John said the below.
I take exception to the claim that order is not a projection from our
own experience and creations (notably logic). Nature, our scientific
model of The World is orderly by reason of its having a logical
skeleton. Naively perceived orders in The World, like the succession
of day and night, depend upon the locale, scale, and senses of the
observer. Thus, aspects of The World may seem orderly TO US, and we
take advantage of this relationship, which itself depends upon logic.
I also take issue with the idea that there is no power of intuition,
simply from my own experience, which is convincing (to me). Indeed,
I think that quantum mechanics has now cleared the way to introduce
intuition even into Nature.
STAN
>
>Folks,
>
>It has been a commonplace in epistemology for, well, I don't know
>how long, that knowledge of the world is impossible unless there is
>order in the world. There are several aspects of this claim.
>
>First, order is assimilated to the idea of regularity. Hume argued
>fairly convincingly that we should be sceptical about any
>regularities we identify in our perceptual experience should be
>projected beyond that experience. He argued that there is no certain
>(i.e., deductive) grounds for doing so. Hume argued that moral,
>i.e., practical, rather than logical considerations of living
>require us to just go ahead anyway as if the regularities can be
>extended. This is in line with his general idea that reason should
>serve the passions. He was a pretty down-to-earth guy who liked his
>food and drink.
>More recently, American pragmatists have typically argued that to
>approach knowledge we should assume the world is regular to some
>degree (39%?) as a working hypothesis, and then see if this is born
>out by our experience, and test this against our practical needs.
>Nicholas Rescher went a bit further and suggested that we should
>test not individual claims against our practical needs and their
>results, but whole methodologies that legitimate knowledge claims.
>This reduces the noise from lucky or unlucky projections. Note that
>there need be no single validated methodology on this approach.
>Methodologies may have different practical domains, so they don't
>clash, or may give similar practical results over common domains, or
>they may give complementary results over the same domain. So there
>is no requirement of a single, universal, best validated
>methodology. However, if the working assumption is shown to be
>false, it is highly unlikely that there will be any validated
>methodology. So we put methodology in the service of practical
>needs, which would have made Hume smile.
>
>Second, order may come from us. Kant seems to have thought something
>like this so far as spatial, temporal and causal order is concerned,
>but strangely enough, not moral order. He's been proven wrong on
>space and time, insofar such things can be proven -- one can always
>find a way to save a hypothesis if one is willing to make enough
>alterations elsewhere, as Duhem showed and Quine justified
>logically, but as Duhem pointed out, we have to fall back on common
>sense as a guide. This puts a lot of weight on a seemingly
>mysterious faculty. Furthermore, we know that there are illusions
>produced by our sensory understanding that are persistent and
>regular, so perhaps all of the order in our understanding stems from
>the same source: us.
>The Scottish common sense philosophers, e.g., Reid, from whose
>school sprang scientists like Young (wave theory) and Maxwell
>(statistical mechanics and electromagnetics) addressed this problem
>by proposing that the senses meet in what they called common sense.
>Illusions can be recognized and rejected despite their persistence
>because they do not persist in common sense. This idea can be
>extended to the understanding via what Whewell called the
>consilience of inductions, which applies the same principle to other
>aspects of the understanding. Basically, the solution (if it is one)
>turns the methods of our understanding of the world onto itself.
>Nice. However, this reflective circularity raise a worry in itself:
>the very commonality or consilience may be a product of the
>understanding itself, and not of the world. In fact that might be
>the simplest explanation. So we don't seem to escape so easily from
>illusion, and this nonHumean, more Cartesian form of scepticism.
>Hume would not be smiling.
>
>Third, and my last for now, the understanding (our mind) is part of
>the world, and there are no logical grounds supporting the
>separation of the two that stand up to scrutiny. Peirce, I think,
>was the first to give a cogent argument for this on the basis of the
>theory of signs (semiotics, broadly). According to Peirce, the stuff
>of our understanding consists entirely of signs and their rational
>and factual relations. Just as we have to interpret the signs of the
>world we get through perception, we have to interpret the signs of
>our inner experience. He argues convincingly, I think, in Questions
>Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man, Journal of Speculative
>Philosophy 2 (1868), pp. 103-114 that we cannot have any cognition
>not determined by a previous cognition, i.e., an intuition. It rules
>out, in particular, introspection. In Some Consequences of Four
>Incapacities Claimed For Man, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2
>(1868), pp. 140-157, he argues that
>
> 1. We have no power of Introspection, but all knowledge of the
>internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our
>knowledge of external facts.
>
> 2. We have no power of Intuition, but every cognition is determined
>logically by previous cognitions.
>
>3. We have no power of thinking without signs.
>
>4. We have no conception of the absolutely incognizable.
>
>Some version of 1-4 have been assumed by most modern philosophers
>(less so since Peirce, but remnants have been very tenacious). This
>paper looks at how philosophy has been misled by assuming one or
>more of these dubious capacities. I should point out that he does
>not assume the reality of the external world here, but only that we
>fallibly divide our experience into that of the internal and that of
>the external. Very clever move, as the points he makes have to be
>established first before we can make a cogent argument for the
>reality of the world.
>The significance of this in the present context is that we should
>not assume our interpretation of the meaning of our won thoughts is
>conclusive, or infallible. In other words, meaning is open-ended in
>the same way (exactly) that our interpretation of the external world
>is open-ended and revisable.
>
>The consequence is that our knowledge of our internal state is has
>the same character as our knowledge of the external world. Going
>back to 1 above, we have to presuppose our understanding is regular
>in order for us to be able to have knowledge of it, and this is a
>fallible assumption. Furthermore, order in our understanding is no
>different to to order in the world, and their are no grounds for
>making such an epistemic distinction.
>
>The upshot is that Loet (and Steven, apparently) could not be more
>wrong in saying that we are the origin of the order we find in the
>world, which is what I thought he said. If not, Loet, please correct
>me. In any case, it is wrong to even make the distinction in general
>between order in our understanding and in the external world, let
>alone to say that the order is in one or the other. Note that none
>of this assumes the reality of the external world.
>
>{addition} Loet has indeed clarified his intentions to me, for which
>I am grateful.
>
>Now I have to get back to grading, and hope that I can actually post this.
>
>Cheers,
>John
>
>----------
>Professor John Collier [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa
>T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031
>http://www.ukzn.ac.za/undphil/collier/index.html
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