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The Nature of Structure and the Structure of Nature
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The Nature of Structure and the Structure of Nature

A special issue of Philosophies (ISSN 2409-9287).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 April 2023) | Viewed by 8598

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Joshua Mozersky

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University (Kingston), Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada
Interests: philosophy of science; philosophy of language; metaphysics

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues, 

You are invited to submit an essay for inclusion in a Special Issue of Philosophies, ‘The Structure and Nature and the Nature of Structure’. 

1)  Background: For 2000 years, Aristotle’s views dominated philosophical and scientific thinking in the West.  A central feature of the Aristotelian picture is that nature behaves according to teleological principles: material objects have ends and act on the basis of sympathies.  On such an account, there is no particular difficulty in finding a place for human beings in the natural order, since our rational capacities for speech and thought can be assumed to arise straightforwardly from the reason-like principles that govern ordinary matter in space and time.  Hence, there is continuity between natural and human explanation.

The scientific revolution of the 17th century changed all of this.  Instead of teleological explanations of motion, early modern scientists and philosophers offered a mechanical conception of change, according to which material bodies follow mathematically strict laws that make no reference to goals or purposes.  As a result, the existence of uniquely human characteristics, such as acting for reasons, linguistic creativity, and the recognition of norms, came to seem quite mysterious – how can a mechanical world of causes be combined with the normative realm of reasons?  In short, what room can we find for human nature in the natural world? 

In many ways, philosophers have been grappling with this divide ever since.  Given that human investigation into reality is guided by adherence to normative concepts such as relevance, evidence, logic, and reasonableness, it is not clear how such a system can track the properties of a reality that is causal−mechanical and, therefore, devoid of normative structure (there is no sense in which material change is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’). 

One historical response to this question is to adopt a stance of incompleteness, according to which our perspective on reality interferes with our ability to comprehend it fully.  This position has been nicely summarized recently:

In our attempts to understand the empirical world we cannot get outside the empirical world.  In our attempts to understand ourselves as human beings we cannot get outside ourselves as human beings.  This is not… to say that we cannot understand anything.  But it is certainly to say that we cannot understand everything. (Bryan Magee, Ultimate Questions, Princeton University Press, 2016, p. 16.)

Another response is to deny that there is reality that is independent of us.  Instead, the structure of the world is determined by the human mind:

if the subject or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, … all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves would vanish.  As appearances they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental Aesthetic” II, sec. 8).

Classical mechanics misled us into thinking that we could … access, at least in theory, a vison of reality entirely independent of the observer.  But the development of physics has shown that, at the end of the day, this is impossible. (Carlo Rovelli, Reality is not what it Seems, Riverhead Books, 2017, p. 253). 

Accordingly, the question arises whether it is possible to gain knowledge of the world as it is independently of us, or whether all knowledge content is either partial or relative to our structure or the structure of our inquiries. 

2)  Aim and Scope: Can we explain human reasoning in terms that are consistent with our theories of space, time, and matter?  Assuming we are physical beings, it would seem that this is a necessity, but it is unclear whether the two worldviews can be reconciled given the differences in their underlying logic.  If they cannot, does this entail that we are not part of the natural world?  Is it, therefore, possible to construct a picture of reality that includes ourselves and our perspective on that reality?

The aim of this issue is to explore the questions that arise from the attempt to construct a scientific picture of reality, humans included.  The goal is to look at these issues from a variety of contemporary perspectives, including natural science, social science, linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy.

3)  In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • What is the relationship between the structure of the world and our human perspective on it?
  • Can we explain human reasoning in terms that are consistent with our theories of space, time, and matter?
  • What is the current status of scientific realism?
  • What is the structure of scientific theories (general or particular)
  • What is the structure of language? Of thought?
  • What is the relationship between language and thought?
  • How, if at all, does the structure of language enable it to capture the structure of reality?
  • Why is mathematics so effective in describing reality? What is the structure of mathematical thought?
  • Is the structure of the world mathematical? Logical? Metaphysical?
  • What is the structure of time, causation, matter, etc.
  • Is a scientifically informed metaphysics possible?
  • What are natural kinds?

I look forward to receiving your contribution.

