Materialism and Idealism

Posted on February 24, 2010
Filed Under Peirce, Philosophy | 2 Comments

Sorry – haven’t had time to finish my other post. I did want to briefly common on a recent post of Levi’s on materialism and correleationalism. Levi notes that both are forms of reductionism.

“The variations of anti-realism all seek to reduce objects to some human related phenomenon, while the variants of materialism always seek to reduce objects to some identical material ‘stuff.’”

Put an other way, both end up variations of nominalism. Either “structures” are due to human thought or else they are just an illusion and there is just the physical parts.

The Peircean solution is to accept both materialism and scholastic realism. That is material stuff can have “habits” such that there exist real mind independent structures in the universe. We’re all familiar with this in one sense. Who wouldn’t say the laws of thermodynamics or quantum mechanics aren’t real? Further it’s difficult to assert these emerge purely out of the properties of matter itself. (Although you can get an astounding amount of thermodynamics out of the symmetries of objects within the system)

While I use the term materialism quite a bit, I do think one should separate out the nominalistic forms of materialism from the more scholastic realist forms.

Related posts:

  1. Derrida and de Man on Materialism
  2. Defining Mormon Materialism
  3. Heidegger, Theology and Materialism
  4. Churchland & Eliminative Materialism
  5. Who believes in the God that the argument from evil would seek to refute?
  6. PoMo Conservative against Atheists

Comments

2 Responses to “Materialism and Idealism”
1 Rich Knapton on March 2nd, 2010 3:47 pm

In a sense , the brain entertains a form of universalism (functionally speaking). From the time we are infants our brain is constantly creating schema of the physical world around us. These are not actual objects of the external world but schematic information by which we can recognize particular objects. A picture of a tree, for example, does not reside somewhere in the brain as an object. However, we have a schema for “treeness”. The schema has the information we need in order to recognize trees. We know birch trees and oak trees are trees because both are recognized as such by the schema. Since all brains form “treeness” schemas, wherever there exists people and trees, this may indeed qualify as a type of universal. People who have not grown up without trees but see a tree for the first time, a “treeness’ schema begins to be built. This would seem to indicate a relationship of external and internal but not on a 1:1 basis. And, the embodied brain/mind is the mediating factor. (Yes Clark I’ve gone over to the embodied brain/mind viewpoint. :))))

Without that schema we would not know what a particular object is. An example, when shown something as simple as a comb, a man, who could no longer access the visual schema for combness, didn’t have any idea what the objects was even though he clearly saw the abject and could draw it. What was interesting, as soon as he touched it he knew it was a comb. I don’t know if individual schemas are formed based on sense or that a schema has more than one sensorial aspect.

Rich

Put an other way, both end up variations of nominalism. Either “structures” are due to human thought or else they are just an illusion and there is just the physical parts.

That is bizarre. It is like saying that if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound. The tree itself has information content. So does the sound. The idea that there is no real distinction between a heap of “raw” matter, and that matter arranged in the form of the tree is the sort of doctrine one would think would take an extraordinary amount of effort to maintain. The sort of thing where one might start to question the sanity of the proponent.

And certainly it is one of the great ironies of history for William of Ockham to be associated with a concept (nominalism) that he violently opposed. Ockham would say that there is not necessarily anything in common between two trees except _real similarities_. Nominalism (by contrast) necessarily denies that similarities are real.

The way I see it, is that Aristotle’s conception of substances has often been reduced to triviality by both his proponents and his detractors, to the degree that the latter are making arguments against a straw man, and the former don’t really understand him. Ockham’s doctrine of real similarities is the basis of demonstrating why Aristotle was right after all.

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