Sorry I missed this.
Your Platonic view is a common one with science fans: the laws of the universe were always there waiting for us to discover them and name them. It's essentially the Garden of Eden story, except with things like atoms and formulae instead of the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. We need to acknowledge that what we know about phenomena and the order we "discover" in it involves a lot of effort by historically and culturally embedded agents. We've found ways to conceptualize natural phenomena that are useful to researchers, as well as lucrative for the corporate and military interests who employ them. But the fact that we still use terminology like order and forces and laws should make it clear what sort of ideological imperatives motivated the development of the modern scientific programs that created the knowledge base we have today.
Incidentally, I don't want to imply that Gabriel himself subscribes to this kind of constructivism; in fact, as a realist he goes out of his way to bash constructivism at every turn. But he certainly believes that science is a for-us-by-us construct rather than a portal to the eternal and unchanging Truth: The "external world" or nature or the "universe" are no longer privileged domains of facts when it comes to our grasp of what it means for something to exist. There are plenty of relevant and important concepts that wouldn't exist if we weren't here to create them.
(December 22, 2023 at 2:48 pm)HappySkeptic Wrote: Honestly, his presentation is crap.Solid opener!
Quote:If he were any type of physicist, he wouldn't say that the "world" of things doesn't contain concepts and relationships.This definitely hinges on a chicken-or-egg kind of question about the properties of the universe and our concepts concerning the properties of the universe.
All of physics is relationships. That's all it is. And human "concepts" describe relationships we perceive within the world, which must already exist for us to have "concepts" about them.
Your Platonic view is a common one with science fans: the laws of the universe were always there waiting for us to discover them and name them. It's essentially the Garden of Eden story, except with things like atoms and formulae instead of the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. We need to acknowledge that what we know about phenomena and the order we "discover" in it involves a lot of effort by historically and culturally embedded agents. We've found ways to conceptualize natural phenomena that are useful to researchers, as well as lucrative for the corporate and military interests who employ them. But the fact that we still use terminology like order and forces and laws should make it clear what sort of ideological imperatives motivated the development of the modern scientific programs that created the knowledge base we have today.
Incidentally, I don't want to imply that Gabriel himself subscribes to this kind of constructivism; in fact, as a realist he goes out of his way to bash constructivism at every turn. But he certainly believes that science is a for-us-by-us construct rather than a portal to the eternal and unchanging Truth: The "external world" or nature or the "universe" are no longer privileged domains of facts when it comes to our grasp of what it means for something to exist. There are plenty of relevant and important concepts that wouldn't exist if we weren't here to create them.
