What is Metaphysics?

Interesting comment, Shapeless. One of the definitions of meta-physics is that it deals with reality beyond or behind our experienced world--this could be, in my thinking, the religous notion of heaven or Kant's noumena, the reality behind phenomena. It's fundamentally OTHER worldly. It seems that the mathematical speculations of string theory are similar in essential respects.
I prefer the definition of metaphysics as reflection on our most fundamental presuppositions about reality. The normally tacit foundations of thought. Metaphysicians study what we take for granted.

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Is it true that modern philosophers have attempted to expel metaphysics from philosophy in order to maintain philosophy as a "genuine branch of knowledge"?

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wandeljw

I doubt whether that is correct since the meaning of "knowledge" is up for metaphysical grabs...unless you are saying there is a conspiracy by "non-metaphysical philosophers" to hush up that issue.

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fresco,

I was wrong to suggest a conspiracy. However, metaphysics has been devalued by modern philosophers. Didn't "logical positivists" attempt to show that metaphysical statements are "nonsensical"?

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wandeljw

They may have attempted as much but they were hampered by the confines of their own "logic" and their tendency to naive realism.

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Wandeljw, it seems to me that logical positivism, in its attempt to achieve intellectual clarity and rigour (cutting out all statements that carried connotative loads) turned out to be one of the more superficial of philosophical movements. It DID achieve a considerable amount of rigour, I admit; but the result was a kind of rigour mortis as I see it.

The attempt of modern philosophy--strongly analyical as opposed to intuititve--HAS attempted to ignore metaphysics because of its essentially unscientific style ("genuine" knowledge tends to be equated with scientific knowledge). The best way for acacemic philosophers to acquire grant money is to show that their philosophical inquiries will serve the ends of scientific research. I suspect--but don't know--that the "philosophy of science" subdivision of philosophy may receive the lion's share of government funding.

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JLN,

In the 1970's I was a political science graduate student and saw the attempts to make the language of political science more rigorous (and more "value-free"). The results were hilariously boring.

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Yes, I have the same recollection. It was also a time psychological behaviorism--a "scientific" psychology that excluded mind and consciousness. Ghastly superficiality.

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JLNobody wrote:

Yes, I have the same recollection. It was also a time psychological behaviorism--a "scientific" psychology that excluded mind and consciousness. Ghastly superficiality.

Not so bad, though. Psychologists obviously don't wish to deny that we have mental processes any more. But behaviourism was still a massive contribution to our understanding of how we learn things. Skinner and Pavlov made a much more substantial contribution to psychology than Freud ever did. One of my lecturers used the term 'associative learning' to refer to both classical and operant conditioning, and argued that all human and animal learning can essentially be reduced to this process of associative learning.

The ironic thing is that behaviourism has contributed to our understand of what goes on in the mind when we learn things.

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Quote:

One of my lecturers used the term 'associative learning' to refer to both classical and operant conditioning, and argued that all human and animal learning can essentially be reduced to this process of associative learning.

He obviously never read any Piaget or Chomsky then ! Laughing

Agrote,

All lecturers push their own position. (I should know having been one).
Your "job" is to intelligently challenge them.

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fresco wrote:

Quote:
One of my lecturers used the term 'associative learning' to refer to both classical and operant conditioning, and argued that all human and animal learning can essentially be reduced to this process of associative learning.

He obviously never read any Piaget or Chomsky then !

Agrote,

All lecturers push their own position. (I should know having been one).
Your "job" is to intelligently challenge them.

Of course I know that. I'm not saying I agree with her, I'm merely pointing out that behaviourism was not merely a great influence in the history of psychology, but it is highly relevant to contemporary psychology. Concepts of classical and operant/instrumental conditioning (or just associative learning in general) are still widely used. Incidentally, I'd be very surprised if she didn't at least study Piaget and Chomsky as an undergraduate at Cambridge.

From some of my philosophy lecturers I get the impression that outside experimental psychology, behaviourism is seen as a philosophy that denies the mind, or denies the importance of mental processing, and claims that everything about us can be deduced from our behaviour. It's fairly obvious that such a philosophy isn't very true or helpful. Whether that is what Skinner etc. actually believed, I'm not sure.

