wleg wrote:Yes, the existence of a thing is explained by its’ unique attributes.
You use existence in a very peculiar way. To my dog like way of thinking, when you list an objects attributes you are describing 'it'; you are not saying anything about it's existence. As Ginkgo pointed out, to claim that existence is an attribute is to engage in rationalism. As far as empiricism goes, it is meaningless to question whether or not the attributes exist. John Locke described two types of attributes in An essay concerning human understanding: Primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are objectively true, they are things like shape, solidity, mass, size. Things which anyone who was to examine the object would agree on. Secondary qualities are things like colour, taste and smell, which are subjective and may differ from person to person. As Wayne pointed out though, with regard to colour, it is possible to analyse the wavelength of light. Likewise, one can analyse the chemicals responsible for smell and taste and so on, in such a way that the source of a secondary quality can be objectively agreed on; that is what some scientists do.
If an object actually has any of those qualities, it necessarily exists, there is no separate quality of existence; if there is any attribute that can be agreed on, it exists. If there is a patch of blue, that everyone can see, shows up on cameras and all scientific instruments that measure blueness, the question of whether the patch of blue exists is pointless. Consider this exchange:
"Do you see that patch of blue, that everyone in the world can see and shows up on every camera in the world?"
"Yes, I do. Does it exist?"
An empiricist might be characterised as some who has done enough philosophy to think that is a stupid question.
The dispute between rationalism and empiricism has it's roots in Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am'. Descartes was a rationalist, he argued that, because the senses can be misled, ie: secondary qualities are subjective, you cannot rely on them to give you knowledge. To know something, said Descartes, you need to have 'a clear and distinct idea' of it. Today, we are more likely to talk about things being self evidently true, or easily demonstrable. In the Meno, by Plato, there is a passage in which Socrates demonstrates to a slave boy how a square drawn within a square, joining the mid points of the four sides is half the size of the original. It is demonstrably true:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meno's_slave That is knowledge of a sort, you know it is true, because you can prove it. Euclid proposed five self evident axioms and created the Elements, one of the most influential books of all time, by applying the sort of reasoning used by Socrates. Descartes hoped to emulate that by creating axioms of his own; he thought he had one in 'I think, therefore I am'. However, hard nosed empiricists came along and pointed out that it doesn't follow from experiences of Descartes that Descartes exists, or more generally, experiences of 'you' don't prove that 'you' exist. Just as the sensation of a patch of blue exists, the sensation of you exists, but the sensation of a patch of blue might just be a sensation of a patch of blue, and the sensation of you might just be a sensation of you. Bertrand Russell made the point: "We may all have come into existence five minutes ago, provided with ready-made memories, with holes in our socks and hair that needed cutting." There is no way of telling from the experiences we have that any hypothesis we make about their source is true. This is the point that infuriated Dr Johnson, someone (I'm guessing Boswell) challenged him to refute the idea of Berkeley, that everything is an idea in the mind of god. Apparently, Johnson said: "I refute it thus!" and kicked a stone.
Empiricism is the dominant philosophy of science. Paul Feyerabend was a massively influential philosopher of science in the later 20th century; some people, unfairly in my view, blame him for post-modernism. The point he made about science is that it doesn't matter how you arrive at any given hypothesis, hard work, lucky guess, divine inspiration or any means you care to imagine. Where some post modernists/relativists went wrong is by insisting that all hypotheses are therefore equal. In one respect that is true, because if they make no predictions about how the world works, they are all equally useless; we can tell how the world works by looking at it, we don't need a metaphysical hypothesis. That is empiricism. Scientists usually have some metaphysical belief, as I said, realism is the default setting and Gingko has provided a link that explains it.
People talk a great deal about the scientific method; in a twist of irony, they are engaging in metaphysical speculation: Feyerabend was right, there is no 'scientific method', but again, as Richard Feyman said: "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."
In your Changing Technique thread, Wayne, you say:
The better way to do Philosophy is for philosophers to first understand and then teach the mechanics of rational thinking which will be the most benefit to mankind.
They did. It's called logic.
