[Bups-dis] Transformation of the individual

[lj lj]

Greetings,

David-

"The first criticism Luis makes: it does not necessarily follow from the 
fact
that understanding is non-atomistic that our relation to the world is
non-atomistic. If though the fundamental idea behind holism, that everything 
is
essentially related, is generally true, why shouldn’t this apply to the
individual and their relation to the world?"

But that wasn't the argument that I attacked. For sake of clarity let me 
define two types of Holism:
1. Metaphysical Holism (MH) - this is the view that all things (or facts, if 
you prefer) are inter-related.
The strong version says that all facts stand in necessary relations to one 
another; the weak version simply says that some of the relations are 
contingent.
2. Epistemic Holism (EH) - this is the view that knowledge of things (or 
facts, if you prefer) is or must be inter-related.
The strong version says that all knowledge stands in a necessary relation to 
all other knowledge (and thus we end up with an identity); the weak version 
says that some of our knowledge is or should be contingently related to 
other knowledge.

Now, what you did in your earlier post was move from EH to MH. Now you are 
trying to go from MH to EH. That is question begging.
I don't have a burning problem with EH but I don't see any good way to move 
from that to MH- that is, unless you want to dissolve the 
metaphysical-epistemological distinction.
Similarly, I don't see how there is any non-question begging way to move 
from MH to EH.
I mean exactly what kind of argument is there for MH independent of an 
argument for EH?

Moreover, my second gripe on that matter was not to do with the move from EH 
to MH (and vice versa) but, rather, with assumption that Holism was 
incompatible with Atomism. Again, we can draw the same kind of distinctions 
for Atomism as I've just done for holism and things seem far less clear-cut. 
Why can't I be, for example, a metaphysical-atomist but an 
epistemological-holist etc. etc.?


"To take the example of religion: say I have a holistic understanding of 
this
area, I view religion as one relational aspect of the development of human
culture/life. As an individual within human culture though, I myself am not
isolated from that process, I cannot avoid being essentially related to 
those
developments. On this view my whole relation to the world [as given in
consciousness] is irreducibly bound up with the psychological, social and
cultural relations that went into shaping religion over the past two 
thousand
years. As such our relation to religion [not as an abstraction, but in its 
full,
real, existence and relations] is necessarily holistic, a purely theoretical
relation, or say purely ‘religious’ [in the sense a Christian might think 
they
have] relation to religion is not, in reality, possible. Further, this 
holistic
relation to religion exists whether or not the individual concerned is at 
all
‘aware’ of this; their consciousness remains related to the
development of religion regardless of whether they know this to be the case"

But this is just re-iteration. Yes, I agree completely that UNDERSTANDING my 
relation to the world must be holistic. What I deny is that: a) it entails 
MH, and b) that it excludes atomism. I just don't think that you've done any 
work to show why EH entails MH. It certainly isn't, as far as I can see, 
logically entailed.

Now, when you talk about religion, yes, I agree that being religious is 
probably metaphysically holistic in the weak sense- in the same way that 
being human involves a metaphysical co-relation of specific physical facts 
(i.e. combinations of nucleic acids and all that jazz). But from this an 
entailment does not follow because for an entailment you'd need a strong 
sense of MH. But the strong sense entails an identity because the strong 
sense states that all relations are necessarily relations. So for every 
statement P of the form 'A is related to B' (where A and B are things or 
facts), P is a necessary truth. If that's right then 'it is not the case 
that P' is necessarily false. it follows that 'it is the case that P' is a 
necessary truth. So, as far as truth-values go: every statement P, Q, R 
(given that Q, R etc. are of the same form as P) and so on have the same 
truth-value and they do so necessarily.
If that's right then there's not much room for things like change and 
contingency.

So let me just be clear about exactly why I think these relations are 
necessary:
if holism is the view that all facts or knowledge are (or should be, in the 
case of EH) inter-related then it cannot be the case that P is false 
because, obviously, P's being false that would entail that at least one 
relation was false (and thus that not everything was inter-related).

The problem is that you clearly want a very strong sense of MH (as when you 
say:
"As such our relation to religion [not as an abstraction, but in its full, 
real, existence and relations] is necessarily holistic, a purely theoretical 
relation, or say purely ‘religious’ [in the sense a Christian might think 
they have] relation to religion is not, in reality, possible. Further, this 
holistic relation to religion exists whether or not the individual concerned 
is at all ‘aware’ of this; their consciousness remains related to the"

But as I've suggested, as soon as you start talking about strong holism of 
either variety you end up with the problem of relations being necessarily 
necessary- i.e. never contingent-, which we don't want. And when one adopts 
MH rather than EH then one ends up without even the room to say that our 
understanding might be or need to be structured necessarily in a given way 
to allow us to accurately access the world and yet and yet the world might 
not really be like that.

Regards,

Luis.

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