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Author | Topic: Omphalism | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5
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We live in a world where our ordinary practices set a context. We understand "age of the Earth" in terms of that context.
When the Omphalist declares that the age of the Earth is something very different, something completely out of context, then I can only conclude that the Omphalist means by "age of the Earth" is very different from what I mean by "age of the Earth." To say that I am agnostic about Omphalism, is to say that I do not accept its meaning of"age of the Earth" and that I have no beliefs with respect to that weird meaning. It says nothing about the ordinary meaning of "age of the Earth" that comes from or ordinary and scientific practices. There is no contradiction between what I might believe with respect to the ordinary notion of "age of the Earth" and what I might believe with respect to the Omphalist's very different notion of "age of the Earth". These are two very distinct notions, so beliefs about them need not be mutually exclusive.
Straggler writes:
That's the point. "It could be ...", but there could not be any evidence about it. So, in the absence of evidence, it is best not to take a position. It could be the case that we were all magicked into existence only moments ago with full living memory of our existence prior to that point. Along with empirical evidence of a planet and indeed a universe that is billions of years old. Your turn
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5
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Straggler writes:
And I say that what the omphalist means by "age of the earth" is very different from what I mean. Well that is the whole point. A biblical omphalist says that scientific practises are irrelevant and that he has a superior method of "knowing" that contradicts the empirical evidence. Likewise Last Thursdayists. This gets back to the question of the nature of meaning, which Jon is attempting to discuss in the thread "What's in a Word?". Let me give you a completely different scenario. I have a special room in my house. I call it "the shrinking room". There is a special ray being emitted into the room that shrinks everything to half its normal size. If you were to enter that room, you would shrink to half your size. When you left the room you would revert to your normal size. Naturally, you are skeptical of this. So you want to see it for yourself. You want to go into the room and measure some things to see if they have shrunk. The trouble is that your ruler will also have shrunk to half the size. Your metre ruler will be only 50 centimetres long. So if you use it to measure an item that has shrunk to 50 centimetres, then you will mismeasure that as having a length of 1 metre. As you can see, this is a similar problem. You cannot get empirical evidence to test my claim of a shrinking room. This brings us to the question of "what is the meaning of length." Is length some fundamental property in the structure of the world, perhaps something came from the original design plans of the creator? Or, to say it differently, is length metaphysical in nature; is there some important essence to the property of length? Alternatively, could it be that early man found that a measuring rod was useful, and just chose "length" as the name for the quantity found by using a measuring rod? That is to say, is the meaning of "length" determined by the measuring conventions that we use to determine length? The first of those views, that meaning is metaphysical or that there is some essence of meaning, is sometimes known as "essentialism". The second of those views, that meaning comes from human conventions, is known as "conventionalism". Our real disagreement here, is that you are (or appear to be) an essentialist, and I am a conventionalist. As an essentialist, you conclude that there is some essence to the meaning of "age of the earth", and that therefore you and the omphalist are talking about the same thing but with different conclusions. So you see your view and that of the omphalist as mutually exclusive. As a conventionalist, I see that the omphalist is not following the same conventions I am using, and therefore when the omphalist talks of "age of the earth" that has no relation at all to what I mean by "age of the earth". So we (the omphalist and I) are not really disagreeing - we are talking past one another. It make sense for me to be agnostic toward omphalism. There are obviously a lot of disagreements over the essentialism/conventionalism issue. When a physicist writes a book named "The Fabric of Space-Time" you can be pretty sure that he is taking a metaphysical view, rather than a conventionalist view. For myself, if meaning is metaphysical then I don't see how we could possible get to know meanings. The only possibility would be if they are innate - transmitted by the genes - and there does not seem to be nearly enough DNA for that to be possible.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5 |
Straggler writes:
As a conventionalist, I believe that the meaning of "age of the earth" is determined by our empirical practices. Of course, we could misuse the evidence and get invalid results. But we cannot appeal to anything beyond evidence, since our empirical practices define what we mean.
Do you believe in the validity of empirical evidence? Because according to omphalists "no evidence that we can see of the presumed age of the earth and universe can be taken as reliable".
Of course. As essentialists, they believe that there is an essence to meaning, and that the empirical practices are not guaranteed to conform to that essence.
So this isn't just about the age of the Earth. It is about simultaneously pronouncing belief in the validity of empirical evidence whilst claiming agnosticism towards something which denies the validity of empirical evidence.
It is about essentialism vs. conventionalism. It is about whether the meaning of words comes directly from God, or the meaning of words comes from the way that we use them. It is about rationalism (innate knowledge and meaning) vs. empiricism (knowledge comes from experience). It is about conservatism vs. pragmatism.
And I say that what the omphalist means by "age of the earth" is very different from what I mean. But those who have advocated omphalism disagree with you. Why do you get to tell them what they believe?
I don't. And, similarly, they don't tell me what to believe. It is up to each of us to make our own decisions on that.
And this isn't just about the age of the Earth. It is about the validity of empirical evidence.
Actually, no, it isn't about the validity of empirical evidence. If I want to cross the street, I first look to make sure that there is no oncoming traffic. If they want to cross the street, they also look to make sure that there is no oncoming traffic. We are both using empirical evidence for deciding empirical questions. They do not accept empirical evidence as settling metaphysical questions. But then, again, I also do not accept empirical evidence as settling metaphysical questions. The big difference is that I don't believe that there are any metaphysical questions that have relevance to us, while they believe that many ordinary questions are metaphysical.
