C. ONTOLOGY


3.35 Ontological Dimension

Ontology is the metalinguistic dimension after syntax and semantics. Semantically interpreted syntax describes ontology most realistically, when the statement is either experimentally of experientially warranted empirically. In science ontology is most realistic when described by the semantics of either a scientific law or an observation report. However even the semantics of falsified theories display less realistic ontology due to the theories’ known lesser truth.

Ontology is the semantically described aspects of reality.


3.36 Metaphysical and Scientific Realism

In his Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World realist philosopher John R. Searle, a critic of cognitive science, refers to metaphysical realism as “external realism”, by which he means that the world exists independently of our representations of it. And he denies that realism can be justified, because any attempt at justification presupposes what it attempts to justify. In other words all arguments for metaphysical realism are circular, because realism must simply be accepted.

Similarly in “Scope and Language of Science” in Ways of Paradox the realist philosopher Willard van Quine writes that we cannot significantly question the reality of the external world or deny that there is evidence of external objects in the testimony of our senses, because to do so is to dissociate the terms "reality" and "evidence" from the very application that originally did most to invest these terms with whatever intelligibility they may have for us. And to emphasize the primitive origin of realism Quine writes that we imbibe this archaic natural philosophy “with our mother’s milk”. He thus affirms what he calls his “unregenerate realism”.

Hickey joins these contemporary realist philosophers. He maintains that metaphysical realism, the thesis that there exists mind-independent reality accessible to human cognition, is the primal prejudice. And he affirms that it is a correct prejudice. Contrary to Descartes, metaphysical realism is neither a conclusion nor an inference nor an extrapolation. It cannot be proved logically, established by science, or validated in any discursive manner. If anything is immediately self-evident, it is the imposing, intruding and recalcitrant otherness of mind-independent reality.

Metaphysical realism is the thesis that there exists mind-independent reality that is accessible to human cognition.

Quine furthermore adds that the notion of reality inde¬pendent of language is derived from our earliest impres¬sions, and is then carried over into science as a matter of course. He writes that realism is the robust state of mind of the scientist, who has never felt any qualms beyond the negotiable uncertainties internal to his science.

Scientific realism is the thesis that the most critically tested and currently nonfalsified theory offers the most empirically adequate description of reality at the current time.


3.37 Ontological Relativity Defined

Further understanding of scientific realism, however, requires consideration of ontological relativity. When metaphysical realism is joined with relativized semantics, the result is ontological relativity. We cannot step outside of our knowledge and compare our knowledge with reality, in order to validate a correspondence. Thus while we can distinguish our semantics from the ontology it describes, as we do when we distinguish real and logical suppositions, we cannot separate ontology from semantics. Ontology is mind-independent reality as our language-dependent semantics describes it, and we describe reality with the concepts in our language. The ontologies described by our artifactual semantics are just as relative as the describing semantics.

Prior to the contemporary pragmatism philosophers had identified realism with one or another particular ontology, which they viewed as the only true ontology on the assumption that there can be only one true ontology. But science has produced revolutionary changes. And as the advancement of science has produced new theories with new semantics exhibiting new ontologies, prepragmatist scientists and philosophers found themselves attacking a new theory and defending an old theory, because they had associated realism with a displaced ontology associated with a falsified and displaced theory. As Feyerabend notes in his Against Method scientists have criticized a new theory using the semantics and ontology of a previously accepted and now falsified theory. Such a perversion of scientific criticism is still common in the social sciences where romantic ontologies are invoked as criteria for criticism.

With ontological relativity realism is no longer uniquely associated with just one particular ontology. The ontological-relativity thesis does not deny mind-independent metaphysical realism, but it distinguishes mind-independent reality from ontology described by language-dependent semantics. It thus enables admitting change of ontology without denying metaphysical realism.

