1 / 8

Standards of Explanation: the Presocratic Revolution

Standards of Explanation: the Presocratic Revolution. Before the Revolution: Mythopoetic Explanations. Features: Natural phenomena are the result of the actions taken by divine persons existing outside the world

marin
Download Presentation

Standards of Explanation: the Presocratic Revolution

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Standards of Explanation:the Presocratic Revolution

  2. Before the Revolution:Mythopoetic Explanations Features: • Natural phenomena are the result of the actions taken by divine persons existing outside the world • What divinities do is unpredictable (their actions depend on their personal interests, desires, needs, which cannot be predicted in advance) • Divine power is magical, i.e., unexplained (Thor-makes-lightning-because-he’s-got-that-hammer [how does it do it? We don’t know])

  3. What Mythopoets Assume About the World • The world is unsystematic and capricious (because the various divine persons have often-conflicting interests, desires, needs) • The causes of natural phenomena cannot be known except by people (oracles) who can detect the interests, desires and needs of the Gods in advance • What oracles can tell us does not explain how the Gods do what they do. • Human interests, desires and needs can only be served by serving those of the Gods.

  4. After the Revolution:Presocratic Explanations Good-making Features: • Universality (the explanation applies everywhere and everywhen to everything within the ‘scope’ of the explanation [scope=everything to be explained]) • Simplicity (Occam’s Razor satisfied…no deus ex machina [unexplained contrivance that solves a problem] • Naturalistic (=employs all and only things that are in nature to explain natural phenomena) • Noncircular (does not explain X by means of X)

  5. Why are each of these good-making properties of an explanation? Universality: any explanation that fails to cover everything that it applies to is incomplete, and thus bad (e.g, the shirt that wants to be lavender). Simplicity: if you can explain something using fewer elements, why use more? Naturalism: rejects divine, magical causes (hmmm….why would that be good?) Noncircular: consider what it means to say “the fire was caused by the fire”. Sounds like a failure to explain, doesn’t it?

  6. The Hidden Assumptionsof Presocratic (Proto-Rational)Explanation • The world is intelligible (i.e., the reality of phenomena we wish to explain can be apprehended by the thought of some mind[s]) • The world is intelligible to us (our minds can think about it usefully) • The world to be explained is regular (i.e., it has a set of systematic, structure properties which remain the same over time….the world is predictable)

  7. There is some set of true statements about the world, the contraries of which are false • In respect to these statements it cannot both be the case that P is true and P is false (the world is consistent with the logical law of noncontradiction)

  8. Going Forward to the Presocratics Not all of the Presocratic philosophers offer explanations that satisfy all the foregoing good-making features of a proto-rational explanation mentioned. Often they go too far with some of them (e.g., Thales’ account of nature is too simple [radically parsimonious]) Chief departure from the mythopoets: rejection of divine causes + naturalism + reliance on specifically human powers of thought and experience.

More Related