Brian,
I personally do not believe that science is merely instrumental. Pure physicists do not seem motivated primarily by a desire for technological manipulation, but rather by a desire for understanding. And I find the understanding of nature to be itself a spiritual thing. If there is a Creator, wouldn't understanding His creation be a way of getting to know Him? Even if there is not a creator, surely understanding the world beyond human beings would be part of the theoretical reason Aristotle thinks is the ultimate point of practical reason.
I'm also suspicious of religious or spiritual objections to the instrumental (technological) side of science.
Before science, religion claimed instrumental value for itself. The OT prophets told the Israelites that they were conquered because they had slipped into idolatry. Jesus didn't just tell us about spiritual things -- he healed the sick (and the dead). I gather that many of the American Indians converted to Christianity when plagues were wiping them out and leaving the Europeans unscathed. And the Christians of the time agreed with them that this was evidence for their own religion. People still pray for health. It's only once science radically outperformed prayer alone that religion started to dismiss the instrumental value of being able to produce health that religion regarded it as irrelevant. (At any rate, we should at least realize that health and the greater leisure that technology allow us could be valuable for spiritual purposes. Yes, technology also produces time wasting video games, but in the middle ages, very few could afford a book, whether religious or secular. It's too easy to pretend that technology brings us only the cineplex and the video game -- and even the cineplex sometimes brings us a real work of art.)
Robt,
The view that language doesn't really refer outside itself (a position you share with the structuralists and post-structuralists) is a particular theory of language (or group of theories). Such non-referential theories of language are not the only ones, and indeed not the kind that a realist would accept. (A realist on my view is someone who believes that rocks and stones and trees and tigers and genes and most of the other things we confidently believe in really do exist independent of our perceptions and beliefs about them -- they existed before humans came along to believe in them, for instance.) Therefore, to assume such theories in an argument for anti-realism is to beg the question against the realist.
I raised a problem above for such non-referential theories -- that they seem to have problems accounting for how language could arise in the first place or how they could be learned by any individual child.
I did not explain the alternative views because I'd already written too much and because I was afraid no one would be interested -- I can explain them if it would help.
As for Buddhism, I'm not knowledgeable about it, but I am told that there is much Buddhist philosophy which looks a fair amount like Western philosophy -- engaging in rational debates on subjects that would be recognizable to Western philosophers, though naturally phrased in a different vocabulary. And in fact, even the view you describe is one which roughly corresponds to some form of Kantianism -- and Kant is surely a Western philsopher. Actually, in its linguistic focus it is more closely related to the views of the amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, the structuralists, Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science and "analytic" anti-realists like Michael Dummett -- all very much within the Western tradition (and all ultimately indebted to Kant).
AE, I'll respond to you in a separate post since this one's already pretty long.
[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 17, 2004).]
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