Logos by Tallis Raymond

Author:Tallis Raymond [Raymond, Tallis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788210874
Publisher: Agenda Publishing
Published: 2018-07-06T05:00:00+00:00

Although there is a connection between objectivity and reality – only the supposition that we and our appearances are parts of a larger reality makes it reasonable to seal understanding by stepping back from appearances in this way – still not all reality is better understood the more objectively it is viewed.10

At the very least, we need a certain constitution – quite narrowly defined – in order to be able to access or contribute to the objective view. This is not, however, as compelling a critique of claims to objectivity as it sounds. After all, the majestic vision of the universe delivered by Newton’s laws of motion owes nothing important to the scientist’s personality, era, cultural context, even his species. Such a world-picture does not belong to an umwelt, even less to the parochial concerns of a bewigged seventeenth-century member of the middle classes. Newtonian science is not contaminated by Newton-the-man. F = ma is not merely third-person; it is no person.

There is, of course, no shortage of ways in which the subject can push back against those successive Copernican revolutions by which we have expelled ourselves from the various centres of the world and have come to see ourselves as smidgeons of cognition located in a place that does not even count as “remote”, given that remoteness is an anthropocentric notion. Every moment of our lives – whether we are in love or just in a hurry, worrying about a crying baby or our reputation, or fretting over the future of humanity or looking forward to our lunch – is charged with meanings that the natural world as described by the most powerful science cannot accommodate. What is more, the technology that science has delivered is deployed in lives that rest on unreconstructed common sense. The invention of the laptop computer, on which I am typing this, drew on the same quantum mechanics that denies the self-identity of the elements of matter, and replaces stuff with probability waves. And yet the device is safely situated on my desk and was transported thither by movements that could be captured by Newtonian, even Galilean mechanics. Science itself must be conducted in the everyday world of rooms with floors, doors and windows, using macroscopic bits of equipment and involving cooperation rooted in a shared “now” of embodied subjects experiencing an everyday world in an everyday way. Both inside and outside the laboratory, it is the world of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. In this world, reality consists of the objects that surround us, stones we could kick in Johnsonian fashion if we were inclined to defend the folk ontology of daily life. The chairs we sit on exist in defiance of the non-local, probabilistic, entangled world of quantum mechanics, and we eat our breakfast before we set out on our journey to work, however relativity theory may throw into question a fixed order of events, unless they are connected in a causal manner that quantum theory cannot accommodate.

It could be argued that this is not evidence of the fundamental truth of unreconstructed folk ontology.

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