Hi TOK List,

  Over on Alexander Bard’s Intellectual Deep Web, there has been an interesting discussion about ontology, and the primacy of experience. For example, in what way does a cup of porridge exist independent of human knowers? What about photosynthesis or the Big Bang? I jumped in and offered a ToK viewpoint:

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  The way I understand the basic dispute here pertains to the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena. That is, there is the world independent of human knowledge (noumena, the thing in itself) and they way the world appears to us as human knowers in our subjective perception of it (phenomenology), and we can only really “know” the latter. A. Elung is embracing this distinction (at least key parts of it), whereas A. Bard is rejecting it (at least in part).

 

For me, although the Kantian insight is crucial at one level, it also is unclear. For example, I know this table in front of me is made of atoms. That is a conceptual analysis and an ontological claim of the “thing in itself” that is actually completely separate from my perceptual experience (phenomenology). I shared this simply as an example to clarify why the Kantian distinction has some conceptual problems with it, at least at a simplified level. That said, it is also the case that my knowledge of atoms comes from my participation in a human community of knowers who developed knowledge of the world via the assumptions and methods of science. In short, all human knowledge does require a human knower, at least in some ways.

 

  To sort out the issues, I think we need to be working from a holistic metaphysics that includes (a) the ontic (the idea of reality as completely independent of human knowledge, starting with the infinite void at Time = 0); (b) the ontological (human knowledge about reality); (c) the phenomenological (human subjective experience of being-in-the-world); (d) the intersubjective/ideological/social construction of reality and (e) scientific epistemology (systematic knowledge derived from experiment and data collection) that shows how they exist in relation on a map. That is what the ToK language system tries to do. See attached to show how I map ontic, ontology, and phenomenology. It also includes a depiction that is used to illustrate John Wheeler’s notion of a participatory universe. I should note here that over the course of his career, his metaphysics evolved from physical objects to fields to information. With its “behavioral metaphysics,” the ToK language system adopts an “object-field change measured via information” view of both scientific ontology and epistemology.

 

  Perhaps this map could be of some use in the context of the present discussion?

 

Best,
Gregg