Week 7

Recap:  We are discussion, and will continue to discuss science as knowledge; our long term goal, which will doubtless transcend the present generation, is to restore natural philosophy with the particular sciences enjoying their rightful places under that "umbrella" .  Because ultimately science means knowledge, the place to begin with the restoration of natural philosophy is with a good understanding of knowledge.  

What is knowledge?
Of what does it consist?
How did / does it come into existence?
What is its purpose?

As philosophical realists, we understand that knowledge is knowledge of reality and can ask ourselves the same questions regarding reality:

What is reality?
Of what does it consist?
How did / does it come into existence?
What is its purpose?

These are questions large enough to occupy a lifetime and we can only touch on them and then only in so far as they pertain to an introductory high school physics course.  
We mentioned Plato and Descartes as philosophers of "idealism"

	Important differences between Plato and Descartes:
		For Plato, there was an objective realm; it was an immaterial realm (the eide) but at least the eide contained objective truth, i.e. truth that was external to his own mind and to which he had to ascend.  
			His ascent was different from the realist's ascent, however, and Plato had no significant  interest in knowing the material world because he thought it was only a shadow of the true world, the world of 						the idea.
		For Descartes, the material being was not a mere shadow but neither could he, if he had actually stayed within the confines of his system, say that he knew that it existed.

		IMMANUEL Kant - 
			Kant  codified the form of realism which is the "default" position -- at least declared to be the position - of the scientific community even today.  For Kant and the school of thought he engendered (German realisy), the properties we discover in objects depend on the way that those objects appear to us as perceiving subjects, and not something they possess "in themselves," apart from our experience of them. The very notion of a "thing in itself" should be understood as an option of a set of functions for an operating mind, such that we consider something that appears without respect to the specific manner in which it appears. The question of what properties a thing might have "independently of the mind" is thus incoherent for Idealism

All of this largely because of a mistrust of sensorial experience.  For the idealist, only ideas are real.  For them, we can not know a thing in itself because a thing has no properties independent of the mind that operates upon them.  Obviously,  this position undercuts the possibility of universals, i.e. the essences that we know.  More on that soon.

	What Kant's followers have to day, to be logically consistent, is that they know nothing about anything.  They can only say that their minds have operated upon appearances of things.
	As realists we can say of Kant and his followers that they know a lot of things, despite the fact that their philosophical foundations were wrong.  It's inescapable that we know things - fortunately, children - even 				preborn babies - acquire knowledge of things before they are told that they can't!  NOT to say we have complete inexhaustible knowledge of everything we consider, in the laboratory or in everyday life.

		PHILOSOPHICAL REALISM (moderate)* - The philosophical position that recognizes that things are individuated, but yet in our minds, our ideas of them are universal.  We abstract the general idea of "dog" 					from the particular dogs in the world.  Hence,dogs exist in my intellect as a universal idea, but in really they exist only as "this particular dog."  We know the essence of "dogginess" - it is this essence, t						his universal idea, which idealism denies as a system.						
	
		We begin with the senses; it is sensorial perception that gets out "out of our mind" (that's a good thing<g>)
	
			Primary Sense Knowledge - that things exist
			Derivative, secondary,  Sense Knowledge - depends on primary
				The Atom - not primary but known through experiments that depend on senses.
				Motion of the Earth - not primary 
				Shape of the Earth -
					a. global shape not primary for most people but can be primary for some (high altitude pilots and astronauts)
					b. locally flat earth is primary sense knowledge

 		Are the senses Trustworthy?

			1. What about the "flat earth"? 
				 Our senses tell us that the earth is locally flat.
				 What tells us that the earth is globally global?
			2.  What about  motion of earth?
				It is true that we have no sense of earth's motion; however, this is not an example of senses deceiving - it is an example of senses' limitation.

					No different than saying our senses deceive us because we "see"  no microbes in a glass of water.  Not seeing them is an example of the sense's limitation.
						Rizzi's examples: 
							cant see the back side of a statue 
							can't see all the colors in white light without the white light being "broken up" - rainbows and prisms
							Can't resolve speed at which dots appear on TV screen so resolves the dots into one image.
					THE SENSES THEMSELVES ARE THE MEANS BY WHICH WE DISCOVER THEIR LIMITATIONS!

					True, we can reach false conclusions when we don't realize the limitations of a given sense.  That is, we can say "The earth is absolutely motionless" or we can say "
						"There are no microbes in this water I'm drinking" and be wrong due to limitations of sense but this is not the same as saying that senses deceive us.
					We cannot sense uniform motion -- we can only sense motion above a certain minimal acceleration.
						note that motion is sensed through the inner ear; other senses can and do verify motion.

					Examples involving visual paradoxes: 
						MIT professor with b/w slides
						TV screen
						 Gustav Fechner's color wheel
						Bivet (poiyut)
 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/84/Poiuyt.svg/1000px-Poiuyt.svg.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1e/RogerHaywardUndecidable_Monument.jpg

		Science's "proofs" of the untrustworthiness of the senses:
			These are not proofs but paradoxes because they use the senses to disprove the reliability of the senses.

					The problem with paradoxes:
						they are artifices -  not natural - to understand nature, one must begin with the natural, not the pathological or the disturbed							to understand a disease, one has to know the healthy body
							the paradoxes have used knowledge of nature and perception to disturb perception.
								Still - knowledge can be acquired even when nature is disturbed. Example of a blind man deducing the existence of a color.

	
		NEXT WEEK: Change						

* "Naive Philosophical Realism