Stephen Pepper’s World Hypotheses: Season 1, Episode 3
Narrator: “Previously on World Hypothese
So we are finally ready to dive into our first world hypothesis. Let's start with formism. Pepper distinguishes two variations: immanent and transcendent.
Immanent Formism
Formism, it should now be clear, is a world hypothesis with unlimited scope. We can use it to ground a complete, and reasonably coherent, philosophy of science. In a previous post, I suggested that the typical psychology student “assimilates a more-or-less unified account of the scientific enterprise”. Here I can be more specific: Transcendent formism is the default metaphysics of the modal research psychologist. I don’t mean to imply that this default metaphysics guides the thinking of the research psychologists in all contexts (e.g., I may be a transcendent formist when I teach Research Methods, but an animist when I read Heidegger). But transcendent formism (as a metaphysics with unlimited scope) is the backdrop against which our parochial theories typically emerge. What we end up with, of course, is a constellation of loosely-affiliated theoretical systems, each with its own constellation of discrete laws (or empirical regularities that cry out to be interpreted as laws).
Mechanism
We will begin our discussion of mechanism with a very simple observation: The world is like a machine.
To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1