Ive been thinking about this a long time. Various things are somewhat often claimed to presuppose certain things. A common trope is that science must presuppose things: causality, the validity of math, that reality actually exists. The first two are kind of silly, because they are observable, and thus not really presupposed. But I think the entire argument can be escaped some other way. Does science actually presuppose the existence of reality? Or is this simply a trick of the language being deployed when people think about science? Can it not be escaped by actually saying that science doesnt presuppose the independent existence of reality, but merely is describing a variable? Let R = the domain that is being observed. Deploy science, discover some property P about R. Can we not then be properly justified (to the extent science lets us be) that P is a property of R? And yet, leave the variable R undefined? Cant we then say that science is returning knowledge about R. Whatever R actually is. Reality. A simulation fed into a brain in a vat. The matrix. A dream. Need we define R to know that P is a property of R? Doesnt this mean we dont actually have to presuppose anything about R? To be rational our actions need only be determined in light of the effects R has upon us: but we dont actually have to say anything about R itself beyond that.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Jan 2014 04:52:42 +0000
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