On the contemporary pragmatist view metaphysical realism is logically prior to and presumed by all ontologies as the primal prejudice, while the choice of an ontology is based upon the empirically tested adequacy of the theory describing the ontology. Thus ontological relativity leaves ontology to the scientist with his explanatory scientific laws rather than to the metaphysician. And increased empirical adequacy of new scientific law yields increased realism in the ontology that the new law describes.

Ontological relativity in science is the thesis that the semantics of a scientific law and its constituent descriptive terms describe reality.

A scientific law is a tested and nonfalsified universally quantified statement that prior to its empirical testing was a theory.


3.38 Ontological Relativity Illustrated

Ontological relativity can be illustrated by the semantical decision about red ravens mentioned in the above discussion about componential artifactual semantics. The decision is ontological as well as semantical. For the bird watcher who found a red raven-looking bird and decides to reject the belief “All ravens are black”, the phrase “red raven” becomes a description for a type of existing birds. Once that semantical decision is made, red ravens suddenly populate many trees in the world, however long ago nature had evolved such avian creatures. But if the decision is to persist in believing “All ravens are black”, then there are no red ravens in existence, because whatever kind of bird they are, the red birds are not ravens. The availability of the choice illustrates the artifactuality of the relativized semantics of language and the consequently relativized ontology that the relativized semantics reveals about reality.

Relativized semantics makes an ontology no less relative whether the posited entity is an elephant, an electron, or an elf. Beliefs that enable us routinely to make successful predictions are deemed more empirically adequate than those not so successfully predictive. And we invest the entities, attributes or any other manifestations of reality posited by those successfully predicting beliefs with our ontological commitments. Thus if positing evil elves conspiring mischievously enabled predicting the collapse of stock-market price bubbles more accurately and reliably than the postulate of euphoric humans speculating greedily, we would accept those busy elves as real entities, and would busy ourselves about them, as we have done with elephants and electrons for successful predictions about elephants and electrons. And when in due course we find our belief in evil elves to be empirically incorrect, we then reject our ontological commitment to the conspiring elves, as today we reject the reality of possessing demons once thought responsible for sickness.

As it happens, today we do not find ontological claims about possessing demons to be empirically adequate for medical practice. But it could have been otherwise. The semantics of “atom” has changed greatly since the days of the ancient Athenian philosophers Democritus and his mentor Leucippus. It has since evolved under the regulation of basic research in physics. Similarly the semantics of “demon” might too have evolved to become as beneficial as the modern meaning of “bacterium” – had empirical testing regulated an evolving semantics and ontology for “demon”.

Both the ancient and the modern physicians may observe and recognize some of the same obvious symptoms for a certain infectious bacterial disease in a patient, thus giving some continuity to the semantics of “demon” through the ages. But their medical diagnoses, practices and remedies would be quite different. If the semantics and ontology of “demon” had evolved under the regulation of increasing empirical adequacy, then today scientists might materialize (i.e., visualize) demons with microscopes, and physicians might write incantations (i.e., prescriptions), and pharmacists might dispense antidemonics (i.e., antibiotics) to exorcise (i.e., to cure) possessed (i.e., infected) sick persons. But terms such as “materialize”, “incantation”, “antidemonics”, “exorcise” and “possessed” would also have acquired new semantics in the more empirically adequate contexts than the ancient medical beliefs. Thus the meaning of “demon” would have been purged of what we now find empirically to be inadequately realistic about demons.


3.39 Causality

Cause and effect are ontological categories described by tested and nonfalsified nontruth-functional hypothetical-conditional statements. The nontruth-functional hypothetical-conditional statement claiming a causal dependency is an empirical statement, and is therefore never proved and may always be falsified in the future. But ontological relativity means that a statement’s empirical adequacy warrants belief in its ontological causality claim.

When in the progress of science the causal claim is empirically falsified by testing, it is made evident thereby that the causality claim is less adequately realistic than previously hypothesized. A scientist has not confused cause with antecedent, until the occurrence of a falsifying test outcome has shown that the consequent phenomenon has failed to follow upon realization of the antecedent conditions. Philosophers and scientists who seek permanent and eternal causes are innocent of the history of science.

