munitz - reality notes

8/13/2019 Munitz - Reality Notes

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Munitz - 'The Question of Reality'

Conferring or discovering intelligibility

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Plato's 'Rational art' within the universe, truth to be discovered

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"The heart of Kant's crtical philosophy is the claim that there are certain a priori, universal and necessary conditions and rules of ordering experience thatbelong to the mind's cognitive constitution" p.71

-the nature of human beings own innate perceptual and conceptual apparatus is perhaps a limiting factor in the type of understanding that can be achieved. Thenwhat is reality?-

----------------------Normally to explain something is to give a casual (empirical) account of a situation.For Wittgenstein - explaining the meaning of a word or phrase - "one makes explicit, teaches, and appeals to rules that, for some community, govern the correctuse of some linguistic expression. This type of explanation belongs to the domai

n of stipulation and convention"

- grammatical rules of use explain meanings

- ostensive defintion versus verbal definition

- "Grammatical rules comprise a collection of forms of representation that allows them to serve as norms of representation".

Grammatical rules (as norms) are arbitary and not fixed. These rules do not disclose and conform to what is contained in reality.

A factual judgment is not a grammatical rule, it is predicated on two factors:

1.the arbitary coventionally adopted grammatical rules that assign their meaning to the expessions used in stating the judgment.

2.the situation in reality that determines whether the statement is true or false.

Mathematics is an activity of constructing grammatical rules.

empirical judgment based on observationsucess of theory is based on the extent of evidential support for the empiricaljudgments encompassed by the theory, as well as by logical simplicity and elegan

ce.

For W. the main task of philosophy is attain a "perspicuous representation"

W.- "Whenever we say that something must be the case we have given an indication of a rule for the regulation of our expression" - this expresses a grammaticalrule

Grammar is antecendent to factual or empirical truth, since it determines only conceptual connections; it is not in itself a source of factaul truth or a way of



stating such a truth.

The rules that govern the meanings of our language are not fixed, unique and universal, and their necessity consits only in specifying and establishing conceptual connections or representations.Their 'relation' to objects is simply the application of these meaning-rules in various ways, including the formulation of empirical propositions.

p103-104

Choosing a set of rules does not establish which necessary proposition matches the putatively real or objective "facts", because there are no objective facts of the matter.

R. explanatory power establishes 'truth'

World picture

Does W. take for granted that the grammars of different nguages are inherently and fundementally different and arbitary? Could there be a 'deep grammar' that all languages share?

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mankind seeks intelligible order

this order is linked to human conciousness and it is connstituted by the searching and discerning of relations or combinations in the various objects, factors or elements in the subject matter.

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Instead of 'Reality'- x is real. Predicate 'Reality' with an example or its mani

festation.

But Reality can not be pointed out, cannot be given an ostenstion, or a literaldescription.

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Differentiate the observable universe - what varous astronomical instruments show and detect - and the theoretical universe or universe as a whole.

the observable universe is still a theory-laden term.

Cosmological models offer an interpretation of the observable universe thus providing intelligibity to the 'universe as a whole'.

Cosmological models (theories) are a set of consistent grammatical rules

"When explaining and understanding the leading idea's (main cosmological theory) meaning, it is inappropriate and irrelevent to raise questions with respect toits truth or falsity. These evaluative judgments come later, when the idea is applied for purposes of factual description, prediction, or casual explanation."



One cannot give examples of the applications of the expression 'universe as a whole' because it is a unique entity that cannot have a multilicity of examples.

Cosmological models come in 3 types:

1.as innovative descrptive interpretations of observed facts

2.as solutions in the form of physical, causal explanations for the observed data

3.as predictions of physical phenomena.

Pragmatic perception of truth, not one of correspondence with antecedent fact, but with its continual, historically located, and not putatively fixed appraisal.

Cosmology is primarily concerned with the enlargement of knowledge.

R. One can be a theist and an anti-realist, Munitz takes it for granted these two positions are incompatible. That to believe that reality is intelligible but not inherently so and that to believe that God can exist without reality - 'His creation' - having any fixed and actual meaning or order are not contradictory.

Metaphysical systems identify a primary type of reality then derive other entiti

es from it:

deductively

causally

telelogically

hierarchally

by exemplification.

R.? - You explain something and bring it into intelligibility or even existence

by contrast to or against a background of the unexplained. So you will be always at one removefrom the unknown - will this unknown always 'be there'.

examine the 'must' that someone else supposes 'must' be in your system of beliefs. Isn't that person's 'must' gratuitious?

Boundless existence - the very 'fact' of existence is unintelligible and unknowable, and conceptually boundless, no concept can penetrate it and render it meaningful.

R. Does everyone have a 'worldview'? And doen't that 'worldview' contain or is contained within a metaphysics? Furthermore is not metaphysics then inescapable?

Defending and persuading from one 'world picture' to the next - what is the process if the principles and ideas assumed or posited are indeed 'groundless'? Howdoes one strap knowledge down so that it is able to 'function', if the criteriawe judge it by is found to be ultimately groundless?

munitz - reality notes

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