John Keats's Lamia (1819) surely deserves some kind of award for Most Famously Annoying Poetry:

...Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow...

My usual reply ends with the phrase: "If we cannot learn to take joy in the merely real, our lives will be empty indeed." I shall expand on that tomorrow.

Today I have a different point in mind. Let's just take the lines:

Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow...

Apparently "the mere touch of cold philosophy", i.e., the truth, has destroyed:

Haunts in the air
Gnomes in the mine
Rainbows

Which calls to mind a rather different bit of verse:

One of these things
Is not like the others
One of these things
Doesn't belong

The air has been emptied of its haunts, and the mine de-gnomed—but the rainbow is still there!

In "Righting a Wrong Question", I wrote:

Tracing back the chain of causality, step by step, I discover that my belief that I'm wearing socks is fully explained by the fact that I'm wearing socks... On the other hand, if I see a mirage of a lake in the desert, the correct causal explanation of my vision does not involve the fact of any actual lake in the desert. In this case, my belief in the lake is not just explained, but explained away.

The rainbow was explained. The haunts in the air, and gnomes in the mine, were explained away.

I think this is the key distinction that anti-reductionists don't get about reductionism.

You can see this failure to get the distinction in the classic objection to reductionism:

If reductionism is correct, then even your belief in reductionism is just the mere result of the motion of molecules—why should I listen to anything you say?

The key word, in the above, is mere; a word which implies that accepting reductionism would explain away all the reasoning processes leading up to my acceptance of reductionism, the way that an optical illusion is explained away.

But you can explain how a cognitive process works without it being "mere"! My b...

martina

martina

martina

martina