It was kind of a "riff" and your explication is clarifying and well-taken.
But, because my micronutrients are off (or something, I cannot tell) I am going to half-seriously and half-playfully double down. You write: "...We lose the ability to differentiate between the conceptual model and the phenomena themselves that the model was devised to account for...."
Can we make this mapping between The Church (model) and Faith (phenomena) as well? Is that why many people might well say in so many words that they believe, but The Church is not for them? We're treating certain human statements as 'infallible" discoveries/revelations, when in fact they're simply invented?
Feel free to ignore this as hopelessly off-target. It's been an odd week, and won't be the first I've failed to understand or express something properly! (and Happy Memorial Day, one and all...)
Riffs are always welcome! And I like this line of thinking. Indeed, the Church fits here, very much so. I see exactly what you're saying. Can you take this analogy a step further and spell it out for me please? How are you tying this back to "God is dead"?
Yikes. I am loathe to take more comment space/time and possibly reveal or compound my error, but....here goes, in brief:
If we throw out our reified theories, the whole current scientific framework, do we risk creating enough anarchy/confusion and thereby temporarily reduce out our ability to "do Science" at all?
Perhaps our "real Science" skills of observation, model-building, collaboration, exploration skills have so atrophied after decades of academic/government control and incentive structures, and we risk losing 'everything' by even trying to fix it.
That's as far as I should probably go, because i have the "walking too far out on the branch" feeling. :-)
I think that's a legitimate concern. I mean, with the institutions and their people currently running things, a paradigm shift might be too much. Trying to fix the broken system is likely impossible because of corporate interests. But on the other hand, you never know. Theoretically, it should be possible to emancipate the minds of scientists. They have been trained to believe in the flexibility of their ways. Meanwhile, there are plenty of scientists doing good work performing various forms of what I would call "engineering." I imagine that for the best among the young ones still training, such a paradigm shift would be most exciting.
Interesting way of putting it, RDM. Perhaps what started with God, continues with the entire conceptual universe. When Nietzsche worried about nihilism resulting from the death of God, maybe he had an inkling of this trouble. But Nietzsche's death of God is a different concept I think. He was talking about a new paradigm replacing the old dispensation: God, priest, king, aristocracy, plebs... including the whole moral framework.
What I'm after is a categorical mistake, a fallacious way of looking at things. So long as "concepts" remain recognised as cogitations, the speculative world remains open to us. Once they are reified, however, they are set in stone (as it were), and we can no longer tell that there's an idea, an assumption, a metaphysic lurking behind the model. The ideas informing the model vanish into the model, and the model vanishes into the phenomena. We lose the ability to differentiate between the conceptual model and the phenomena themselves that the model was devised to account for. In other words, we lose the ability to differentiate between the inner and outer worlds, which means we can no longer tell the difference between fantasy and reality. It's essentially a mental illness. We believe we're discovering things that in fact we've invented.
It was kind of a "riff" and your explication is clarifying and well-taken.
But, because my micronutrients are off (or something, I cannot tell) I am going to half-seriously and half-playfully double down. You write: "...We lose the ability to differentiate between the conceptual model and the phenomena themselves that the model was devised to account for...."
Can we make this mapping between The Church (model) and Faith (phenomena) as well? Is that why many people might well say in so many words that they believe, but The Church is not for them? We're treating certain human statements as 'infallible" discoveries/revelations, when in fact they're simply invented?
Feel free to ignore this as hopelessly off-target. It's been an odd week, and won't be the first I've failed to understand or express something properly! (and Happy Memorial Day, one and all...)
Riffs are always welcome! And I like this line of thinking. Indeed, the Church fits here, very much so. I see exactly what you're saying. Can you take this analogy a step further and spell it out for me please? How are you tying this back to "God is dead"?
Yikes. I am loathe to take more comment space/time and possibly reveal or compound my error, but....here goes, in brief:
If we throw out our reified theories, the whole current scientific framework, do we risk creating enough anarchy/confusion and thereby temporarily reduce out our ability to "do Science" at all?
Perhaps our "real Science" skills of observation, model-building, collaboration, exploration skills have so atrophied after decades of academic/government control and incentive structures, and we risk losing 'everything' by even trying to fix it.
That's as far as I should probably go, because i have the "walking too far out on the branch" feeling. :-)
I think that's a legitimate concern. I mean, with the institutions and their people currently running things, a paradigm shift might be too much. Trying to fix the broken system is likely impossible because of corporate interests. But on the other hand, you never know. Theoretically, it should be possible to emancipate the minds of scientists. They have been trained to believe in the flexibility of their ways. Meanwhile, there are plenty of scientists doing good work performing various forms of what I would call "engineering." I imagine that for the best among the young ones still training, such a paradigm shift would be most exciting.
So when it comes to the reification of scientific models, we are, a la Nietzsche, once again saying “God is dead“?
Interesting way of putting it, RDM. Perhaps what started with God, continues with the entire conceptual universe. When Nietzsche worried about nihilism resulting from the death of God, maybe he had an inkling of this trouble. But Nietzsche's death of God is a different concept I think. He was talking about a new paradigm replacing the old dispensation: God, priest, king, aristocracy, plebs... including the whole moral framework.
What I'm after is a categorical mistake, a fallacious way of looking at things. So long as "concepts" remain recognised as cogitations, the speculative world remains open to us. Once they are reified, however, they are set in stone (as it were), and we can no longer tell that there's an idea, an assumption, a metaphysic lurking behind the model. The ideas informing the model vanish into the model, and the model vanishes into the phenomena. We lose the ability to differentiate between the conceptual model and the phenomena themselves that the model was devised to account for. In other words, we lose the ability to differentiate between the inner and outer worlds, which means we can no longer tell the difference between fantasy and reality. It's essentially a mental illness. We believe we're discovering things that in fact we've invented.
Great piece, Asa! I have previously called this phenomenon and others like it 'sci-dolatry'. 😁
Nice coinage! I may use it, with reference to you of course. Cheers, Chris.
Help yourself! It's always more pleasant to have left a mark somewhere than to be completely ignored. 😂