RE: Why materialists are predominantly materialists
September 19, 2016 at 11:40 am
(This post was last modified: September 19, 2016 at 11:40 am by Neo-Scholastic.)
(September 17, 2016 at 4:55 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: Of course it does. Ideas as a something is opposed to ideas as nothing. That's taking a position. Only by contrasting the world of ideas with the world of things do you come up with the notion of "what ideas are." Relationships among objects is a category of idea but it doesn't explain what an idea is. Our experience is completely noninformative about the nature of ideas. The only non-position position about their reality is pure agnosticism. They could be material. They could be a substance in and of themselves. They could be illusions. By describing them as a substance in and of themselves, you're taking a metaphysical view about them as sure as materialism is. What's worse, you're defining them as the negation of the material. That's borrowing the concept of the material in defining the idea. It's an example of the use of the stolen concept.
It is from sensory experience that people explain things in terms of matter and its operations. From that stance, the materialist reinterprets the original sense data and experience - either trying to force mental properties into a materialist paradigm (making it a kind of substance) or dismissing mental properties as illusions because they don't conform our notions about how matter works. But if our knowledge of matter and how it works originally come from sensory experience then denying the reality of sensory experience undermines the reason that knowledge about matter exists in the first place. To me that sounds self-defeating.
This is not to say that no one can know anything about ideas. Ideas are that with which we are most intimately familiar. For that reason, I believe they should be treated on their own terms and not forced to fit in some Procrustes bed fabricated by materialist assumptions.