From: Hans Ehrbar <econ-AT-lists.econ.utah.edu> Subject: rts2-14a Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2001 19:16:26 -0700 4. THE STATUS OF ONTOLOGY AND ITS DISSOLUTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY This analysis of experimental episodes enables us to isolate a series of metaphysical, epistemological and methodological mistakes within the tradition of empirical realism. For if the intelligibility of experimental activity entails that the objects of scientific understanding are intransitive and structured then we can establish at one stroke: (i) that a philosophical ontology is possible; (ii) some propositions in it (causal laws are distinct from patterns of events, and events from experiences); and (iii) the possibility of a philosophy which is consistent with (and has some relevance for), i.e. which is itself `in phase with', the realist practice of science. Ontology, it should be stressed, does not have as its subject matter a world apart from that investigated by science. Rather, its subject matter just is that world, considered from the point of view of what can be established about it by philosophical argument. The idea of ontology as treating of a mysterious underlying physical realm, which owes a lot to Locke and some of his rationalist contemporaries (particularly Leibniz), has done much to discredit it; and to prevent metaphysics from becoming what it ought to be, viz. a conceptual science. Philosophical ontology asks what the world must be like for science to be possible; and its premises are generally recognized scientific activities. Its method is transcendental; its premise science; its conclusion the object of our present investigation. The metaphysical mistake the argument of the previous section allows us to pinpoint may be called the `epistemic fallacy'. This consists in the view that statements about being can be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge; i.e. that ontological questions can always be transposed into epistemological terms. The idea that being can always be analysed in terms of our knowledge of being, that it is sufficient for philosophy to `treat only of the network, and not what the network describes',^17 results in the systematic {RTS2:37} dissolution of the idea of a world (which I shall here metaphorically characterize as an ontological realm) independent of but investigated by science. And it is manifest in the prohibition on any transcendent entities. It might be usefully compared with the naturalistic fallacy in moral philosophy. For just as the naturalistic fallacy prevents us from saying what is good about e.g. maximizing utility in society, so the epistemic one prevents us from saying what is epistemically significant about e.g. experience in science. To show that it is a fallacy and to trace its effects are two of the principle{<<al} objectives of this study. In showing that the intelligibility of experimental activity entails that the objects of scientific knowledge, in so far as they are causal laws, are intransitive I have already succeeded in the first of these aims. For this means that a statement of a causal law cannot now be reduced to or analysed in terms of a statement about anyone's knowledge of it or knowledge in general. On the contrary, its assertion now entails that a causal law would operate even if unknown, and even if there were no-one to know it. So that knowledge ceases to be, as it were, an essential predicate of things. The epistemic fallacy is most marked, perhaps, in the concept of the empirical world. But it is manifest in the criteria of significance and even the problems associated with the tradition of empirical realism. Kant committed it in arguing that the categories `allow only of empirical employment and have no meaning whatsoever when not applied to objects of possible experience; that is to the world of sense.'^18 (For us on the other hand if the Kantian categories were adequate to the objects of scientific thought then they would continue to apply in a world without sense, and have a meaning in relation to that possibility.) Similarly, the logical positivists committed it when arguing, in the spirit of Hume, that if a proposition was not empirically verifiable (or falsifiable) or a tautology, it was meaningless.^19 Verificationism indeed may be regarded as a particular form of the epistemic fallacy, in which the meaning of a proposition about reality (which cannot be designated `empirical') is confused with our grounds, which may or may not be empirical, for holding it. Once this doctrine is rejected {RTS2:38} there is no need to identify the necessary and the a priori, and the contingent and the a posteriori; or, to put it another way, one can distinguish between natural and logical necessity, and between natural and epistemic possibility. Further there is no need to assume that the order of dependence of being must be the same as the order of dependence of our knowledge of being. Thus we can allow that experience is in the last instance epistemically decisive, without supposing that its objects are ontologically ultimate, in the sense that their existence depends upon nothing else. Indeed if science is regarded as a continuing process of discovery of ever finer and in an explanatory sense more basic causal structures, then it is rational to assume that what is at any moment of time least certain epistemically speaking is most basic from the ontological point of view.