Causal claims based on statistical correlations can also be schematized as nontruth-functional hypothetical-conditional statements subject to empirical testing and thus expressing causal ontological claims. The scientist does not know that a correlation is not causal, until the correlation is falsified empirically.


3.40 Ontology of Mathematical Language

In the categorical proposition the logically quantified subject term references individuals and describes the attributes that enable identifying the referenced individuals, while the predicate term describes only attributes without referencing any instantiated individuals manifesting the attributes. The referenced extramental real things and their semantically signified extramental real attributes constitute the ontology described by the categorical proposition that is believed to be true due to its experimentally or otherwise experientially demonstrated empirical adequacy. This ontological claim is expressed explicitly by the copula term “is” as in “Every raven is black”.

However, the ontological claim made by the mathematical equation in science is not just about instantiated individuals or their attributes. The individual instances referenced by the variables in the mathematical equation are instances of individual measurement results, which are acquired by measurement operations that produce numeric values for the descriptive variables. Individual measurements are made by the scientist, and the individual measurement instances are related to reality by nonmathematical language, which may include description of the measured subject, the metric, and the measurement procedures including any apparatus described in test-design language. Calculated and predicted descriptive variables also make ontological claims until falsified empirically.


D. PRAGMATICS


3.41 Pragmatic Dimension

Pragmatics is the metalinguistic dimension after syntax, semantics and ontology, and it presupposes all of them. Specifically it pertains to the uses or functions of language understood as semantically interpreted syntax and described ontology. The regulating pragmatics of basic science is set forth in the statement of the aim of science, namely to create explanations containing scientific laws by the development and empirical testing of theories, which are deemed laws when not falsified by the currently most critical empirical test. Explanations and laws are accomplished science, while theories and testing are work in process at the frontier of basic research. Understanding pragmatics therefore requires understanding the concepts of theory and testing.

Pragmatics is the uses or functions of language understood as semantically interpreted syntax and described ontology.


3.42 Semantic Definitions of Theory Language

For neopositivist philosophers the term “theory” refers to universally quantified sentences containing “theoretical terms” that describe unobserved phenomena or entities. Early positivists had rejected altogether the atomic theory of matter in physics, because the atoms were deemed unobservable. These early positivist philosophers’ idea of discovery consisted of induction, which yields empirical generalizations rather than theories.

Later the neopositivists believed that they could validate the semantical significance of theoretical terms referencing unobservable microphysical particles such as electrons, and thus admit theories as valid science. But for discovery of theories they invoked human creative processes and offered no description of the processes of theory creation.

For romantic philosophers and romantic social scientists “theory” means language describing subjective mental experiences such as ideas and motivations. The theory creation process is typically portrayed as consisting firstly of introspection by the theorist upon his own personal subjective experiences. Then secondly it consists of imputing vicariously his introspectively experienced ideas and motives to the social members under investigation. Thus the social scientist can recognize or at least imagine these ideas and motives in his own personal experience, such that the motives “make sense” to him.


3.43 Pragmatic Definition of Theory Language

Unlike positivists and romantics, pragmatists define theory language pragmatically instead of semantically.

Scientific theories are universally quantified statements including mathematical expressions that are proposed for empirical testing.

This is the definition of “theory” in the contemporary pragmatist philosophy of science. It contains the traditional idea that theories are hypotheses, but the reason for their hypothetical status is not due to either the positivist observation-theory dichotomy or the romantics’ requirement of referencing subjective mental states. Contemporary pragmatists have replaced such semantical concepts for identifying theory language with the pragmatic definition based on the function of theories in science.

Theories are hypothetical because they are proposed for testing.

All universally quantified statements are hypothetical in the sense that they are empirical, and thus are not provable, incorrigibly true, or beyond revision. But theories are those statements that are regarded as relatively more hypothetical, because scientists believe they are more likely to be productively revised, if a falsifying test outcome shows revision is needed. After a theory is tested, it ceases to be a theory, because it is either scientific law or rejected language, except for the skeptical scientist who wants further predictive testing. Theories may have lives lasting many years due to problems formulating or implementing decisive test designs. Or as in a computerized discovery system with an empirical decision procedure, they may have lives measured in milliseconds.

