Blog post: ydoaPs: Facepalms and Philosophy

Sometimes I hate philosophy. Usually, it's because I run into people who still reject Empiricism so that they can attempt to justify their belief in magic, but sometimes it's because I'm reminded of arguments that are confused to the point of pointlessness yet are somehow taken seriously. The case that brought this blog post to life is that of Mereology. Mereology is a part of metaphysics dealing with composition of parts. It is essentially about how you count things.

For example, take a single molecule of water. How many objects are there? 1? 3? 4? 6? 7? 9? 10? 20? 21? 24? 41? It's all in what constitutes an "object". If we're only counting molecules, there's obviously 1. If we're counting atoms, well, that's clearly 3. But what of "objects"? Is the molecule itself an object to be counted with the atoms? If so, that makes it 4! We can go on and on until we're down to quarks, gluons (for those that don't know, it turns out that the weak nuclear force is just the residual effect of the strong force), and electrons. But do we still count the compositions in between the fundamentals and the molecule?

Here's where the divide comes in. Mereological Realists say that there's only one object, but Mereological Nihilists say that there's only the fundamentals and their reactions. That is, the nihilists say that molecules are useful fictions describing common interactions between fundamentals. And the same argument goes on up to macroscopic objects. For the realists, a chair is one object; for the nihilists, it's trillions of objects.

Now, why did I say this is a confused argument? Because they're prima facie talking past each other. The two camps don't disagree on matters of fact. The realists don't deny that quarks and leptons exist and nihilists don't deny that chairs are useful descriptions (which is actually their claim). The whole debate is based on confusing a matter of fact with a matter of perspective.

The solution: how many objects there are depends on what level of abstraction on which you're working.

Like I said, sometimes I hate philosophy. If only the entirety of my field (as opposed to the current majority) were empirical analytic philosophers, I would be saved many facepalms. I'll just stick with playing on the cutting edge of Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, and rational extensions of Natural Ethics.Read and comment on the full post