Platonism and the Objects of Science

by Scott Berman

What are the objects of science? Are they just the things in our scientific experiments that are located in space and time? Or does science also require that there be additional things that are not located in space and time? Using clear examples, these are just some of the questions that Scott Berman explores as he shows why alternative theories such as Nominalism, Contemporary Aristotelianism, Constructivism, and Classical Aristotelianism, fall short. He demonstrates why the objects of scientific knowledge need to be not located in space or time if they are to do the explanatory work scientists need them to do. The result is a contemporary version of Platonism that provides us with the best way to explain what the objects of scientific understanding are, and how those non-spatiotemporal things relate to the spatiotemporal things of scientific experiments, as well as everything around us, including even ourselves.

Genres: Philosophy

194 pages, Paperback

Published August 26, 2021

Reviews

[Kaye]

Platonism and the Objects of Science looks at the various types of claims about the world around us (from a scientific standpoint) and describes how Platonism better matches what scientists actually do. It hearkens back to the big Penrose (platonism) vs. Hawking (non-platonism) stuff in pop science articles in the 1980s-2000s before Hawking died, but comes at all of this from a different perspective (philosophy of science). The author sort of ignores all developments in Platonism after Plato, and I think he really could have gotten some entertainment out of reading Syrianus’ response to Aristotle’s Metaphysics. I do think that many of the comments that Lloyd Gerson made in his Bryn Mawr Classical Review reaction are valid. It also seemed a bit off-topic to the work for Berman to be making comments about religion unless he was attempting to socially reassure scientists or something. However, anything that encourages scientists to actually realize that they've been small-p platonists the whole time along is a good thing, in part? I mean, I would really love it if scientists stopped using a Plato’s Cave analogy for everything and looked at some of the other stories in Plato when they want to reference something fun, so it would also be a win if they read some of the referenced dialogues and started adding to their analogy dossiers.

All in all, it’s kind of like reading a spun-around-sideways Parmenides commentary. Fast read if you’re used to compact language with a lot to think about. Not sure how to rate it, but you may like reading it if you want to see how someone coming from a modern science background approaches Platonizing philosophy of science.

[Jean-françois Virey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected this book to be a five-star rating for me, so the three stars are a measure of my disappointment.

The book has a nice argumentative structure, summarised in the one-page appendix on p165, which consists of a flow-chart leading to various proposed solutions to the question of universals: nominalism, contemporary Aristotelianism, constructivism (existentialism, cultural relativism, theological voluntarism), and realism, which includes classical Aristotelianism and the option the author defends in this book, Platonism.

The arguments against all the rejected options are good. They are not necessarily Plato's, as Berman is not engaging in exegesis, and is not concerned with showing that Plato actually endorsed the Platonism he himself puts forward. He thinks Terry Penner's 1987 The Ascent from Nominalism has done the job of interpreting Plato for him (he considers Penner a friend and mentor.)

What I most like about the book is that it offers evolutionary arguments for (at least Berman's version of) Platonism. I found very clever Berman's deduction of what the world (and universals more specifically) must be like for evolution to have managed to endow us (and other animals) with the sensory and cognitive systems we have. This and the possibility of the scientific enterprise are his two litmus tests for the plausibility of a view on universals. I thought that bit was great.

What I liked least about the book is what Berman 's "Platonic" universals boil down to, i.e. what he calls "scale-relative parameters" (he likes the phrase so much that he uses it no less than ten times in a twelve-line paragraph on p152.) Much of Berman's (meta?)physics rests on the concept of scale, and the idea that a given system will look different at different scales. For instance, I am both a single thing (a human being) a the meter scale, and billions of things (cells) at a smaller scale, and billions of billions of billions of things (atoms) at the angstrom-length scale.

At each scale, systems can be described by parameters, hence the phrase "scale-relative parameter", which Berman thinks is "what Plato called a 'Form'" (p144). Those that describe me as a human being will be different from those that describe me as a collection of cells or as a collection of atoms. What worries me is that Berman thinks "all scale-relative parameters [and hence Plato's Forms] are mathematical equations of some sort or other, typically differential equations of one sort or another" (p145.) Unfortunately, the examples Berman gives are either oviously true but uninteresting (gravity, speed or parabolas, for instance, can be described by equations) or interesting but (to me) totally unconvincing: how can cancerous tumors, examples of evolution or sitting (all examples listed by Berman) be reduced to differential equations?

Berman goes so far as to say that "Scientists are currently working on discovering the scale-relative parameter for being human and they are also working on discovering the scale-relative parameter for standing, that is, the scale-relative parameter for being in an orthostatic state... The scale-relative parameter for standing has something to do with when the resultants of the forces and the torques acting on the human complex spatiotemporally extended dynamical system are zero." (p147.) I'm sure if Plato could read this he would go 0_o.

I am not sure my problem with this theory is a minor quibble, because Berman concludes the book thus: "whatever is true in any domain of interest will ultimately be true, and be best explained by, the mind-independent nonspatiotemporal fully existing things scientists pursue every day in their work and which we, less rigorously, use to think about and understand our experiences of our lives" (p164.) This seems to me a profession of faith in scientism, which bodes ill for "domains of interest" like ethics or esthetics. Even if there was such a thing as a differential equations for "I am standing", I wonder what kind of differential equation could account for my reading the Lord of the Rings or for temperance being one of the cardinal virtues.

I also wonder what me being a set of equations at all levels implies for my free will.

[Louna · Rating 4 out of 5]

worth reviewing for its specific view on platonism and Aristotle's thought