Sincerely,

Prof. Dr. Joshua Mozersky
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Philosophies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • nature
  • structure
  • mind independence
  • reason
  • natural kinds
  • space
  • time
  • matter
  • logic
  • truth

Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

20 pages, 512 KiB  
Article
Flowing Time: Emergentism and Linguistic Diversity
by Kasia M. Jaszczolt
Philosophies 2023, 8(6), 116; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8060116 - 04 Dec 2023
Viewed by 1433
Abstract
Humans are complex systems, ‘macro-entities’, whose existence, behaviour and consciousness stem out of the configurations of physical entities on the micro-level of the physical world. But an explanation of what humans do and think cannot be found through ‘tracking us back’, so to [...] Read more.
Humans are complex systems, ‘macro-entities’, whose existence, behaviour and consciousness stem out of the configurations of physical entities on the micro-level of the physical world. But an explanation of what humans do and think cannot be found through ‘tracking us back’, so to speak, to micro-particles. So, in explaining human behaviour, including linguistic behaviour on which this paper focuses, emergentism opens up a powerful opportunity to explain what it is exactly that emerged on that level, bearing in mind the end product in the form of the intra- and inter-cultural diversity. Currently there is a gap in emergentism research. On one hand, there are discussions in philosophy of the emergent human reality; on the other, there are discussions of social, cultural, or individual variation of these emergent aspects of humanity in the fields of anthropology, sociology, linguistics or psychology. What I do in this paper is look for a way to ‘trace’ some such diversified emergents from what is universal about their ‘coming to being’, all the way through to their diversification. My chosen emergent is human time, my domain of inquiry is natural-language discourse, and the drive behind this project is to understand the link between ‘real’ time of spacetime on the micro-level from which we emerged and the human time devised by us, paying close attention to the overwhelming diversity in which temporal reference is expressed in human languages. The main question is, where does this diversity fit in? Does understanding of this diversity, as well as of what lurks under the surface of this diversity, aid the emergentism story? My contribution to this volume on ‘the nature of structure and the structure of nature’ thus takes the following take on the title. The structure of human communication is at the same time uniform, universal, and relative to culture, in that it is emergent as a human characteristic, and as such compatible with the micro-level correlates in some essential ways, but also free to fly in different directions that are specific to societies and cultures. I explore here the grey area between the micro-level and the linguistic reflections of time—the middle ground that is emergent itself but that tends to be by-passed by those who approach the question of human flowing time from either end: metaphysics and the philosophy of time on the one hand, and contrastive linguistics, anthropological linguistics and language documentation on the other. I illustrate the debate with examples from tensed and tenseless languages from different language families, entertaining the possibility of a conceptual universal pertaining to time as degrees of epistemic modality. Needless to say, putting the question in this way also sets out my (not unassailable) methodology. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Nature of Structure and the Structure of Nature)
25 pages, 1108 KiB  
Article
The Concept of a Substance and Its Linguistic Embodiment
by Henry Laycock
Philosophies 2023, 8(6), 114; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8060114 - 27 Nov 2023
Viewed by 1332
Abstract
My objective is a better comprehension of two theoretically fundamental concepts. One, the concept of a substance in an ordinary (non-Aristotelian) sense, ranging over such things as salt, carbon, copper, iron, water, and methane—kinds of stuff that now count as (chemical) [...] Read more.
My objective is a better comprehension of two theoretically fundamental concepts. One, the concept of a substance in an ordinary (non-Aristotelian) sense, ranging over such things as salt, carbon, copper, iron, water, and methane—kinds of stuff that now count as (chemical) elements and compounds. The other I will call the object-concept in the abstract sense of Russell, Wittgenstein, and Frege in their logico-semantical enquiries. The material object-concept constitutes the heart of our received logico/ontic system, still massively influenced by Aristotle after almost 2.5 millennia. On such an account, the fundamentality of material objects and their attributes are the metaphysical basis of the cosmos, as reflected in our received logic, Quine’s ‘canonical notation’—derived via the empiricism of Russell from Frege’s function-based Begriffschrifft, and consisting of concrete singular terms and variables, quantifiers and predicate-expressions. The inadequacy of Frege’s approach to understanding concepts is reflected in his initial question. Frege enquires of ‘what it is that we are calling an object’, remarking that he regards a regular definition as impossible: “we have here something too simple to admit of logical analysis”. The imagined ultimacy or simplicity of the idea of a single object (arithmetically, just a unit—one as opposed to two, three, four, etc.) as foundational to the calculus is just that—imagined. It is also guaranteed to block the comprehension of the substance-concept. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Nature of Structure and the Structure of Nature)
