Jeepers, cornelis, I didnt imagine I'd made such a move. Maybe I did; perhaps I wrote carelessly. I was critiquing the seeming illogic of the reductionist view of nature. Let's see....
Just to get us all on the same page here, an antinomy is a contradiction between two apparently equally valid principles or between inferences correctly drawn from such principles. Examples of antinomies: beauty and evil, or slavery and freedom.
On that basis, I just dont see how the reductionist view can be an antinomy. It doesnt say there is any contradiction of anything; it simply refuses to recognize anything outside of itself. This strikes me as being a blatantly incorrect inference.
We were speaking of complementaries in Niels Bohrs sense of the word. I dont think complementaries are antimonies, either. The most obvious example of a complementarity is the particle/wave duality of subatomic physics. The complementarity principle basically says that the observer is able to discern either one or the other, but not both at the same time. Particles and waves appear to be mutually exclusive entities, but that is only from the point of view of the observer, who should know that both descriptions are true, and both essential to the complete description of the system which is constituted by both particles and waves. In an experiment, the observer must choose which he would like to see, because you cant see both at once, as Heisenberg pointed out i.e., his uncertainty principle (Bohr preferred to call it the indeterminacy principle), which is based on the recognition that you cant know both the position and the velocity of a subatomic particle at the same time. If your experiment calls for viewing the particle aspect, the wave aspect utterly falls away from view, and vice versa. But it is still there.
So complementarity essentially refers to a paradox in epistemology. The observer cannot see or know the two entities together; but nature is constituted by both. Indeed, it is a superposition of both: This is the higher resolution I was referring to. The human mind cannot directly see this resolution (because man is utterly involved in it and so cant find a point outside from which to view it?); but its already a given in nature. And to me, nature and the universe are evidently ordered at a higher principal level that we do not directly discern (e.g., physical laws and/or mathematical axioms), though we do see the lawful results in the created world. And so I am led to the idea of a Logos. Without a rational standard, nature could only be a random, accidental development: nothing distinct or definite could ever come to be or persist in time.
By analogy, I think an argument can be made that the human knowledge domain involves complementariness, sometimes referred to as the Cartesian split. On the one side of the divide are the natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc.); on the other, the humanities, or sciences of the spirit (e.g., philosophy, theology, the arts, history, etc.). In recent times it has become fashionable to say that the natural sciences are exact and objective, while the humanities are inexact and subjective, and therefore of inferior value (if they have any real value at all and arent merely exercises in superstition referring to illusory objects). Fans of this presupposition find reason to believe that the universe is in fact reducible to the matter-only, monist proposition.
Well, thats enuf for now. Sorry for not replying sooner. Ive been a little distracted by the election lately. Now that its over, and irrationality seems to have triumphed big-time, its time to move on .
Thanks so much for writing, cornelis!
Thanks for the pings. It's good to get our eyes off the elcetion results and be reminded of the reality beyond this world.
There are may other kinds of oppositions that may or may not resemble contradictory metaphysical claims. They too will be variously explained, resolved, or dismissed. Pythagoreans struggled over the odd and even, Zeno is famous for his paradoxes, Empedocles suggested Love and Strife, Socrates describes pain and pleasure as Janus-headed in the Phaedo, in the Parmenides we find the problem of the one and the many, Aristotle discusses the principle of noncontradiction, he also perceives the interplay of stasis and kinesis, other dualistic myths abound outside of ancient Greece, Christ our Lord teaches life through death, and so on. Hot and cold, slavery and freedom, and other kinds of opposites also show their own unique relations.
With all of these classified in some reasonable order we might strictly reserve a particular term such that antinomy is used only to speak of contradictory metaphysical claims and contradiction of formal logical oppositions. A term like paradox may now be unacceptable in cases, depending on someone's social preferences. Habits of thought often shift according to the convenience of power or advantage. Take your pick, there are a whole lot of terms that do the trick:contrariety, antitheses, in/congruity, in/consistency, inversion, dilemma, dis/parity, hetero/homogeneity, in/equality. There may be good reason to reserve the term complimentarity for observations made about physical nature.
Anyhow, what is fascinating is that Kant's resolution of the cosmological antinomy greatly resembles the description of complimentarity in particle/wave duality of subatomic physics. In fact, both of these are similar to the classic way Thomas Aquinas resolves debates: both points whose are true in a restricted sense. This is exactly how Kant works his way around. He held that these jusitifiable but contradictory metaphysical claims are resolved by limiting the application of the claim. As Kant understood it, human knowledge is barred from knowing anything in itself, including nature. This means that claims about nature are limited. They are true in a restricted sense. His restrictions were described in terms of the conditions and categories of knowledge and reasoning. And in the case of subatomic physics, "particles and waves appear to be mutually exclusive entities, but that is only from the point of view of the observer."
Thanks for your reploy, bb. More later, time for choir.