But many of the findings of behaviourist experiments are undeniable... e.g. Pavlov's dogs clearly did drool when they heard a bell, and it was because the bell had previously been accompanied by food. Conditioning really does happen. The behaviourist perspective was limited, and it's a good thing that psychologists are no longer restricted by it, but it still made a very significant contribution to psychology.

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O.K., I agree that behaviorism had/has SOME merit, but, as you put it, its limitations are a good reason to have gone beyond it. To "ignore" the process of "subjective" reflection as a methodological principle, a principle that assumes we can learn all we need to learn about human experience and action without it trivializes human existence profoundly. What is true of primates in lab tests may also be true of us, but I cannot for the life of me reduce Shakespeare's or the Buddha's lives to a stream of stimuli and responses. There must be MORE TO IT.

BTW, I feel the same way about sociobiology.

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JLNobody wrote:

To "ignore" the process of "subjective" reflection as a methodological principle, a principle that assumes we can learn all we need to learn about human experience and action without it trivializes human existence profoundly.

Human existence is trivial, though. Even with subjective reflection, we're still just animals.

Quote:

What is true of primates in lab tests may also be true of us, but I cannot for the life of me reduce Shakespeare's or the Buddha's lives to a stream of stimuli and responses. There must be MORE TO IT.

Not much more, though. Behaviourists would be wrong to reduce a Shakespeare play to "Stimulus-->Response", but they wouldn't be that far off. The reality is: "Stimulus-->Process-->Response," which is almost as unmagical as before. Shakespeare had some experiences, fluid and electricity moved around inside his brain, and then his hands wrote MacBeth. Okay, I'm oversimplifying... but we are still just lumps of matter in a deterministic universe, and Shakespeare and Buddha were no different.

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Of course we are animals, but I don't like the phrase "just animals." As a matter of values, I would not rank us above other animals but I consider us very special as HUMAN animals, especially in terms of our potential.
Your argument is not only simplistic, it is also reductionist. When we reduce to simple princples that which "inherently complex" we leave out too much.
I acknowledge that I am expressing values.

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Agrote,

Quantum mechanics has deterministic materialism for breakfast.

Here's just one reference.

http://www.fdavidpeat.com/bibliography/essays/nat-cog.htm

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fresco wrote:

Agrote,

Quantum mechanics has deterministic materialism for breakfast.

Here's just one reference.

http://www.fdavidpeat.com/bibliography/essays/nat-cog.htm

I'm not sure how much hope there is of me getting my head round quantum mechanics. But it deals in probability, right? There's a tiny chance that my hand will go through this wall if I keep poking it. So are you suggesting that the universe is probabilistic rather than deterministic? Either way, we don't really have any free will to speak of, do we? We're lumps of matter in a probabilistic universe... still fairly unremarkable.

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Agrote.

Why not try reading the reference before making your mind up about your own limitations and projecting them onto others ?

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fresco wrote:

Agrote.

Why not try reading the reference before making your mind up about your own limitations and projecting them onto others ?

Because I read the first couple of paragraphs and already felt lost. And it's not something that particularly interests me anyway. There's a reason I didn't study physics.

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agrote,

You can in fact skip most of the physics to get the drift. However your attitude/competence with physics puts your philosophical position vis-a-vis "materialism" on a par with the apocryphal "lady motorist" who has no idea what goes on under the car bonnet.

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Do you want to wait until I can be bothered read the article, or do you want to just tell me what you're getting at now so we can discuss it sooner?

My physicalism (I prefer that term) is what... unjustified? Because I don't understand quantum mechanics. Is that what you're saying?

You could probably give me the jist of that article yourself, couldn't you?

(I don't want to go on and on about it, but your writing is again difficult to understand, and I don't think it's because you're saying something very complicated. Without getting too personal, I think you make a conscious effort to remind everyone of your level of education in the way you write. I mean, what's the point in saying "your philosophical position vis-a-vis materialism" when you could just say "materialism"?!)

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What is Metaphysics?

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