^20 More generally, the epistemic fallacy is manifest in a persistent tendency to read the conditions of a particular concept of knowledge into an implicit concept of the world. Thus the problem of induction is a consequence of the atomicity of the events conjoined, which is a function of the necessity for an epistemically certain base. Although the epistemic fallacy is of most interest to us as it is manifest in the tradition of empirical realism, it is worth mentioning that a philosopher who rejected empirical realism might still commit the epistemic fallacy, i.e. analyse being in terms of knowledge, if, as in some varieties of Platonism and rationalism, he were to define the world in terms of the possibility of non-empirical knowledge of it. For the transcendental realist it is not a necessary condition for the existence of the world that science occurs. But it is a necessary condition for the occurrence of science that the world exists and is of a certain type. Thus the possibility of our knowing it is not an essential property, and so cannot be a defining characteristic, of the world. Rather on a {RTS2:39} cosmic scale, it is an historical accident; though it is only because of this accident that we can establish in science the way the world is, and in philosophy the way it must be for science to be possible. The view that statements about being can be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge might be defended in the following way: ontology is dependent upon epistemology since what we can know to exist is merely a part of what we can know.^21 But this defence trades upon a tacit conflation of philosophical and scientific ontologies. For if `what we can know to exist' refers to a possible content of a scientific theory tha{<e}n that it is merely a part of what we can know is an uninteresting truism. But a philosophical ontology is developed by reflection upon what must be the case for science to be possible; and this is independent of any actual scientific knowledge. Moreover, it is not true, even from the point of view of the immanent logic of a science, that what we can know to exist is just a part of what we can know. For a law may exist and be known to exist without our knowing the law. Much scientific research has in fact the same logical character as detection. In a piece of criminal detection, the detective knows that a crime has been committed and some facts about it but he does not know, or at least cannot yet prove, the identity of the criminal. To be is not to be the value of a variable;^22 though it is plausible (if, I would argue, incorrect) to suppose that things can only be known as such. For if to be were just to be the value of a variable we could never make sense of the complex processes of identification and measurement by means of which we can sometimes represent some things as such. Knowledge follows existence, in logic and in time; and any philosophical position which explicitly or implicitly denies this has got things upside down. The metaphysical mistake the analysis of experimental episodes pinpoints, viz. the epistemic fallacy, involves the denial {RTS2:40} of the possibility of a philosophical ontology. But if transcendental realism is correct, and ontology cannot in fact be reduced to epistemology, then denying the possibility of an ontology merely results in the generation of an *implicit ontology* and an *implicit realism*. In the empirical realist tradition the epistemic fallacy thus covers or disguises an ontology based on the category of experience, and a realism based on the presumed characteristics of the objects of experiences, viz. atomistic events, and their relations, viz. constant conjunctions. (Such presumptions can, I think, only be explained in terms of the needs of a justificationist epistemology, e.g. for incorrigible foundations of knowledge.) This in turn leads to the generation of a methodology which is either consistent with epistemology but of no relevance to science; or relevant to science but more or less radically inconsistent with epistemology. So that, in short, philosophy itself is `out of phase' with science. Let us see how this happens. First, the general line of Hume's critique of the possibility of any philosophical ontology or account of being, and in particular his denial that we can philosophically establish the independent existence of things or operation of natural necessities, is accepted. Now it is important to see what Hume has in fact done. He has not really succeeded in banishing ontology from his account of science. Rather he has replaced the Lockean ontology of real essences, powers and atomic constitutions with his own ontology of impressions. To say that every account of science, or every philosophy in as much as it is concerned with `science', presupposes an ontology is to say that the philosophy of science abhors an ontological vacuum. The empiricist fills the vacuum he creates with his concept of experience. In this way an implicit ontology, c{r}ystallized in the concept of the empirical world, is generated. And it is this ontology which subsequent philosophers of science have uncritically taken over. For whether they have agreed with Hume's epistemology or not, they have accepted his critique of ontology, which contains its own implicit ontology, as valid. --- from list seminar-14-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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