Metsfanmax wrote:What I think the quoted argument misses is that the mathematical equation describing the dynamics is valid regardless of the fundamental reason for why the dynamics happens that way. Newton's law of gravitation, for example, is clearly a supreme approximation describing the motion of the moon. Whether that is because of general relativity or because of space aliens, it is nevertheless true.
Hrmm, my limited knowledge of philosophy makes me agree with what you are saying; but, and im sure there is someone around here who can answer adequately, are you not referring to empiricism rather than objectivity?
I don't know if I'm quite qualified to answer this, but I had made a mental note to come back and try at some point (as much for my own clarity of reasoning as for any external reasoning), so here goes.
Empiricism is all about judging reality only on the basis of evidence that we can collect, either directly or indirectly. Objectivity is all about finding out what is really there, behind the "veil of perception". For example it would be perfectly permissible in empiricism for me to say "I am sitting on a black chair", but for objectivity that statement is functionally meaningless. The concepts of me, the chair, the colour black, and what it means to be sitting are all inherently subjective, even if they can be almost universally agreed upon. What actually matters is what is really happening.
In a sense, to avoid making this a really really long post (it's going to be long enough anyway), we are limited by our perception. We can draw up mathematical models for things, we can "discover" certain laws and functional relationships between things, but what we cannot do (with the possible exception of pure theoretical mathematics, and even that is debatable) is to see behind our "veil of perception". Our brains just aren't capable of perceiving or conceptualising that level of reality.
For example, you can look at relativity. Relativity states that space is curved, but it is impossible to conceive of a 3 dimensional object, functionally infinite in all of those 3 dimensions, that is also curved. We can imagine something like a long, thin, wide box, that has 3 dimensions, and then bend it to be a curved 3 dimensonal object, but we cannot imagine that the 3 dimensions themselves can be curved because we would have to be able to conceptualise a space outside of those 3 dimensions for it to be curved in, and thats simply limiting the size of the 3 dimensions and curving within those same 3 dimensions, which is fundamentally different to an actual reality of 3 dimensional space which is also curved.
Or, you can look at quantum mechanics. This states that an electron may be able to exist in multiple places at the same time. Now, we can imagine a picture of an electron at a point in space, and we can imagine zooming out to give a wider view and we can say that now we can see that electron existing in more than one place at once, but what we are actually doing is imagining multiple elctrons. We're not picturing a single electron co-existing in multiple locations, we are imagining copies of the elctron existing at the same time in different locations and all sharing the same behaviour and exhibiting the effect that if one of them is affected by something they all are.
It all gets very counter-intuitive at these sorts of levels, and it's confounded some of the greatest minds of our generation and a few beforehand. Richard Feynman, the godfather of quantum physics, himself admitted that he didn't actually understand quantum physics. He just followed the maths.