll grant the point that in the full article an example of an “object” is given.

What I was responding to was the “package deal” of a certain paragraph from the article plus a segment from Scientific American. Those two things were presented by Meerkat as a connected unit. And within that unit, no example was given. So my criticism was fair as a criticism of Meerkat’s exposition, though unfair as a criticism of the SEP article.

I gladly withdraw my charge that the SEP article is guilty of bad writing, but I don’t withdraw the general charge that there is a lot of bad writing on the subject of philosophy of science. In my copy-editing work I encounter it frequently. And it’s not just philosophy of science, as I said, but many other areas. It’s a revolting development in academia, though it resulted in one humorous ray of light, i.e., the Sokal Hoax. (One would have thought that the hoax would have so embarrassed the academic BSers that they would reform their ways, but nothing happened; the scholars kept writing the BS and the journals kept publishing it.)

Interesting that Matthew Dickau and Ron Sewell, two of the moderate and non-partisan posters here, both found my discussion in some way useful, but all Roy has to say about it is something negative. The bulk of my comment isn’t invalidated by the flaw pointed out by Roy, but of course, based on past experience, it was never to be expected that Roy would ever say anything positive about anything I wrote.

[Paul_King]

The mistake, however was very real, and attributed to the wrong source. Meerkat has a history of unreliable quoting and it’s really not fair to blame the source without checking it.