Empirical testing is the pragmatics of theory language in science. After a conclusive test outcome, the tested theory is no longer a theory. The conclusive test outcome makes the theory either a scientific law or falsified discourse.

Romantic social scientists adamantly distinguish theory from mathematical and statistical models. Many alternative supplemental speculations about motives can be appended to the model that is tested, but it is the model that is empirically tested and not the various supplemental discourses. Pragmatically the language that is tested empirically is theory, such that when the model is proposed for empirical testing, the model has the status of theory

Sometime after initial testing and acceptance, a scientific law may revert to theory status to be tested again. Centuries after Newton’s law of gravitation had been initially accepted as scientific law, it was tested in 1919 in the famous Eddington eclipse test of Einstein’s alternative general relativity theory. Thus for a brief time early in the twentieth century Newton’s theory was pragmatically speaking actually a theory again.

The term “theory” is ambiguous in contemporary usage. There are both archival and pragmatic meanings. In the archival sense we still may speak of Newton’s “theory” of gravitation. But in the pragmatic sense Newton’s “theory” is now falsified physics in basic science and is no longer proposed for testing, although it is still used by aerospace engineers who can exploit its lesser realism and truth. Knowledge of its error means that Newtonian mechanics is neither a hypothesis for testing nor is it our currently most empirically adequate and thus most realistic universal law for explaining space, time, motion and gravitation.


3.44 Pragmatic Definition of Test-Design Language

Pragmatically theory is universally quantified language that is proposed for testing, and test-design language is universally quantified language that is presumed for testing.

Accepting or rejecting the hypothesis that there are red ravens presumes a prior agreement about the semantics needed to identify a bird’s species. Similarly the empirical test of a scientific theory presumes prior agreement about the semantics needed to identify the test subject. This semantics includes but is not limited to the language for describing the design of any test apparatus, the testing methods including any measurement procedures, the characterization of the test’s initial conditions, and the characterization of the observed outcome resulting from the test execution. The universally quantified test-design statements contribute these meaning components to the semantics of the descriptive terms common to the test design and the theory.

Both theory and test-design language are believed to be true, but for different reasons. Experimenters testing a theory presume the test-design language is true with definitional force for identifying the subject of the test and for performing the test. The advocates proposing or supporting a theory believe the theory statements are true with sufficient plausibility to warrant testing with an expected nonfalsifying outcome. Both the theory statements and the test-design statements contribute component parts to the complex semantics of the descriptive terms that they share.

Often test-design concepts describing the subject of a theory are either not yet formulated or are too vaguely conceptualized to be used for effective testing. They are concepts that await future scientific and technological developments that will enable formulation of an executable and decisive empirical test. Formulating a test design capable of evaluating the empirical merits of a theory decisively often requires considerable ingenuity. Eventual formulation of specific test-design language enabling an empirical decision supplies the additional semantics that sufficiently reduces the disabling vagueness.


3.45 Pragmatic Definition of Observation Language

After scientists have formulated and accepted a test design, the universally quantified language describing the design determines the semantics of its observation language. To describe an individual test execution and its outcome, the test-design statements have their quantification changed from universal to particular, and are thus made observation statements. This is a pragmatic concept of observation language, because it depends on the function of such language in the test. Contrary to positivists, pragmatists reject the thesis that there is any inherently or naturally observational semantics.

If a theory’s test outcome is not a falsification, the tested theory is deemed empirically warranted. The status of the tested theory is then changed to scientific law, and it continues to contribute its semantics to the meaning complex associated with the descriptive terms in the language used for reporting observations. And the test outcome may be described in terms of the law, a former theory.

Observation sentences are test-design sentences and test-outcome sentences with particular logical quantification for describing an individual test execution including reporting the explained test outcome.


