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Judith,
First of all, I
never said or intimated what you seem to attribute to
me here:
JR:This is a far cry from saying that one must never
look for causal entailments from system behaviors!
I did not use
the phrase "never...". Instead, I said "...one cannot reliably argue backwards from
behavior (effects) to causes" and "Analytic
models are not generically the
inverse of synthetic models." (Arrgh, I just noticed a typo in my reply to Steve, where I left out
the "not" on the prior sentence - should
be: "And an accretion of behaviors does not generically entail a particular accretion
of causes.") The use of the more cautious phrases "cannot reliably" and "are not generically" is because one might
in fact be discussing a simple sytem where 1) analysis and synthesis
are inverses, and 2) where subjective discrimination issues (such as in the
Gibbs paradox referenced after the quotes I previously mentioned, on p. 43 and
124) do not inject themselves into the study of that system. Such situations will be nongeneric, but may exist.
So, it is not possible to universally rule out such backward
reasoning from from behaviors to causal underpinnings. The quotes from Essays p.
42 and 123 both take that same cautious tone, using the terms "unsound" and
"cannot generally argue" respectively, rather than "never".
We certainly both
agree on this:
JR:In that chapter, my father is talking about how foolish
it is to study the behavior of simulacra and apply principles learned from that
study to the real systems that were being simulated. He further said that
simulacra, which mimic only the observable behavior of the real system because
of the false premise that the underlying entailments will follow, are a waste of
time, scientifically.
I disagree that in
the quote on p.42 "the physical world" refers only to "contemporary
physics". I assert he is simply citing a
well-known historical observation about the general failure of
such backwards reasonings about the external world. The reductionist
paradigm does not have a way of accounting for this observation (thus it is
that the "Gibbs paradox" is a "paradox" at all), but the Rosennean paradigm
does. Thus it is all the more explicitly apparent in the Rosennean paradigm
why it is unsound to argue from behaviors to causal bases; and
therefore, why it is generally a waste of time to study simulacra of
a natural system as a way to learn more (i.e., be able to answer more "why"
questions about) that natural system.
Regards,
Tim
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