Platonism and the Objects of Science | Dr. Scott Berman

Science has been exceedingly successful. But can we account for the success and objects of science without Platonism? Dr. Scott Berman, author of “Platonism and the Objects of Science” (2020), doesn’t think so. (Enjoy the bonus soccer, too!)

Question: Joe, are you a Platonist?

Answer: No and sort of.

No, in that I don't have a solid position in the debate — the literature is vast and I've mainly looked into the literature on models of God, arguments for/against God, and persistence.

Sort of, in that I slightly lean towards realism about (some) abstract objects, and I also slightly lean towards thinking that [contemporary analytic] Platonism is the best realist view.

OUTLINE

0:00 Intro and Outline
4:00 Definitions and Alternative Views
17:45 The Argument for Platonism
18:55 Contra Nominalism
30:39 Contra Contemporary Aristotelianism
41:07 Contra Constructivism
47:23 Contra Classical Aristotelianism
1:00:17 Platonic Account
1:10:30 Some Objections to Platonism
1:10:46 Platonism is Queer
1:16:15 Epistemic Access
1:24:03 Conclusion
1:25:55 Bonus Soccer!

And the usual links:

[stevesmiff]

@2:40 "I also wanted to write a book ... not only 10 people would read".
I was so prepared for this:
"I wanted to write a book ... that 11 people would read".

[allenanderson]

First, as a Platonist myself, I think Dr. Berman's arguments against nominalism, contemporary Aristotelianism, and constructivism/conceptualism are all broadly correct. I also think his argument against classical Aristotelianism is right in one sense: there must be a general sense of "existence" that applies univocally across categories. But according to contemporary defenders of the view he's arguing against, like William Vallicella or Kris McDaniel, such a general, univocal sense of "existence" is perfectly compatible with there being different modes of existence, that is, with things existing in different ways. According to Vallicella, this is because 'sense' is a semantic category, while 'way' or 'mode' of existence is ontological. To miss this is to confuse "existence" with existence. It's unfortunate that Berman's argument in chapter 5 doesn't engage with this claim of compatibility, or with Aristotle's own argument for why Being cannot be a genus, and instead only treats best-explanation-style arguments for "classical Aristotelianism".

Secondly, while I know Berman is more interested in the philosophical question ("are there different types of existence?") than in the exegetical question ("did Plato believe in different types of existence?"), I'm not sure I agree with the characterization of Plato as an "ontological monist", i.e., one who does not think there are varieties of Being. To be sure, Plato would have rejected the claim that Forms exist in a lesser, derivative or diminished sense of "existence" than spatiotemporal particulars, but this is not because he held that Forms exist in the same way as particulars, as Berman insists. Rather, it is because he insisted that Forms enjoy a greater degree of being than spatiotemporal particulars, that the former are "that which completely is" (Rep. 477a3), and that spatiotemporal particulars exist in a lesser sense, "between being and non-being" (Rep.479d). Berman is right when he argues that spatiotemporal particulars are complex dynamical systems that lack essences. Particulars only *are* inasmuch as they *partake* of some Form. Forms, by contrast, just are what they are in virtue of themselves (and ultimately in virtue of the Idea of the Good, which is *not a Form* and which I won't get into). The point is, Plato definitely holds that Forms possess a greater degree of Being than spatiotemporal particulars, from which it follows that the two enjoy different types of existence. (In Aristotle's language, Forms are substances with independent existence, while particulars are not.)

I'm sure Dr. Berman has counterarguments he could give. In any case, I hope his book enjoys a wide audience and helps bring Platonism to the fore as a serious contender in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of science.

Thank you Joe for having this conversation with Dr. Berman and for sharing with the rest of us!

[brando]

Hey Joe. Thanks for the interesting discussion! A really appreciate when you say “for the audience”, because then I know there is an example and a more simplistic explanation coming that I can more easily wrap my head around haha

[vituzui]

I don't see why abstracta could not be causal. The assumption that all causes should be spatio-temporal is a modern assumption that seems unjustified. Until Kant, amost everyone agreed that causes could exist outside space and time. And if you read the argument of Kant to change that agreement (according to which the order of the causal series depends on, or is just, the order of the time series), it is quite unconvincing.

[AlexADalton]

This is such an interesting issue and this was awesome. Just picked up his book.

[OriginalWinProductions]

I have to give props to anyone who cites Jagger and Richards as part of his bibliography for an academic book.

[plantingasbulldog]

Came for legit discussions on Platonism. Stayed for the football.

[anitkythera]

Just bought his book on Kindle thanks to this video! Only 5 hours estimated time to read. Looking forward to it!

[edwardtbabinski]

Timeless, spaceless, abstract sets of universals? What are those exactly?

Are all “chairs” based on a timeless spaceless universal chair? There are 1, 3, 4 legged chairs, beanbags, swings, air filled chairs. There is also the philosophical problem of heaps: When does the addition of one more grain of sand to other grains suddenly turn those grains into a heap? Or in the case of chairs, when exactly do chairs become couches, couches become benches or beds? At what exact angle does leaning against something become sitting on something? When does a puddle become a pond, become a lake, become a sea, become an ocean? When would a modern human become an Australopithecus, and an Australopithecus become a modern human, if one continued to swap individual DNA base pairs between the genomes of both species?

