basic principles

I find myself in environements, situations, world

I want to cope with/handle my environment

I want to understand my environment--the environment I find myself in and subject to.

Understanding can be the best way to cope with an environment because it gives a principle of why what happens should do so.

But because understanding gives a principle why what happens should do so it raises a quaetion about how we can know that the principle it would work by is correct. Nevertheless, this does not show that any principle 'understanding' choses to work by cannot be correct.

There may be an unlimited number of ways to try and cope with our environment, many of these will be weeded out by natural selection. But I am not going to try and be broad minded about possible stratagies for dealing with our environment. I'm going to describe one strategy, or group of stratagies that lump together, and what can be gained by it, or them. And will compare this to several current philosophical attitudes.

If we see our situation as being in an environement, this all ready suggests that our experiences are not simply isolated occurences, as they are related by the environment. But, again, although we might try and abstractly investigate what is and isn't necessitated by supposing an environment, I am not being broad minded, or trying to chase out the logical consequences of a position, so I don't have to go into that.

As naive realists our understanding is based on the principle that the contents of the situations we find ourselves in--the contents of the environment we find ourselves confronted by and having to cope with, are what produce what happens in this environement, and so what happens to ourselves.

We are not trying to make logical deductions but are making comparisons. The object of these comparisons is to try and avoid anything new appearing (or dissapearing) in the situation. If anything new occurs that posses a problem. Insofare as nothing new occurs, there is no problem. So this is a principle by which we can try to deal with our environment; nothing fundamentally new, or novel happens.

Let us suppose that in trying to acheive the above objective we in turn employ the strategy of trying to avoid drawing conclusions beyond objects. So, let us suppose we see a shape move across our veiw, and suppose there is a rectangle in its path, and that the shape dissapears simultaniously as it reaches one edge of the rectangle, and an indestinguishable shape appears at the other edge of the rectangle in such a way that the 'new' objects motion appears consistent with a continuation of the previous shapes motion. In that case, if we suppose an object continues across our view, dissapears behind a screen and re-appears on the other side, then; the object continues, the rectangle continues, the motion continues, and so nothing really new appears through the situation. If this is the principle on which we are working, then our 'object' must continue to exist behind the 'screen' even if we never imagine it doing so, because there couldn't be one continued, un-altered object through the situation if it didn't, and we would have to allow something new, which would pose a problem.

To suppose our shape is one object that continues through the situation, appears to be a way of simplifying all that multiplicity of logically distinguishable experiences that this situation could be broken down into and that we might try to think the experienced situation consists in. But the simplicity is not an ultimate, because it is based on trying to avoid conclusions beyond 'objects', or 'factors', which is required if fundamentally new things in the situation pose a problem, and nothing fundamentally new means there's no problem.

If objects must continue to exist independently of whether I see them, or imagine, or think about them, as it seems our object must if it is to continue so that no new state is required with respect to it, then the notion of it is something independent of my own existence. So the idea of a world that is independent of myself begins to immerge? Or is re-enforced? and does not require that we try to imagine something that we aren’t imagining. It’s a consequence of trying to avoid drawing conclusions beyond objects, which is a consequence of new things requiring an explanation, posing a problem for explanation and understanding.

Reality can be defined in terms of truth. Then we need to say what truth is. But a good measure of what is meant by saying something is true can be seen as resulting from, or as parasitic upon a sort of basic concept of reality. Something that is out there and independent of what anyone might wish. If we define reality in this way it wont do to suppose realists are people who think our theories aim at being empiricaly adequate. They aim at realising how our environment can form an objectively self sufficient system, and this goes beyond claiming that they are merely 'true'.

What is the nature of the underlying laws that would explain why, if you push a ball into a bucket of water, the water level will rise?

Perhaps;

Volume added to volume = greater volume

Might be the main one

But is this a law that contributes to the explanation of the grater volume, or in itself explains the greater volume? Or is it itself an adequate explanation and because we can appreciate that it is liable to be right, we are happy to assert it as a law? If the last were true it wouldn’t be a law that was contributing towards making something an adequate explanation (or an explanation), but something being an adequate explanation that helped us regard something as a law. But if we suppose adequate explanations sometimes determine laws we will have to say what an adequate explanation is and this sounds unempirical as how do we know anything we take to be adequate might not come to be regarded as inadequate? And in what sense could it be ‘adequate’ anyway? If we take laws as stating claims about, or representing beliefs in, universal regularities we seem to avoid such problems. Because we can easily find a regularity doesn’t hold after all or/and could replace it with another one. Also regularities seem a simpler thing to define and recognise than whether an explanation might be in itself ‘adequate’, which seems a very ideological, and thus doggy question.

