So nothing.
As I suspected, but I thought I’d at least ask.
Because you cannot perceive something or refuse to acknowledge its reality does not mean it’s nothing. It’s a blindness, and a deafness.
Philosophical materialism does not preclude the existence of abstractions, but it does make them more difficult to explain ontologically. Supernaturalism makes them easier to explain ontologically, but is in the same boat as materialism when coming to explain how they are used.
Nominalists and realists didn’t give up on using mathematics in the middle ages, but they disagreed as to how much of their ontological nature was knowable by humans.
Yes, this makes sense due to other commitments that have been made within your philosophical conscience. I take @Faizal_Ali to make different philosophical commitments that ground his argument. To get at the heart of this disagreement, you’ll need to circle back around and hunker down to clarifying what you all mean by certain terms and then realize that we are all probably wrong!
I did not do much of any readings on philosophy of mathematics, but the name that crept into numerous conversations in defense of the nominalist position was Hartry Field. From my limited conversations, he seems to be the current doyen of naturalistic mathematics/logic.
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Very helpful, thanks.
Is there a metaphysical term for the position that abstractions exist as immaterial entities, but that immaterial beings like souls, gods and the like do not exist?
Atheist? Philosophical naturalist? Physicalist?
I was thinking maybe “platonic naturalist” but I could not find it in the philosophical stuff I looked at. Perhaps it is a term for asexual nudists.
Seriously, I don’t think one can be a materialist/physicalist/naturalist while still accepting abstract objects. Here is more from SEP discussing the issues for abstract objects from the naturalist perspective.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/#MatFac
Can I ask why the existence of such a name matters to you?
After all, accepting abstract objects entails nothing about the existence of God as usually conceived. For God is conceived as having causal interactions with spacetime whereas abstract objects by definition do not.
ETA: So there is no inconsistency in believing both that abstract objects exist and also that science is our only source of knowledge about how the world is, where the world is restricted to causal entities in spacetime.
Closer to abstract objects would be immaterial views of qualia (AKA phenomenal experience or consciousness experience). If you take the view that qualia have no causal influence, technically called epiphenomenalism, then perhaps the existence of abstract objects might help bolster your case for qualia being non-physical.
But I doubt such impotence for consciousness is of interest to many of the anti-physicalists who post here. Just my opinion on that, of course.
I guess it doesn’t really matter that much. It just seems to me the most obvious position to take, so it surprises me there is no proper name for it. Although I guess that is in the nature of metaphysics. What seems obvious and practical may not matter much there.
Another way of wording the position would be as lack of belief in immaterial entities with causal properties. Yes?
Part of the reason I raise the question is I often encounter arguments along the lines of “Materialism is false, because math is immaterial. Therefore, the mind cannot be explained by the brain and God exists.” Not quite as tersely, but that is the gist. It is clear I do not have to explain to you why this argument is invalid.
I don’t see why this would be so. Abstractions seem to be limited to humans, and we have a physical brain capable of producing abstractions. We also see that our mental models of reality are changed as we learn more about reality instead of the other way around. For example, we can’t change how matter and energy interact by changing the equations that we use to describe them. Rather, models and abstractions that humans invent are just that, models of how the world works. That includes mathematics.
I think the issue is whether abstractions exist outside of their concrete instances: Everyone agrees that there are physical thoughts and physical drawings and physically running software, for example, all of which can represent abstract objects. But does that mean that (say) an algorithm exists outside of any its physical implementations?
Or are the abstractions simply reifications based on confusions about the ways we use language.
It’s similar to the way we can think about Pegasus and draw pictures of a winged horse without believe such an entity exists (that’s just an analogy).
The problem with the position is this: if abstract entities have no causal properties, how can we ever come to know about them? That is why many philosophers do not think that abstract objects can exist.
Godel was a platonist; he thought we knew about abstract objects because we have some intuitive sense which gives us access to them. But that does not really help, since you end up with the same question: how does that intuitive sense work?.
Quine, who was a reductionist physicalist otherwise, thought for a long time that mathematical sets must exist because mathematics is essential to our best science and because our ontology should include the essentials of our best science. (He only needed sets because he thought you could build the rest of math given sets). So that is a kind of IBE argument for the existence of mathematical abstract objects. But later in life he was convinced that the IBE did not work in this case.