So you see your view and that of the omphalist as mutually exclusive. As do those who have advocated omphalism. The omphalist is making a statement about the length of time that the Earth has physically existed. What metaphysical claim do you think the omphalist is making?
The omphalist sees the meaning of "physical" as metaphysical. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" is a metaphysical claim about the origin of the physical. Galileo didn't get into trouble with the Church for reporting empirical evidence -- he got into trouble for challenging their metaphysics. At the root of the disagreement between evolution and creationism, is that the creationists think that the question of origin of species is a metaphysical question, and that it therefore cannot be settled by empirical evidence. If the evidence for evolution should become so overwhelming that even they cannot deny it, then they will resort to theistic evolution rather than to naturalistic evolution, because their metaphysics demands it.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5
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Modulous writes:
Agreed. I was trying to keep the example simple. The point is that if you don't tie your concepts to empirical data, then all kinds of games can be played.
You need to change time as well as space to make your analogy work We all agree on what a year is.
I don't think so. We mostly agree about a contemporary year, though I'm not sure even that holds for advocates of LastThursdayism. And we mostly agree that we should extrapolate from our concept of current time intervals to get to time intervals in the past. But there is a lot of disagreement on how to extrapolate.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5
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PaulK writes:
Practically speaking, there cannot be any useful meaning of "actual age" other than what we can, at least in principle, determine.
You are not taking a stand on the actual age - as most people would think of it - at all.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5 |
You don't agree on what events happened one year ago.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5
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You are probably having trouble understanding my point of view because you are something of an essentialist yourself. Most people are, and they tend to look askance at my conventionalism.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5
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Modulous writes:
That is precisely what I have explained. Man up, explain what you are talking about OR talk about the same thing we are: People that use the words 'year', 'age', 'earth' etc consistently and state that they believe with a high confidence that the earth is billions of years in age but aren't willing to say with equal confidence that it isn't 10,000 years old with the appearance of age. You have chosen to not accept my explanation. That leaves you with a problem of something for which you do not have an explanation acceptable to you. It does not leave me with a problem, nor with any further obligation to solve your problem.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5
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Modulous writes:
Under which theory of meaning?
So - can you support the assertion that Last Thursdayists don't agree with me about what the time period of 'a year' means? quote:
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5
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Straggler writes:
I was directing my comments toward the "Last Thurdsdayism" versions of omphalism. Except that the biblical omphalist disagrees with you as to what is evidence and what is not. I am not agnostic about biblical literalist versions - I reject those.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5
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Modulous writes:
Thanks. But I really did not need the abuse. You really do seem to be intentionally obfuscating your point. Whether you like it or not, this is a question about meaning and pointing that out is not obfuscation.
Do you think it is a serious point to raise that when a person makes the proposition "The world appears to be 4 billion years old" and another person agrees with this but says it is actually 10,000 years old that somewhere in the middle of all that they have decided to change what they were referring to when they said 'year'?
Under what theory of reference.
Do propositions even exist? A question about beliefs is implicitly a question about mind. Our science of mind is very inadequate, perhaps non-existent. There are lots of highly contentious issues. I entered this discussion only to respond to a question raised by Straggler on why people might accept the scientific conclusions on age, yet be agnostic about omphalist claims. I don't read other people's minds, so I can only answer that for myself. And for me, it is a question of meaning. The omphalist conclusions are ones that are completely inapplicable to what I mean by, say "10,000 years ago". Based on the fact that the omphalist makes such claims, it is a likely conclusion that they are not inapplicable to the omphalist's meaning.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5
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Straggler writes:
No, I am not making any such assumption. I have no idea where you got that idea.
Your entire position here is founded on the false assumption that omphalist claims about time and physical reality mean something other than what they are actually saying. Something metaphysical.
As I use the term "metaphysical", they are making a metaphysical claim.
You have redefined omphalism to meet your own arguments. But nobody including the omphalists agrees with your definition.
I have no idea how you are coming to that conclusion.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5
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Straggler writes:
I see biblical omphalism as an evasion of the evidential case against young earth creationism and similar positions. Oh so you are not agnostic to all forms of omphalism? Only some. Despite them all being identical in terms of empirical evidence and falsifiability. Why? I see a pure "Last Thursdayism" as raising important philosophical issues about the reliability of evidence of the past.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5
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Straggler writes:
Where have I advocated that? You advocate empirical evidence as the only valid form of evidence ... The discipline of mathematics is almost entirely based on non-empirical evidence, and is much the better off for that.
... yet you distinguish between two empirically identical omphalistic claims.
They are not philosophically identical, and that is the basis for distinguishing between them.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5
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Straggler writes:
That's not at all the same. Some decisions have to be made prior to there being any empirical data, and as such are part of how one ties concepts to empirical data.
Straggler: You advocate empirical evidence as the only valid form of evidence ...
Here Message 13 "The point is that if you don't tie your concepts to empirical data, then all kinds of games can be played."nwr: Where have I advocated that? They both deny the validity of empirical evidence with regard to the age of the universe and they both advocate an alternative non-empirical epystemology as a means of determining the age of the universe. So in what way are the philosophically different such that you can reject one and claim agnosticism towards the other?
Actually, I think that is wrong. The biblical omphalist embraces some empirical data, namely that which is biblical (and which I would consider low quality and unreliable). The LastThursdayist argues for radical skepticism about all evidence.
What metaphysical claim are they making? Be specific.
Don't waste your time repeating this. My knowledge of metaphysics is very thin, so I am not going to debate it.
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