Jonathan Hockey’s Reviews > Dynamics of Reason > Status Update

The analysis of Darwinian biology and evolution is also deeply flawed and weak. Why is he bringing Kant up in such a discussion? His Critique of judgment offers no basis for evolutionary thinking. And why Pierce and pragmatism? How about social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer the people who actually took Darwins ideas to a complete ontological system?

As we can do this, why not do it? Why commit ourselves to such a ever more ludicrous ontology of physical structure when we could simply bring into question that itty bitty metric infiinitesimally extending out from every event?

We can always vary the curvature rather than admit some unseen force, or we can postulate some unseen thing to explain a bit of variation in curvature that is otherwise unexplained. Does this seem like a strong ontological structure? I am not saying we should abandon it, but we should hold it in a place like Husserl's epoche, monitor its results without fully committing to its ontology.

The structure may have no ontological status at all, as general covariance may be such that any deviations find an explanation that can be fitted into the framework. What of dark matter, dark energy? All these extra ontological structures that emerge from taking general relativity's structure too seriously perhaps and can be arbitraily varied to undermine any discrepancies

But this theory, of course, is limited to spaces of constant curvature and is thus quite inapplicable to the radically new (space-time) structure employed in the general theory of relativity."

[Once again statements like this are dubious to my mind. he is claiming an ontological status for this structure which is under dispute due to general covariance, diffeomorphisms etc and due to quantum loop gravity possibility

He also neglects to mention the thermodynamics revolution story. This I believe should surely class as more fundamental conceptually and theoretically than the chemical revolution story. Boltzman, Maxwell's Demon, once again Barbours recent ideas, even Hawkings and mainstream cosmology is largely inspired by the thermodynamics aspects in their extensions of general relativity.

Also he overestimates Einsteins completion of the relative motion dilemma. Einsteins view does not complete the story as we see from the likes of Julian Barbour one has to go further to genuinely complete the Machian revolution. And the whole general covariance issue is glossed over considerably. Add the variable speed of light view Einstein considered also as I would like to see this directly addressed.

Disappointing assessment of quantum theory, neglecting to mention quantum gravity, and the quantum loop gravity approach where space and time are emergent. Perhaps this was just an emerging idea when he wrote this.. However, I think it raises more serious problems for his whole interpretation and its precedence, for if space-time is emergent the whole tradition he is privileging is in fact secondary.

Major assumptions social and otherwise have to be made as to what is accepted as this internally constituted realism, and these are precisely what are under debate when we are looking to make changes in our perspective, and so cannot be taken as given without a holistic appeal to some presumed "consensus". It is not enough to defeat relativism and holism

However, just as in the case of Kant's original conception, we do retain an element of"internal" or what Kant called "empirical realism." For, once a given constitutive framework is already in place, there is a perfectly precise sense in which we can then speak of a "matching" or "correspondence" between a theory formulated within that framework and the empirical or phenomenal world.

{Still Holism]