Parsimony ? The Fourth Substance :: essays research papers

<a href="http//www.geocities.com/vaksam/">Sam Vaknins Psychology, Philosophy, Economics and Foreign Affairs Web SitesOccasionalism is a mutation upon Cartesian metaphysics. The latter is the most notorious case of dualism ( fountainhead and body, for instance). The judging is a mental substance. The body a literal substance. What permits the thickening fundamental interactions which happen between these two disparate substances? The un all-embracing mind and the extended body surely sightnot interact without a mediating agency, God. The appearance is that of direct interaction but this is an illusion maintained by Him. He moves the body when the mind is willing and places ideas in the mind when the body comes across other bodies. Descartes postulated that the mind is an active, unextended, thought while the body is a passive, unthinking extension. The First means and the Second midpoint combine to form the Third Substance, Man. God the Fourth, uncreated Substance facilitates the direct interaction among the two within the third. Foucher raised the question how can God a mental substance interact with a material substance, the body. The answer offered was that God created the body (probably so that He will be able to interact with it). Leibnitz carried this further his Monads, the units of reality, do not really controvert and interact. They just seem to be doing so because God created them with a pre-established harmony. The continual divine mediation was, thus, reduced to a one-time act of creation. This was considered to be some(prenominal) a logical result of occasionalism and its refutation by a reductio ad absurdum ad absurdum argument. But, was the fourth substance necessary at all? Could not an explanation to all the known facts be provided without it? The ratio between the payoff of known facts (the outcomes of observations) and the number of theory elements and entities employed in order to relieve them is the parsimony r atio. Every newly discovered fact either reinforces the existent worldview or forces the introduction of a new one, through a crisis or a revolution (a paradigm shift in Kuhns toss away phrase). The new worldview need not necessarily be more parsimonious. It could be that a single new fact precipitates the introduction of a xii new theoretical entities, axioms and functions (curves between data points). The very delineation of the knit stitch of study serves to limit the number of facts, which could exercise such an influence upon the subsisting worldview and still be considered pertinent.