NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #20/NN_1992_20.iso/spool/sci/physics/14187

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From: [e-mail] (Mitsuharu Hadeishi)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: Report on Philosophies of Physicists
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Date: 5 Sep 92 21:24:15 GMT
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[e-mail] (Cosma R. Shalizi) writes:
>In philosophy proper, the question is not "Why does philosopher X
>say Y?" but "Is X true?"

    Not at all.  The most basic question is really "what does X mean?"
"What does it mean to say X is 'true' or 'false'"?  You seem to uncritically
accept that the question "Is X true?" is well-defined.  This does often
happen to be the case in mathematics or even physics, in which the
meaning of "true" is restricted to being a technical (usually mathematical)
one.  I submit, however, that this is very far from the case in general.

    That is to say, in order to understand the arguments and
the philosophies of the Eastern philosophers (and Western philosophers
who have also understood the limitations of the "standard assumptions"
in the West), one needs to go all the way down and question one's
"naive intuitions" about the meaning of statements.  If you do not
do this, then you will not be able to understand or appreciate the
philosophy being referred to, since the entire basis of these
philosophical investigations is founded on fundamentally different
approaches to these problems than you are assuming unquestioningly.

[e-mail] (Kim Gunnar St|vring yhus) writes:
>The problem is, apart from referencing to Wittgenstein, you tell us
>absolutely nothing about what you mean by 'eastern philosophies'.
>You refuse to describe it. But why haven't you named it? Are you
>talking about Zen-buddhism? Konfucius? Ying-Yang? Many people on the
>net, including myself, have studied this, and have well founded opinions,
>for and against.

    The general areas of investigation I am referring to are addressed
my most schools of Eastern thought to varying degrees, though naturally
there are signficiant differences in styles of approach, presentation,
emphasis, and the areas that the different schools have chosen to
investigate in detail, not to mention the various wide differences between
the individual philosophers of the various schools.  However, it would
hardly be worth it to get involved in a discussion of, say, the concepts of
ri and bi (equality and differentiation) in Zen Buddhism, without getting
beyond the initial problems of background material which is the primary
barrier to discussing these things in the first place.

    In any case I hardly think that someone who has already
formed an "against" opinion of Eastern philosophy (without being
able to spell "Yin-Yang" correctly, and not knowing that it does not
refer to a school of philosophy in any case) would be able to
sit through a discussion of Eastern philosophy per se, since they
are, indeed, quite obscure (not because they don't know what
they're talking about, as you seem to believe, but simply because
this is an effective style of presentation for their context.)  The
Western discursive style is probably much more familiar to you
which is why I suggest Wittgenstein.  There are others, of course,
but Wittengenstein is one of the more rigorous.

In addition, [e-mail] (Keith Ramsay) writes:
>Mitsuharu Hadeishi continued...
>> the lines of "what does it mean to make a statement about something?",
>> "what is the relationship between a model and the thing modelled?",
>> "what is the nature of the subject-object relationship?", and so forth.
>> These are questions of basic epistemology, in which the Eastern
>> schools of philosophy make very different basic assumptions about
>> how one goes about understanding these issues than are made in
>> Western logical positivist schools, particularly those that use
>> Boolean logic as their basis.
>
>I have only read a little bit about the subject, but I find this
>description to be correct. (I won't claim that the "very different"
>assumptions are accurate.) I read part of one interesting book which
>compared the work of certain eastern logicians with Quine. (I can find
>the reference if you like, when the UBC library re-opens after the
>weekend holiday.)

    I am not very familiar with the work of Quine, but based on this
statement it seems Quine could well be another interesting
philosopher to read if you want to acquaint yourself with the issues.
The point is, of course, the direction of investigation, not whether the
philosopher happens to be "Eastern" or "Western".  Of course, Eastern
schools have many other things associated with them, including a
variety of mental and physical techniques and disciplines which have
as their basis the philosophical grV(mB{Zng; philosophy per se is only a
subset of what one might call an "Eastern school".

Keith Ramsay also writes (earlier in his posting):
>Consider the constructivist approach to mathematics. Under it, to say
>"A or not A" implies that we have a method which will either yield a
>derivation of A, or a demonstration that A leads to a contradiction.
>Certainly under such an interpretation, we can't reasonably assert the
>universal validity of "A or not A", without stretching the usual
>meaning of the term "method".
>
>There are, by the way, other problematic instances of boolean logic.
>Under one common definition of "implies", "either A implies B or B
>implies A" holds in boolean logic. This to many people's minds does not
>accord with the standard meanin of "implies".
>
>The biggest difficulty lies in the fact that we haven't specified very
>well what it means to say "boolean logic is violated". We haven't
>specified the meanings of the terms at all. How, in the first place,
>does one specify the meanings of the terms of boolean logic? Without
>using them in a circular way? Or determine whether it is a sound basis
>on which to build a philosophy of language?

    Very good questions.  It is always the questions that are
more interesting than the answers, in any case.  These are precisely
the questions that have been investigated by most Eastern philosophers
and some Western philosophers (as has been mentioned above).
You may or may not agree with how they go about investigating them,
but if you do not understand what they're saying it hardly makes
sense to say they're "wrong".

Keith Ramsay continues:
>I've heard people from the humanities' end of the science/humanities
>spectrum often complain that people in the sciences assume that (being
>intelligent) they should be able quickly to grasp the nature of
>questions in the humanities (in spite of the fact that it seems the
>converse doesn't hold). "If you can't explain it without a lot of
>effort, it must be bullshit", in effect.

    I've noticed this too among many people in the sciences.
I believe it is a kind of "reverse envy"; many humanities people have
"physics envy", and physics people have a kind of reverse envy of
humanities people, but rather than respect what they do not know
much about, they would rather disdain it (sort of a sour grapes attitude).
I myself was a physics major in college but I rarely hung out with
other physics majors to some degree because I was interested in
learing what the humanities folks were involved with.  However
I noticed many of my classmates in the physics department would
often hang out primarily with other math and physics majors (actually
this happened more among the math majors than the physics
majors, but it could be seen happening in both groups).

Mitsu