there's a specter haunting philosophy:
the specter of reaching inconceivable levels of meta.
the worst part: i'm not helping.
not too long ago i attended a lecture by colin mcginn titled "on the possibility of ontology." his main point was that there is no need to reduce from any of the three traditional ontological categories (i.e. physical, mental, abstract) to any other, mainly because none of the ontological categories are well-defined (or definable) anyway. so mcginn pretty much said let's leave things that "are" as just "being" and accept many things as just plain "being". that's to say: chairs are, just as beliefs are and numbers are. he dubbed this view ontological pluralism.
this position leaves some questions unclear (is this really ontological pluralism? isn't this an argument for ontological category-eliminitavism?), but in the spirit of this post, i'll leave them aside for now.
what bothers me is that, in having ontology the topic of discussion, we are engaging in the the practice of metametaphysics, as ontology is a part of metaphysics; or others have dubbed it metaontology (which 3 out of 3 surveyed found a more pleasing term). anyway, these metaontological talks have already spawned discussions about the plausibility of engaging in in such metaontological discussions, deeming them to be meaningless banter, a sort of psychobabble. this opinion, of course, spontaneously generated metametaontology, or even worse, metametametaphysics.
and i'm making all things worse because whatever level of meta these ontologists achieve, i'll always be, a fortiori one step more meta.
i guess my worry and my reason for this post is this basic pondering: are claims of this nature truth-conditional? are we even still worried about the truth at this level of meta?
No comments:
Post a Comment