EY’s made a kind of argument that you should have two kinds of stuff (although I still think the logical pinpointing stuff is a bit weak), but he seems to be proceeding as if he’d shown that that was exhaustive. For all the arguments he’s given so far, this third post could have been entitled “Experiences: the Third Kind of Stuff”, and it would be consistent with what he’s already said.
So yeah, we need an argument for; “You’re only supposed to have two kinds of stuff.”
So yeah, we need an argument for; “You’re only supposed to have two kinds of stuff.”
I think the whole point of “the great reductionist project” is that we don’t really have a sufficiency theorem, so we should treat “no more than two” as an empirical hypothesis and proceed to discover its truth by the methods of science.
He may be overreacting against a strain in philosophy that seeks to reduce everything to experience. Similar to the way behaviorism was an overreaction against Freud.
this third post could have been entitled “Experiences: the Third Kind of Stuff”
Not third, first. There are only two kinds of stuff, experiences and models. Separating physical models from logical is rather artificial, both are used to explain experiences.
We only access models via experiences. If you aren’t willing to reduce models to experiences, why are you willing to reduce the physical world of apples and automobiles to experiences? You’re already asserting a kind of positivistic dualism; I see no reason not to posit a third domain, the physical, to correspond to our concrete experiences, just as you’ve posited a ‘model domain’ (cf. Frege’s third realm) to correspond to our abstract experiences.
This.
EY’s made a kind of argument that you should have two kinds of stuff (although I still think the logical pinpointing stuff is a bit weak), but he seems to be proceeding as if he’d shown that that was exhaustive. For all the arguments he’s given so far, this third post could have been entitled “Experiences: the Third Kind of Stuff”, and it would be consistent with what he’s already said.
So yeah, we need an argument for; “You’re only supposed to have two kinds of stuff.”
I think the whole point of “the great reductionist project” is that we don’t really have a sufficiency theorem, so we should treat “no more than two” as an empirical hypothesis and proceed to discover its truth by the methods of science.
He may be overreacting against a strain in philosophy that seeks to reduce everything to experience. Similar to the way behaviorism was an overreaction against Freud.
Not third, first. There are only two kinds of stuff, experiences and models. Separating physical models from logical is rather artificial, both are used to explain experiences.
We only access models via experiences. If you aren’t willing to reduce models to experiences, why are you willing to reduce the physical world of apples and automobiles to experiences? You’re already asserting a kind of positivistic dualism; I see no reason not to posit a third domain, the physical, to correspond to our concrete experiences, just as you’ve posited a ‘model domain’ (cf. Frege’s third realm) to correspond to our abstract experiences.