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To: betty boop
So what, PH??? [That is, what if "we'll never know, indeed we can't know, if Joan imagined her voices or if something objectively real was speaking to her."] Maybe truth must be validated internally, "subjectively," and not externally, "objectively" ...

You dismiss the whole topic with "so what?" I guess we ought to drop it. I see a gigantic chasm between objectively verifiable facts on the one hand and subjective experience on the other. Gigantic. You seem not to see this, or if you do see it, you regard it as no big deal. I think we'll just have to let the subject go without agreement.

Patrick, seemingly all your favorite biologists say that all of life (and human living) really is completely "objective," or at least ought to be. On this view, biological existence is subject to the laws of chemistry and physics.

I don't really know if they all say that. That is, if they embrace what we've been discussing as "metaphysical naturalism" and would thus assert that nothing exists which cannot be objectively verified. Maybe they all believe that, maybe they don't. I don't, and I suspect they don't -- not all of them. But like all scientists in any field, their work is only with things that can be objectively verified. They use procedural materialism when doing science, whether they're metaphysical naturalists or not. That what makes them good and successful scientists.

But let's play turnaround here, and imagine that "the subjective" is the actual test of the truth of reality on the very largest scales, propagating downward from there.

I don't know how that could work in practice. What if my subective voices tell me something very different from your subjective voices?

In that context, "objective tests" would only be useful ways of validating particular questions relative to concrete existents, with a view to probing their real nature.

That would mean any a scientific finding that contradicted a "subjectively determined" truth would be invalid. It would make science subservient to mysticism. We've been there. I don't want to go back.

172 posted on 05/12/2004 4:24:59 AM PDT by PatrickHenry (Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.)
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To: PatrickHenry
I see a gigantic chasm between objectively verifiable facts on the one hand and subjective experience on the other. Gigantic. You seem not to see this, or if you do see it, you regard it as no big deal. I think we'll just have to let the subject go without agreement.

Of course I see this. Why should I regard this as a "big deal?" It is part of the structure of life. You seem to think that subjective experience is somehow beyond the pale. Well, it is beyond the pale -- of science. Not every question is a scientific question, with a scientific answer. That doesn't mean that what science cannot address does not exist, or has inferior status. Perhaps science, for you, is the key to certainty. But life is uncertain, through and through. That's not a scientific observation; but I do believe it is a truthful one.

173 posted on 05/12/2004 6:29:26 AM PDT by betty boop (The purpose of marriage is to civilize men, protect women, and raise children. -- William Bennett)
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