I am not sure which position you are referring to. Rejecting abstract objects says that you do not believe such objects are real; that is, you do not believe reality includes anything beyond the concrete,
Rejecting abstract objects means reality only consists of entities or structures that have causal properties and exist in spacetime. I am unsure on this: that final “and” might be an “or”; I’m not sure about whether there is a single position on whether non-abstract objects must have both a spacetime location and causal properties, or just at least one of those two.
I would tentatively conclude that abstractions are imperfect reifications. This would be due to the imprecise nature of language and our lack of knowledge. I tend to lean towards this conclusion because we change our abstractions to fit reality, and not the other way around.
I think a brain capable of inventing drawings and fictitious animals is compatible with physicalism. We can program computers to invent fictitious animals and drawings, so I don’t see why biological brains would be any different.
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We invent them.
It depends on what we mean by “exist”.
Or, to put that in a Bill Clinton way of talking, it depends on what the meaning of “is” is.
I don’t see the problem. Why are causal properties necessary for us to know about them?
Exactly. Having concepts of abstract entities does not require that the abstract entities themselves exist.
There was a long discussion of that idea – intentional inexistence – at TSZ where Mung refused to understand it. Good ol’ Mung. I wonder where he scores his debating points these days?
The way I see it, gaining knowledge without causal interaction would require some variant of Plantinga’s Sensus divinitatis tuned to the world of abstract entities instead of the divine domain. That’s a form of rationalism as I see it.
But I am an empiricist, not a rationalist.
I think we invent abstract entities; we do not discover them.
Understanding how the world is requires we causally interact with it; there are no non-causal sources of knowledge of how the world is.
Examples of causal interaction
- our direct perceptions of the world
- an interaction by one of our evolutionary ancestors leading to incorporation of an innate concept grounded in genome and development in the evolutionary niche
- culturally-maintained knowledge that we interact with by learning through perception and cognition
- science (an example of cultural learning) which postulates unobservable but causally-interacting entities to explain the results of observation and experimentation (this last position requires scientific realism as well as empiricism)
None of these ways work for abstract entities. An empiricist must therefore be a nominalist if these are the only ways.
Are there other ways of gaining knowledge of how the world is?
ETA: In reviewing above, I see that I need to be clearer about the term “the world”. For the realist about abstract entities, the world includes both space-time located, casually interacting entities as well as abstract entities. From the physicalist stance, which I take, the world only includes entities in spacetime which causally interact (and entities which supervene upon them).
I should also say that I try to stick with the phrase “how the world is” to avoid discussing “how the world should be”., something that would be way off topic
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Agreed.
As I read your whole reply, you are a type of nominalist – you do not believe abstract entities themselves exist according to my reading, Only conceptions of them or linguistic representations of them…
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Great stuff. This is really helping me get a handle on this.
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Except it isn’t.
Easy. “to be is to be the value of a bound variable”
And, no, not “bound” in the sense Bill C (or maybe Hillary?) might have taken it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_commitment#Quine’s_analysis
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– Is materialism false because abstractions (like mathematics) exists?
I once read that fellow, Lucretius, might have had a somewhat similar notion; from what comes all the variation.
If you want to defend materialism against the rampant idea that it’s false (which appears to be your motivation) perhaps you could try dealing with the material basis of your beliefs.
Let us assume that an unknown instance of great energy causes the universe to come into existence, which then condenses into various forms of matter, each with its own particular regularities. There are no questions and no answers. At this point, you can decide for yourself if either your question or an answer to it could exist without an abstraction.
If you decide to go forward, you can then ask, “does an abstraction exist?”
An abstraction implies an alternative (i.e. an abstraction of something), and thus it implies a non-dynamic relationship (i.e. the physical possibility of an alternative).
You may want to decide upfront if you intend to model on the empirical observations themselves (as we actually find them), or if you have your own ideas on what must be true, or those of someone else.
When you work all that out, a small group of secular scientists and philosophers like Peirce, von Neumann, Pattee (and others) will be waiting for you. You might even find a theist or two. Generally, it will be the opposite of what you find here.