I’d appreciate it if you write down your positions explicitly, even if in one-sentence form, rather than implying that so-and-so position is wrong because [exercise to the reader]. These are difficult questions, so even communicating what you mean is non-trivial, not even talking about convincing arguments and rigorous formulations.
That’s fair. I wrote something about my own position here.
Here is what I called mistaken, and why:
Mathematical platonism: I believe that we can’t know about something unless we can interact with it causally.
The belief that physical facts are contingent: I believe that this is just an example of the mind projection fallacy. A fact is contingent only with respect to a theory. In particular, the fact is contingent if the theory neither predicts that it must be the case nor that it must not be the case. Things are not contingent in themselves, independently of our theorizing. They just are. To say that something is contingent, like saying that it is surprising, is to say something about our state of knowledge. Hence, to attribute contingency to things in themselves is to commit the mind projection fallacy.
My interest is piqued as well. You appear to be articulating a position that I’ve encountered on Less Wrong before, and that I would like to understand better.
So physical facts are not contingent. All of them just happen to be independently false or true? What then is the status of a theory?
I’m speculating.. perhaps you consider that there is a huge space of possible logical and consistent theories, one for every (independent) fact being true or false. (For example, if there are N statements about the physical universe, 2^N theories.) Of course, they are all completely relatively arbitrary. As we learn about the universe, we pick among theories that happen to explain all the facts that we know of (and we have preferences for theories that do so in ever simpler ways.) Then, any new fact may require updating to a new theory, or may be consistent with the current one. So theories are arbitrary but useful. Is this consistent with what you are saying?
Thank you. I apologize if I’ve misinterpreted—I suspect the inferential distance between our views is quite great.
Let me start with my slogan-version of my brand of realism: “Things are a certain way. They are not some other way.”
I’ll admit up front the limits of this slogan. It fails to address at least the following: (1) What are these “things” that are a certain way? (2) What is a “way”, of which “things are” one? In particular (3) what is the ontological status of the other ways aside from the “certain way” that “things are”? I don’t have fully satisfactory answers to these questions. But the following might make my meaning somewhat more clear.
To your questions:
So physical facts are not contingent. All of them just happen to be independently false or true?
First, let me clear up a possible confusion. I’m using “contingent” in the sense of “not necessarily true or necessarily false”. I’m not using it in the sense of “dependent on something else”. That said, I take independence, like contingency, to be a theory-relative term. Things just are as they are. In and of themselves, there are no relations of dependence or independence among them.
What then is the status of a theory?
Theories are mechanisms for generating assertions about how things are or would be under various conditions. A theory can be more or less wrong depending on the accuracy of the assertions that it generates.
Theories are not mere lists of assertions (or “facts”). All theories that I know of induce a structure of dependency among their assertions. That structure is a product of the theory, though. (And this relation between the structure and the theory is itself a product of my theory of theories, and so on.)
I should try to clarify what I mean by a “dependency”. I mean something like logical dependency. I mean the relation that holds between two statements, P and Q, when we say “The reason that P is true is because Q is true”.
Not all notions of “dependency” are theory-dependent in this sense. I believe that “the way things are” can be analyzed into pieces, and these pieces objectively stand in certain relations with one another. To give a prosaic example. The cup in front of me is really there, the table in front of me is really there, and the cup really sits in the relation of “being on” the table. If a cat knocks the cup off the table, an objective relation of causation will exist between the cat’s pushing the cup and the cup’s falling off the table. All this would be the case without my theorizing. These are facts about the way things are. We need a theory to know them, but they aren’t mere features of our theory.
I’d appreciate it if you write down your positions explicitly, even if in one-sentence form, rather than implying that so-and-so position is wrong because [exercise to the reader]. These are difficult questions, so even communicating what you mean is non-trivial, not even talking about convincing arguments and rigorous formulations.
That’s fair. I wrote something about my own position here.
Here is what I called mistaken, and why:
Mathematical platonism: I believe that we can’t know about something unless we can interact with it causally.
The belief that physical facts are contingent: I believe that this is just an example of the mind projection fallacy. A fact is contingent only with respect to a theory. In particular, the fact is contingent if the theory neither predicts that it must be the case nor that it must not be the case. Things are not contingent in themselves, independently of our theorizing. They just are. To say that something is contingent, like saying that it is surprising, is to say something about our state of knowledge. Hence, to attribute contingency to things in themselves is to commit the mind projection fallacy.
My interest is piqued as well. You appear to be articulating a position that I’ve encountered on Less Wrong before, and that I would like to understand better.
So physical facts are not contingent. All of them just happen to be independently false or true? What then is the status of a theory?
I’m speculating.. perhaps you consider that there is a huge space of possible logical and consistent theories, one for every (independent) fact being true or false. (For example, if there are N statements about the physical universe, 2^N theories.) Of course, they are all completely relatively arbitrary. As we learn about the universe, we pick among theories that happen to explain all the facts that we know of (and we have preferences for theories that do so in ever simpler ways.) Then, any new fact may require updating to a new theory, or may be consistent with the current one. So theories are arbitrary but useful. Is this consistent with what you are saying?
Thank you. I apologize if I’ve misinterpreted—I suspect the inferential distance between our views is quite great.
Let me start with my slogan-version of my brand of realism: “Things are a certain way. They are not some other way.”
I’ll admit up front the limits of this slogan. It fails to address at least the following: (1) What are these “things” that are a certain way? (2) What is a “way”, of which “things are” one? In particular (3) what is the ontological status of the other ways aside from the “certain way” that “things are”? I don’t have fully satisfactory answers to these questions. But the following might make my meaning somewhat more clear.
To your questions:
First, let me clear up a possible confusion. I’m using “contingent” in the sense of “not necessarily true or necessarily false”. I’m not using it in the sense of “dependent on something else”. That said, I take independence, like contingency, to be a theory-relative term. Things just are as they are. In and of themselves, there are no relations of dependence or independence among them.
Theories are mechanisms for generating assertions about how things are or would be under various conditions. A theory can be more or less wrong depending on the accuracy of the assertions that it generates.
Theories are not mere lists of assertions (or “facts”). All theories that I know of induce a structure of dependency among their assertions. That structure is a product of the theory, though. (And this relation between the structure and the theory is itself a product of my theory of theories, and so on.)
I should try to clarify what I mean by a “dependency”. I mean something like logical dependency. I mean the relation that holds between two statements, P and Q, when we say “The reason that P is true is because Q is true”.
Not all notions of “dependency” are theory-dependent in this sense. I believe that “the way things are” can be analyzed into pieces, and these pieces objectively stand in certain relations with one another. To give a prosaic example. The cup in front of me is really there, the table in front of me is really there, and the cup really sits in the relation of “being on” the table. If a cat knocks the cup off the table, an objective relation of causation will exist between the cat’s pushing the cup and the cup’s falling off the table. All this would be the case without my theorizing. These are facts about the way things are. We need a theory to know them, but they aren’t mere features of our theory.