3.46 Observation and Test Execution

For the execution of a test, the statements predicting the test outcomes are the statements of the theory having semantics defined by the theory’s universal statements with their logical quantification made particular for the individual test execution. For a mathematically expressed theory this particular logical quantification is accomplished by assigning measurement values to the theory’s descriptive variables that are needed to calculate a value for the theory’s prediction variable, and then calculating the predicted numerical value.

For the execution of a test, the statements reporting the observed test outcomes are the statements of the test design having semantics defined by the test-design’s universal statements with their logical quantification made particular for the individual test execution. For a mathematically expressed theory this particular logical quantification is accomplished by assigning measurement values to the theory’s prediction variables describing the test outcome for comparison with the predicted values. Both the prediction and test-outcome statements must share the same descriptive terms.

The statements reporting the test outcome are observation statements describing what was observed as a result of the test execution. But the prediction statements are not as such observation statements. They are only incidentally observation statements, when the test outcome is nonfalsifying. A nonfalsifying test outcome is a predicted effect that is larger than the estimated measurement error and that is not obscured by semantical vagueness, such that the prediction is deemed to be the same as what the test-outcome statements describe.

Scientists prefer repeatable controlled experiments. When possible, measurement values are the result of repeated measurement instances, in order to produce a statistical inference that enables an estimate of measurement error and a mean average value for a mathematical variable. A conventional measure of dispersion about the mean such as the standard deviation may serve as an estimate of measurement error.

The test outcome may have semantical consequences. If the test outcome is nonfalsifying, the semantics of the terms common to theory and test design does not change for the theory’s advocates whose belief in their theory was vindicated. But if the test outcome is falsifying, then by prior agreement it is the theory that is falsified. And the semantical outcome is that the falsified theory statements no longer contribute to the semantics of the terms common to the test design and theory for the theory’s advocates.

But the semantical contributions made by the test-design statements are unaffected by either test outcome for all who continue to accept the test design. Herein lies the semantical continuity throughout the test. Thus contrary to Kuhn and Feyerabend there is no complete replacement of semantics of statements used to report an observed test outcome much less any alleged semantic incommensurability.


3.47 Scientific Professions

In computational philosophy of science a “scientific profession” means the researchers who at a given point in time are attempting to solve the same scientific problem as defined by a test design. On this pragmatic definition, a profession is a much smaller group than the academicians in the field of the problem, while by no means restricted to academicians.


3.48 Semantic Individuation of Theories

Theory language is defined pragmatically, but theories are individuated semantically.

Theories are individuated semantically in either of two ways. Firstly different expressions are different theories, because they address different subjects. Different theory expressions having different test designs are different theories, because the test-design statements are semantical rules that define the subject of a theory. Furthermore the different theory expressions are different for different scientific professions, because they address different problems. In fact pragmatically what is theory for one profession is not theory for another.

Secondly different expressions are different theories, because each makes contrary claims about the same subject. The test-design language defines the subject. Contrary claims are different descriptions and make different predictions. Occasionally there is more than one theory proposed for empirical testing with the same set of test-design statements. Since the alternative theories are all universally quantified and proposed for testing, they are all instances of theory language, but they have different semantics and are therefore different theories.

There has occasionally been confusion due to philosophers’ failure to recognize semantic principles for the individuation of theories. Some philosophers state that theories are not rejected due to empirical falsification, because a scientist will “save” a falsified theory by modifying it, so that there is no longer a falsifying test outcome. But when the scientist tries to “save” the theory by making adjustments to it, he has ipso facto rejected the tested theory and has made a new theory with his modifications. The original theory has been discarded and a new theory has been developed, when the adjustments are not merely ad hoc particularly quantified statements citing individual instances as exceptions, but instead are modifications to theory’s universally quantified statements that alter its semantics, even if in relatively minor ways.
 

Pages << Previous  [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]  Next >>
NOTE: Pages do not corresponds with the actual pages from the book