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14 pages, 238 KiB  
Article
Neutral Realism: A New Metaphysical Approach to Representation
by Heather Dyke
Philosophies 2023, 8(2), 19; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8020019 - 27 Feb 2023
Viewed by 1349
Abstract
Metaphysics seeks an account of fundamental reality as it is independent of any observer or point of view. As such, one problem it faces is that any such account is necessarily created by some observer from some point of view. Does this mean [...] Read more.
Metaphysics seeks an account of fundamental reality as it is independent of any observer or point of view. As such, one problem it faces is that any such account is necessarily created by some observer from some point of view. Does this mean that metaphysics is thereby inherently impossible? Or inherently incomplete? I argue that it is possible and it can aim at completeness, but it must acknowledge the contributions made by the human perspective on reality, human cognition, and features of the conceptual and linguistic representations in which it is couched. The idea that we can discover metaphysical insights by investigating concepts and language has had a remarkably tenacious grip on the field of metaphysics. I offer a diagnosis of how this grip took hold and an argument that it should be loosened. I also propose a means of pursuing metaphysical investigation that does not rely on an enquiry into language and that can yield fruitful results. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Nature of Structure and the Structure of Nature)
15 pages, 880 KiB  
Article
The Artificial Intelligence Explanatory Trade-Off on the Logic of Discovery in Chemistry
by José Ferraz-Caetano
Philosophies 2023, 8(2), 17; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8020017 - 23 Feb 2023
Viewed by 1616
Abstract
Explanation is a foundational goal in the exact sciences. Besides the contemporary considerations on ‘description’, ‘classification’, and ‘prediction’, we often see these terms in thriving applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in chemistry hypothesis generation. Going beyond describing ‘things in the world’, these applications [...] Read more.
Explanation is a foundational goal in the exact sciences. Besides the contemporary considerations on ‘description’, ‘classification’, and ‘prediction’, we often see these terms in thriving applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in chemistry hypothesis generation. Going beyond describing ‘things in the world’, these applications can make accurate numerical property calculations from theoretical or topological descriptors. This association makes an interesting case for a logic of discovery in chemistry: are these induction-led ventures showing a shift in how chemists can problematize research questions? In this article, I present a fresh perspective on the current context of discovery in chemistry. I argue how data-driven statistical predictions in chemistry can be explained as a quasi-logical process for generating chemical theories, beyond the classic examples of organic and theoretical chemistry. Through my position on formal models of scientific explanation, I demonstrate how the dawn of AI can provide novel insights into the explanatory power of scientific endeavors. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Nature of Structure and the Structure of Nature)
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18 pages, 267 KiB  
Article
On the Understanding of the Unity of Organic and Inorganic Nature in Terms of Hegelian Dialectics
by Cihan Cinemre
Philosophies 2022, 7(6), 128; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7060128 - 13 Nov 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1456
Abstract
The understanding of nature and its motion through Hegelian dialectics brings the notion of the organism that is intertwined with its inorganic nature. This notion is crucial first and foremost to comprehend life in its wholeness, as becoming that is in constant movement. [...] Read more.
The understanding of nature and its motion through Hegelian dialectics brings the notion of the organism that is intertwined with its inorganic nature. This notion is crucial first and foremost to comprehend life in its wholeness, as becoming that is in constant movement. To attain this comprehension, it is necessary to treat beings as entities invariably determining each other in their reciprocal relatedness. In this way, it becomes possible to set both the organism and its environment free of their fixity and quiescence. Within the work, to derive this mode of reasoning, the sciences and the dialectics are asserted in their unity. The relationship between the organism and its inorganic nature is one of tension. The organism in its finitude is in opposition to its inorganic nature; it is compelled to act to sublate the latter’s independence, indifference, and exteriority for its self-preservation. This is called the melting of the non-organic into fluidity that renders the organism infinite. The relationship, as tension, elicits the notion of freedom; it signifies that freedom is not merely a matter of free will, it rather pertains to the organism’s penetration into its exteriority, in which it can determine ever-changing goals for itself. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Nature of Structure and the Structure of Nature)
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