Platonism fails to convince because everything is not static and based on spaceless timeless universal archetypes. Instead, imagine a sped up movie of the history of planet earth and its species, notice how things change over time, constant change, along with species arising and dropping out.

[JohnVandivier]

As a programmer, we can translate “being in different senses” to an argument for the impossibility of coercion across types, in the sense of a data type.

This coercion argument then clearly and readily fails because logical coercion is possible in many cases, although not all. In other words being can be used in many ways, but they are often isomorphic to another usage in another logical type.

[JohnVandivier]

Largely good, but the constructivist convo stepped around divine cognition and atemporal mind

[johncracker]

Every entity in the universe must have oneness itself seeking shared belonging to a greater unity… a greater good.

[larsanderson]

If the justification for the existence of universals is that we need them in order to explain commonalities between things, then (for someone who holds to the credo of "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity") then what justification do we have (if any) for believing in the existence of any universals that can be expressed as composites of other universals?

Or to put it another way, even assuming Platonism for the sake of argument, how do we know that at least SOME of the things we consider to be instantiations of actually-existing Platonic Forms, are not nominalist extensions atop a smaller set of Forms, that do not specifically have any Forms of their own, since the comparison necessity is already fulfilled?

Say we do believe that there exist a Platonic form of "mammal" and a Platonic form of "red things". Then say I wanted to compare two creatures who fulfilled both conditions of "being a mammal" and "being red". I don't see how the existence of a (separate, actually-existent) Platonic Form of "red mammal" is required to do that, since (even under the Platonist argument) the simpler two Forms, together with logical operators, seem sufficient to accomplish the task of comparison.

And if the Platonic Form of "red mammal" is neither observable, nor necessary for anything that we do... why can't Occam's Razor excise its existence?

[Swpeloquin]

Seeing that trope nominalisum is the sort of nominalisum that shows the greatest promises and is the most widely discussed is it weird that it is left out if the discussions. It feels a little strawman-ish. Like here are to form of nominalisum fewer people defend. It weird when his point about platonisum is that it is often not properly represented or only done so in an exgurated way.

[blotto]

As for the univocity of being and Aristotle's categories. I thought the argument of the categories wasnt that the categories can't comingle but that you cant find a more primary category which underscores all the others. This goes to the question of to think about being is to separate thinking and being.

[johncracker]

Everything has a form and No two things are alike. It literally explains everything. That said, Hylomorphic monism does solve the problem of difference in the world/transcendental unity. Transcendental difference/Unity in the world.

[Oskar]

On the causal contact point. I think that the stronger formulation is that they don't have causal contact with anything that we have causal contact with either.

So it's not only that we don't have a direct perception of them. It's that we don't even perceive anything effected by them or caused by them at all. We can see the effects of electrons quite easily so it feels asymmetrical to me.

Presumably it they are to explain any contrastive facts (like why we think they exist) we should be a able to at least trace the causes back to the facts in some way.

If I say, I know Socrates had an even amount of hairs on his head on his 12th birthday it just sounds like a wild guess. Presumably that's because you can't see a causal connection between that fact and my knowing it. Maybe you'd ask, was this recorded somehow, do we know he suffered from alopecia.

In the same way I would like an account for how the facts of abstract objects could cause my knowledge of them if they truly change nothing in the causal nexus.

[liptontee]

On the subject of contemporary aristotelianism, couldn't you say that when you learn of uninstantiated universals that what you're learning about Is just what would be common between the instantiated and uninstantiated universals? It seems like you're learning about possible universals

[anitkythera]

@37:35 How do we know that the elements we've synthesized have never been produced in nature at some point in the past given the energy levels observed around supermassive black holes and colliding neutron stars etc.
That said, how does an instantiation of a universal create the universal? It seems backwards... the possibility of a thing to existing is a precondition or is necessary for a thing to be instantiated. Perhaps a universal can't be instantiated at a particular point in spacetime but does that license us to say it doesn't exist as an abstract object regardless of whether or not matter-energy modeled/ instantiated/supervened upon by that universal or even whether or not matter-energy existed at all! To be, means that something is a certain way and, by implication, not another way. The essential pattern/algorithm (process) is what it means to be a dog or a star or a mind or a triangle or a number. To be a *material* object does require it to be at a particular place at a particular time, but that's not what were talking about... contemporary aristotelian account seems question begging. Thoughts?

[Swpeloquin]

I dont think that it would violate trope nominalisum to recognize that every blue trope is accompanied by a trope of wave lenghts of light of around 450 to 495 nanometers. And no non blue tropes are not accompanied by these wavelengths. We can still compair the tropes of an object with another object. Yes every object is a sieres of tropes, but that does not mean we can not look into what a trope is made of or why it interacts in a certain way.