Your examples in this post (Gaia, Beauty), are two similar mistakes—assuming that since there’s a label, it must be labeling something important, basic, and with the expected connotations.
Maybe the fact that these examples are similar is actually a bit of a reminder to look into the dark.
For example, we might only be able to define how quarks interact with each other but not say what their nature actually is apart from being things that interact in that particular way (some might say that behaviour is all that there is to the nature of something, but then what’s the difference between an atom and a simulation of an atom?). If this were the case, then we’d have to define them as an external reference.
(Huh, are you British? I was assuming you were American. Sorry if that’s nosy.)
The Beauty-essentialist could just as easily claim that they are making an external reference.
“For example, we might only be able to define how Beauty interacts with our awareness, but not what its nature actually is apart from being a thing that interacts with us in a particular way.”—David Chalmers, probably
Suppose we even want to ground ourselves directly with an extensional definition. You might point at an STM image of an electron orbital and say “there: that is an electron.” What is stopping the beautician from pointing at the Venus de Milo and saying “there: that is beauty.”?
So I don’t see how your examples illustrate a relabeling vs. external reference distinction. What is wrong with them is not that they are “relabelings,” is that we (reductionists) accept only a certain sort of complicated work as evidence that something is ontologically fundamental, and the beautician hasn’t done that work, and is in fact contradicting other, more careful work.
Yes, you can posit that they are external references, my main point was that if they aren’t external references but merely relabellings, then they don’t change the system and so it’s invalid to try to sneak in the connotations being attempted. Sometimes people try a motte and bailey where they say they are just making a definition and not positing something new; but then they act as though the thing they said was just a relabelling has its own existence.
So I don’t see how your examples illustrate a relabeling vs. external reference distinction.
Part of what makes this so complex is that the same thing can be introduced as either a relabeling or an external reference. And people often do a half-and-half as I’ve described
Your examples in this post (Gaia, Beauty), are two similar mistakes—assuming that since there’s a label, it must be labeling something important, basic, and with the expected connotations.
Maybe the fact that these examples are similar is actually a bit of a reminder to look into the dark.
Anyhow, syntactically speaking, these are perfectly valid external references. You say:
(Huh, are you British? I was assuming you were American. Sorry if that’s nosy.)
The Beauty-essentialist could just as easily claim that they are making an external reference.
Suppose we even want to ground ourselves directly with an extensional definition. You might point at an STM image of an electron orbital and say “there: that is an electron.” What is stopping the beautician from pointing at the Venus de Milo and saying “there: that is beauty.”?
So I don’t see how your examples illustrate a relabeling vs. external reference distinction. What is wrong with them is not that they are “relabelings,” is that we (reductionists) accept only a certain sort of complicated work as evidence that something is ontologically fundamental, and the beautician hasn’t done that work, and is in fact contradicting other, more careful work.
Yes, you can posit that they are external references, my main point was that if they aren’t external references but merely relabellings, then they don’t change the system and so it’s invalid to try to sneak in the connotations being attempted. Sometimes people try a motte and bailey where they say they are just making a definition and not positing something new; but then they act as though the thing they said was just a relabelling has its own existence.
Part of what makes this so complex is that the same thing can be introduced as either a relabeling or an external reference. And people often do a half-and-half as I’ve described