But can anyone honestly say that volume added to volume=greater volume seems adequate because it is regularly found to be the case? Does it seem adequate to maintain that 1+1=2 must be true because it is regularly found to be the case?

An alternative that it is true by definition doesn’t seem to work. It certainly isn’t true BY DEFINITION that if you push a ball into a bucket of water the water level will rise! Similarly, although it might be true by definition that 1+1=2, it’s not true BY DEFINITION that if you put one pebble next to another pebble you must have two pebbles, because it seems perfectly logically possible that they might merge, or transform, or disappear. Is it true by definition that IF THEY DON’T merge, or transform, or disappear etc. etc. you must have two pebbles? So 1+1 must equal 2 in those cases where what is required by definition for 1 to be added to 1 is fulfilled?

The rules forming such a definition might be “if you have one thing, and then another thing of an appropriate sort, and both continue as they were as appropriate types of individual throughout, then, if you put them together you will have two of that sort of thing.” But this definition requires we have two things that separately continue when they are put together. But if you have two things that continue when you put them together that MATTER OF FACT would be sufficient to mean you would have two of them. I.e. the idea is the matter of fact is chosen by the definition so that it would be of the right sort to be sufficient to produce the conclusion. But in that case a matter of fact can itself be sufficient to produce, and in that way explain, a conclusion. And we can appreciate how it would be sufficient without recourse to laws, or to universal generalisations.

The situation is not equivalent to ‘water must by definition be H2O’ that definition just picks out a particular thing and excludes all other things. But the definition in our present case has to pick out something(s) that is (are) sufficient to produce a particular result. But that means that THAT THING must be sufficient to produce that result (or at least appear so), but if that thing is sufficient then it can, or would, produce that result independently of existence of the definition, and so we could appreciate how it does so independently of the definition, as well as independently of laws or universal generalisations.

And this seems to me to be the case of how we can explain and understand why if you push a ball into a bucket of water the water level should rise.

Induction

The Humean problem of induction is how to draw inferences about what will happen based on experience.

What has happened (our experience) literally only tells us about what has happened. That is the problem.

To put the problem again; If we suppose that what has happened is or should be a good(ish) guide to what will happen, what aspect of experience could be the basis for this supposition?

It can’t be based on any aspect of experience, because that only tells us what has happened, and poses once again the original problem.

It seems like we are simply supposing that what has happened is a good(ish) guide to what will happen. We always do suppose this (allegedly), so you can say that we simply do draw inferences about what will happen based on what has happened.

But the problem remains that experience hasn’t given us any reason to make this supposition, because it literally can only tell us about what has happened. The supposition is something extra to what can be supplied to us by experience.

It doesn’t help to say experience always has been a good guide to what will happen IN THE PAST, because that poses exactly the same problem again, even though psychologically it may be quite convincing.

You say that you are only interested in the here and now, but you are not literally interested only in the ‘here and now’ because here and now has happened, it just isn’t past. It is the present, not the future or the past. You want to know what will happen with a particular situation shortly in the future, even though it is only shortly in the future and isn’t pretending to be exotically different in time and place from the present. You also, presumably, will want to understand things that have happened, and use that understanding in saying what will happen. According to Hume, our understanding of things that have happened depends on constant conjunction; or, what normally happens. Liberalising this a bit we could say that understanding progresses by showing how particular truths are more generally applicable. The more generally the better.

But I disagree with this; our understanding (often) depends on making comparisons in an effort to try and avoid drawing conclusions beyond ‘objects’ so that we can see how the contents of situations are sufficient to produce what happens in those situations. It is not based on the generality of our experience, but on real explanation; the contents of a situation themselves produce what occurs in it. This also supplies the basis of our inductions; since what happens depends on the contents of the situation we can’t just have something completely novel happening. What’s more, if we apparently have the same contents in two situations we should get the same thing happening or there should be some difference between the contents after all. And this works whether or not we have any clear idea how the contents of a situation could actually themselves produce what happens in it. Of course, this breaks down with quantum mechanics—not that I know anything about it.