Being relatively liberal about symbol grounding makes it easier to answer Searle, but harder to answer other people, such as people who think germs or atoms are just social constructs.
Exactly the sane....that is the point of predictive accuracy being orthogonal to ontological accuracy...you can vary the latter without affecting the firmer,
“just social constructs” is (almost always) not a purely ontological statement, though. And those who think that it’s a social construct, but that the predictions of germ theories are still accurate… well, it doesn’t really matter what they think, they just seem to have different labels to the rest of us for the same things.
As the author of the phrase, I meant “just social constructs” to be an ontological statement.
Are you saying they are actually realists about germs and atoms, and are stating their position dishonetly? Do you think “is real” is just a label in some unimportant way?
Do you think “is real” is just a label in some unimportant way?
Maybe. I’m not entirely sure what your argument is. For instance, were the matrices of matrix mechanics quantum physics “real”? Were the waves of the wave formulation of QM “real”? The two formulations are equivalent, and it doesn’t seem useful to debate the reality of their individual idiosyncratic components this way.
Being relatively liberal about symbol grounding makes it easier to answer Searle, but harder to answer other people, such as people who think germs or atoms are just social constructs.
What predictions do they make when looking into microscopes or treating infectious diseases?
Exactly the sane....that is the point of predictive accuracy being orthogonal to ontological accuracy...you can vary the latter without affecting the firmer,
“just social constructs” is (almost always) not a purely ontological statement, though. And those who think that it’s a social construct, but that the predictions of germ theories are still accurate… well, it doesn’t really matter what they think, they just seem to have different labels to the rest of us for the same things.
As the author of the phrase, I meant “just social constructs” to be an ontological statement.
Are you saying they are actually realists about germs and atoms, and are stating their position dishonetly? Do you think “is real” is just a label in some unimportant way?
Maybe. I’m not entirely sure what your argument is. For instance, were the matrices of matrix mechanics quantum physics “real”? Were the waves of the wave formulation of QM “real”? The two formulations are equivalent, and it doesn’t seem useful to debate the reality of their individual idiosyncratic components this way.