Determinism, internalism and objectivity

OLIMPIA LOMBARDI

Ringberg Castle, Rottach-Egern

Workshop; International Interdisciplinary Workshop on Determinism (invitada); 2001

Harald Atmanspacher and Robert Bishop

One of the most longstanding debates in the history of philosophy is the one resulting from the confrontation between realism and relativism. For the metaphysical realist there is only one real ontology, and this ontology is taken as the object of our objective knowledge. For the relativist, by contrast, objectivity is relative to the historical or cultural context. Putnam’s internalism was proposed as a middle way between these opposing views, and had wide repercussion for many areas of philosophy. According to internalism, ontology is framework-dependent, so "objective" does not mean independent of the subject, but rather, resulting from applying our frameworks to the reality lying behind the world of our experience. The internalist perspective was not originally proposed to face controversial questions in philosophy of science such as the problem of the objectivity of scientific descriptions. Nevertheless, in the present contribution I will argue that internalism provides a proper philosophical approach to deal with the problem of the compatibility between deterministic and indeterministic descriptions in highly unstable systems. When the framework-dependence of ontology is accepted, both descriptions become objective because each one of them cuts out its own entities from the same underlying reality. I will also suggest that internalism can be applied to other traditional problems in the philosophy of physics -such as debates about irreversibility and locality-- and to the classical mind-matter problem in the philosophy of mind. Finally, I will discuss some remaining problems regarding the notion of underlying reality and the conception of reduction.