Ontological Pluralism

Outline – Ontological Pluralism

1. People
   1. William Wimsatt
   2. Scott Page  
   3. Johannes Jaeger
   4. Lawrence Cahoone
   5. Spencer Greenberg 
2. Ideas
   1. Rainforest Ontology (Wimsatt)
   2. Realms of Truth (Greenberg)
   3. Perspectival realism
      1. Meta-modernism (post-postmodernism)
3. Ontologies
   1. Monism
   2. Dualism
      1. Matter
      2. Mind
   3. Trialism (Penrose)
      1. 
      2. Physical world
      3. Mental world
      4. Platonic mathematical world
   4. Pluralism
4. Reductionism
   1. Ontological: reality is composed of a minimum number of kinds of entities and substances
   2. Epistemological: reality is best explained by reduction to its most basic kinds of entities and substances
   3. Todd: in-principle epistemological reductionist but not an ontological reductionist. Everything that happens in a physical system evolves according to physical laws but those physical processes don’t constitute all there is.
   4. Can a macro-scale entity really be completely inexplicable in terms of micro-scale entities?
   5. Micro-scale events may only make sense in terms of macro-scale events.
      1. Ex: Enzymes and reactants
         1. Enzyme is larger and more complex than the reactants
         2. The speed of the reaction only makes sense by accounting for the enzyme
         3. But the enzyme is still explained in terms of smaller-scale entities (amino acids, atoms, etc.)
5. Seven Realms of Truth – Spencer Greenberg
   1. Some things “exist” in the sense that they are in physical reality, like atoms (in “Matter Space”).
   2. Other things may “exist” in the sense that they are real experiences conscious beings have, like the taste of pineapple (in “Experience Space”).
   3. Still, other things may “exist” in the sense that they are shared constructs across multiple minds, like the value of money (in “Consensus Space”).
   4. Other things may “exist” in the sense of being conclusions derived from frameworks or sets of premises, like consequences of economic theories (in “Theory Space”).
   5. Some may “exist” in the sense that they are represented in systems that store or process information, such as the information in a database (in “Representation Space”).
   6. If universal moral truths “exist” (e.g. objective facts about what is right and wrong), then we can talk about moral rules existing (in “Morality Space”).
   7. Finally, if supernatural entities “exist”, such as spirits (meaning that not all beings inhabit Matter Space), then these beings are in a different realm than us (in “Supernatural Space”).
6. Tropical Rainforest Ontology (Wimsatt)
   1. Contra Quine
      1. Willard van Orman Quine once said that he had a preference for a desert ontology.
   2. Robustness
      1. Criterion for what is real
      2. “Things are robust if they are accessible (detectable, measurable, derivable, defineable, produceable, or the like) in a variety of independent ways.
      3. Local
         1. Criteria used by working scientists
         2. “The nitty-gritty details of actual theory, actual inferences from actual data, the actual conditions under which we poised and detected entities, calibrated and ‘burned in’ instruments, identified and rejected artifacts, debugged programs and procedures, explained the mechanisms behind regularities, judged correlations to be spurious, and in general, the real complexities and richness of actual scientific practice.”
   3. Levels
      1. 
      2. Dissipative wave (pro-reductionistic)
      3. Sharpening wave (pro-holistic)
   4. Perspectives
      1. “As long as there are well-defined levels of organization, there are relatively unambiguous inclusion or compositional relations relating all of the things described at different levels of organization… But conversely, when neat compositional relations break down, levels become less useful as ways of characterizing the organization of systems–or at least less useful if they are asked to handle the task alone. At this point, other ontological structures enter, either as additional tools, or as a replacement. These are what I have called perspectives–intriguingly quasi-subjective (or at least observer, technique or technology-relative) cuts on the phenomena characteristic of a system,which needn’t be bound to given levels.”
      2. “What I am calling perspectives is probably a diverse category of things which nonetheless appear to have at least some of the properties of being ‘from a point of view’ or to have a subjective or quasi-subjective character.”
   5. Causal Thickets
      1. “This term is intended to indicate a situation of disorder and boundary ambiguities. Perspectives may still seem to have an organizing power (just as viewing a thicket or shrub from different sides will reveal a shape to its bushy confusion), but there will be too many boundary disputes.”