Struggling to grasp the concepts between ontological view, and the epistemological I stumbled upon some of Rene Descartes works that I thought help me work out the way in which we think or maybe except one of the two different approaches. One of his famous sayings is cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) more interesting is the Wax Argument. He considers a piece of wax; his senses inform him that it has certain characteristics, such as shape, texture, size, color, smell, and so forth. When he brings the wax towards a flame, these characteristics change completely. However, it seems that it is still the same thing: it is still a piece of wax, even though the data of the senses inform him that all of its characteristics are different. Therefore, in order to properly grasp the nature of the wax, he cannot use the senses. He must use his mind (Wikipedia). Could this apply to the way in which we must consider what a “fact” is, or in what way we view facts of arising. Could we fact totally disengage ourselves from are senses and still be able to adequately understand the true nature of facts or our existence? Or do we just take what is in front of us, oberservations, experiments, etc and disregard the unknown?
Thanks, Chris, for bringing in that example. It is one of my favorite passages from the ‘Meditations’. As I understand Descartes’ point there, he is arguing that the most basic concepts that we use to think and talk about things in general (e.g., the concept ‘thing’ and the correlated concept ‘property’) are not produced by our sensory awareness. If we actually thought that what the piece of wax is is just a set of sensible properties (this color, this shape, this taste, this smell, etc.) then we would not think it was the same thing after it was melted that it was before it was melted (i.e., after all those sensible properties had changed). The fact of the matter, though, is that we don’t think that the old thing is gone and a new thing has taken it’s place–rather, we think that the same enduring thing has undergone a change in its sensible properties. What the thing is that has undergone this change is something we think about and know through our intellect, even if we require information from our senses to tell us about the particular changes it actually undergoes.
Descartes is trying to get us to see the implausibility of the idea that science is grounded in sense experience alone–the most basic commitments of the natural scientist (e.g., the commitment to the belief that there is a world of things that undergo law-governed changes in their states) are based on principles provided by the intellect. The senses alone would never provide us anything more than this color, this smell, this taste, this apparent motion etc.; the judgment that these are all properties or states of things that, e.g., exist whether or not we are perceiving them, and play a causal role in explaining the quality of our perceptions, is something that takes us beyond the evidence of the senses into the realm of the intellect.
The question that arises in response to this recognition, and is largely responsible for the realism vs. anti-realism debate, is:
Are the things, powers, and properties that we conceive of as explanatory grounds of our sense perception real (i.e., do they actually exist in the mind-independent way that we conceive them to when we think of them as playing this explanatory role) or are they merely empty or imaginary thought-things that serve our thinking as useful tools for ordering our sense-experience but do not have any real existence beyond that?
If the former, realist view, is right then our statements about these things are statements of fact. If not, then we have to understand the value of these statements for the practice of science as a value that is other than their truth-value (i.e., whether they are True or False)
This is a very interesting topic to bring up, and I’m glad you did. I personally enjoy thinking in ways such as Descartes does in the manner of “using mind over senses”. Although many may find thought processes such as this to be illogical or even unnecessary, who is to say what is the “right” and “wrong” way to think of something? Mellor’s “all possible worlds”, to me, seems somewhat outrageous and outlandish, yet it is, at least by some, accepted as a possible answer to “FNG”.
I feel that these philosophers are trying to show us abstract ways to analyze the world around us in a new fashion in order to try to, or better, understand how our world works by not just covering what we see and feel, but the possibilities of what could or may happen.
I feel this example that Chris utilized really emphasizes just how we as society define facts. To our knowledge, we decide something is a fact after many observations. I forget who it was that mentioned in class that we believe facts to be true due to how certain concepts, theories, beings, etc. seem. However, I believe that we rarely do acknowledge and question the unknown to make sure that these facts are as they seem. So as in the example, the wax was defined by certain characteristics and facts at one point in time. Then, once held close to a flame, the form and shape was altered. With that said, I think that we may never actually understand truth in facts, but rather believe to understand facts for how the seem.