July 18, 2021 – David Bohm was concerned with providing a description of reality—at the quantum level, and more generally, a unified description of matter, life, and consciousness, all adding up to a general concept of reality or a metaphysical theory. Such synthetic ontological projects were not popular in much of 20^thcentury philosophy and thus Bohm’s philosophical work has been often ignored by professional philosophers. However, it is important to realize that although he was clearly more concerned with describing a mind-independent reality than many other 20th-century physicists or philosophers, this concern did not mean that he ignored the role of the mind (language, perception, etc.) in his attempts to describe reality. In other words, he did not ignore epistemological issues or questions that concern the nature of our knowledge and the problems of justifying it, or the way language shapes our perception of reality. On the contrary, his broad philosophical work includes extensive studies of various epistemic issues: physics and perception (Bohm 1965a), the notions of truth and understanding (Bohm 1964), a view of science as ‘perception-communication’ (Bohm 1977), experimentation with the structure of language (the rheomode, Bohm 1977), study of knowledge understood as process (Bohm 1974), and discussions of topics such as communication, creativity, art, and so on. To fully appreciate Bohm’s views about the nature of reality, they should be understood in the context of his epistemic considerations.

What would it mean to go beyond Bohm in philosophy? Before doing that we ought to first be able to understand the philosophical significance of what he did. Perhaps his main contribution was to offer us a version of scientific metaphysics, through his interpretations of quantum theory and the more general implicate order scheme he developed. The need for a scientific metaphysics has in recent years been energetically proposed by Ladyman and Ross in their ‘ontic structural realism,’ which is in some ways similar to Bohm’s implicate order scheme—perhaps some new possibilities arise when thinking together these schemes? But Bohm’s proposal to experiment with the structure of language and to ask what happens to epistemology if both reality and knowledge are processes offer likewise radically new perspectives for philosophy. In this talk Pylkkänen goes through some of Bohm’s key philosophical contributions and sketches how they could be further developed in future research.

Length: 2 hours

Paavo Pylkkänen, PhD, Philosopher of Mind, Helsinki University, Finland