At 06:47 PM 7/19/2005 +0900, CeJ wrote:
I'm wondering if the cold war actually transformed anything. And is there really much more to say on the topic after Lakatos, Feyerabend, but also the post-structuralists?
What does this mean?
More interesting to me has always been LP-related but not pure LP. For example, Wittgenstein's foray into the philosophy of psychology. One totally underestimated philosopher of science was the non-LP Jean Piaget, a Swiss who wrote in French. Piaget was quite interested in a unity of sciences and even wrote a monograph about it (which we never studied in university philosophy of science class back in the early 80s, but whose main name, Kuhn, later acknowledged a debt to Piaget). Interestingly enough a quick search of the Marx-related web yielded a typical Piaget piece about the LPs! I might add, cognitive science could sure use a review of the likes of Wittgenstein, Piaget, and Vygotsky. Here is just an excerpt that focuses on the LPs--the part about Chomsky is QUITE good. I really like the end sentence of the excerpt, so much I'll quote it here too, for those who aren't going to read what follows or surf to the site:
The part about Chomsky is not good at all. More comments below addressed to the Piaget essay.
If indeed we find logical structures in the coordinations of actions in small children even before the development of language, we are not in a position to say that these logical structures are derived from language. This is a question of fact and should be approached not by speculation but by an experimental methodology with its objective findings.
A good position to take.
The first principle of genetic epistemology, then, is this - to take psychology seriously. Taking psychology seriously means that, when a question of psychological fact arises, psychological research should be consulted instead of trying to invent a solution through private speculation.
Philosophy of language is mostly speculation, n'est ce pas?
It is worthwhile pointing out, by the way, that in the field of linguistics itself, since the golden days of logical positivism, the theoretical position has been reversed. Bloomfield in his time adhered completely to the view of the logical positivists, to this linguistic view of logic. But currently, as you know, Chomsky maintains the opposite position. Chomsky asserts, not that logic is based on and derived from language, but, on the contrary, that language is based on logic, on reason, and he even considers this reason to be innate. He is perhaps going too far in maintaining that it is innate; this is once again a question to be decided by referring to facts, to research.
But is this an accurate characterization of Chomsky's position? This doesn't sound right to me.
It is another problem for the field of psychology to determine. Between the rationalism that Chomsky is defending nowadays (according to which language is based on reason, which is thought to be innate in man)
Where does Chomsky claim that language is based on reason?
The second reason is found in Godel's theorem. It is the fact that there are limits to formalisation. Any consistent system sufficiently rich to contain elementary arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency. So the following questions arise: logic is a formalisation, an axiomatisation of something, but of what exactly? What does logic formalise? This is a considerable problem. There are even two problems here. Any axiomatic system contains the undemonstrable propositions or the axioms, at the outset, from which the other propositions can be demonstrated, and also the undefinable, fundamental notions on the basis of which the other notions can be defined. Now in the case of logic what lies underneath the undemonstrable axioms and the undefinable notions? This is the problem of structuralism in logic, and it is a problem that shows the inadequacy of formalisation as the fundamental basis. It shows the necessity for considering thought itself as well as considering axiomatised logical systems, since it is from human thought that the logical systems develop and remain still intuitive.
Good point.
The third reason why formalisation is not enough is that epistemology sets out to explain knowledge as it actually is within the areas of science, and this knowledge is, in fact not purely formal: there are other aspects to it.
Good point.
In his conclusion to this volume, Beth wrote as follows: "The problem of epistemology is to explain how real human thought is capable of producing scientific knowledge. In order to do that we must establish a certain coordination between logic and psychology." This declaration does not suggest that psychology ought to interfere directly in logic - that is of course not true - but it does maintain that in epistemology both logic and psychology should be taken into account, since it is important to deal with both the formal aspects and the empirical aspects of human knowledge.
Would this have made Frege or Husserl happy?
So, in sum, genetic epistemology deals with both the formation and the meaning of knowledge. We can formulate our problem in the following terms: by what means does the human mind go from a state of less sufficient knowledge to a state of higher knowledge?
Good.
So much for the introduction to this field of study. I should like now to turn to some specifics and to start with the development of logical structures in children. I shall begin by making a distinction between two aspects of thinking that are different, although complementary. One is the figurative aspect, and the other I call the operative aspect. ......... To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active. To know is to assimilate reality into systems of transformations. To know is to transform reality in order to understand how a certain state is brought about. By virtue of this point of view, I find myself opposed to the view of knowledge as a copy, a passive copy, of reality. In point of fact, this notion is based on a vicious circle: in order to make a copy we have to know the model that we are copying, but according to this theory of knowledge the only way to know the model is by copying it, until we are caught in a circle, unable ever to know whether our copy of the model is like the model or not. To my way of thinking, knowing an object does not mean copying it - it means acting upon it. It means constructing systems of transformations that can be carried out on or with this object. Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality. They are more or less isomorphic to transformations of reality. The transformational structures of which knowledge consists are not copies of the transformations in reality; they are simply possible isomorphic models among which experience can enable us to choose. Knowledge, then, is a system of transformations that become progressively adequate.
Very interesting.
But there is a second possibility: when we are acting upon an object, we can also take into account the action itself, or operation if you will, since the transformation can be carried out mentally. In this hypothesis the abstraction is drawn not from the object that is acted upon, but from the action itself. It seems to me that this is the basis of logical and mathematical abstraction.
This must be true. We wouldn't have number concepts if it weren't.
In cases involving the physical world the abstraction is abstraction from the objects themselves. A child, for instance, can heft objects in his hands and realize that they have different weights - that usually big things weigh more than little ones, but that sometimes little things weigh more than big ones. All this he finds out experientially, and his knowledge is abstracted from the objects themselves. But I should like to give an example, just as primitive as that one, in which knowledge is abstracted from actions, from the coordination of actions, and not from objects. This example, one we have studied quite thoroughly with many children, was first suggested to me by a mathematician friend who quoted it as the point of departure of his interest in mathematics. When he was a small child, he was counting pebbles one day; he lined them up in a row, counted them from left to right, and got ten. Then, just for fun, he counted them from right to left to see what number he would get, and was astonished that he got ten again. He put the pebbles in a circle and counted them, and once again there were ten. He went around the circle in the other way and got ten again. And no matter how he put the pebbles down, when he counted them, the number came to ten. He discovered here what is known in mathematics as commutativity, that is, the sum is independent of the order. But how did he discover this? Is this commutativity a property of the pebbles? It is true that the pebbles, as it were, let him arrange them in various ways; he could not have done the same thing with drops of water. So in this sense there was a physical aspect to his knowledge. But the order was not in the pebbles; it was he, the subject, who put the pebbles in a line and then in a circle. Moreover, the sum was not in the pebbles themselves; it was he who united them. The knowledge that this future mathematician discovered that day was drawn, then, not from the physical properties of the pebbles, but from the actions that he carried out on the pebbles. This knowledge is what I call logical mathematical knowledge and not physical knowledge.
You can learn a lot from observing children's games. It's truly remarkable.
Now all these forms of coordinations have parallels in logical structures, and it is such coordination at the level of action that seems to me to be the basis of logical structures as they develop later in thought. This, in fact, is our hypothesis: that the roots of logical thought are not to be found in language alone, even though language coordinations are important, but are to be found more generally in the coordination of actions, which are the basis of reflective abstraction.
Fascinating. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
