hollovv replied to your post: hollovv replied to your post: hollovv replied to…
Oh I agree but to say that something is relational doesn’t mean you can’t give it an ontology… I feel like most of these problems are problems with construing science as a physicalist atomism, and I agree that science in that vein is problematic!
Also I’m giving you a million high fives for that last sentence, that was exactly what I was hoping you’d say. Is Progress and Its Problems the book I should start with?The problem with relations is that if we grant them ontological status, where do we stop? Everything is in some relation or other to everything else. Literally everything. This cup I’m holding is currently partaking in a relation with my socks. At what point do we say, hey(!) this is trivial? I haven’t read Progress and its Problems tho. The problem with positing properties and entities is that then you can’t freaking find a starting point and you get into the whole problem of grounding (which, I dare say, for the purposes of science is absolutely futile at this point). In order to ground science we already need to know the truth of a given paradigm in advance. But that’s paradoxical considering science, as such, is a perpetually tentative project.
I CAN TALK ABOUT SCIENCE ALL DAY I LOVE PHILO OF SCIENCE SO MUCH OMG
So, I’m going to jump into this conversation, because I’m drunk, and of course philosophy seems like the thing to do. Also, I’m going to rep for Harman here, because I really like this ideas, and think they’re worth discussing, so…yeah.
*Disclaimer: totally a realist, so that’s where I’m coming from on this discussion on giving ontological statuses to stuff.
I really like Harman’s way of getting around the problem you point out with relations. His philosophy’s heavily Heidegger based, and he sees Heidegger’s philosophy as being able to get past this problem. For him - Harman - objects are both relational and exist independently of each other, even at the same time.
The thing is that objects have a subterranean level at which they withdraw from all meaning, and from any sort of autonomy, into the entire void of equipmentality (“there is no such thing as an equipment”, or whatever Heidegger says, is meant to convey that all being exists as equipment in some way at all times, and that this status is universal and can’t be broken down into the being of individual objects).
Of course, this goes against intuition: if an object’s status as non-present makes it fall into the void of being as equipment, then why does it seem to be that we encounter individual objects all the time and not just a great mesh of tool-being? The answer comes from when a tool shifts from being a ‘tool-being’ to being a ‘broken-tool’ - that is, the difference between readiness-to-hand and -presence-at-hand, or between ontological and ontic states (both are synonymous for Harman). When we confront something ‘as’ it is, when it becomes a ‘broken-tool’ and thus an object of our conscious engagement, it gets removed from the mesh of ‘tool-being’, from the unknown ontological depths of an object, and placed within the realm of being ‘as’ something, the realm of being a tool towards some purpose within the greater textual mesh of tool-being.
So that’s where we stop with relations: at the level of broken-tool, at the level of beyond any sort of intelligibility. Objects exist only relationally when confronted in the ‘as-structure’, but lack relational status when they’re not considered ‘as’ objects, but instead fall back into the pre-conscious status of readiness-to-hand.
Also, I think I may have confused ontic and ontological levels there, because drunk, but whatever, I still think Harman does a really good job of answering this metaphysical problem.
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autochthones said:
Ah I would probably differ from you on the latter half of this and I think grounding is precisely the point of this BUT whateva
