Hey Krimel, Krimel said: I am fine with the idea that whether correctness is possible or not it probably not possible to know it with confidence. That's the skeptic in me. But the criterion of usefulness troubles me even more. We have every reason to suspect that the universe at large is non-Euclidian and thus that Euclidian geometry is not correct. But it is useful for 99% of the activities that anyone would need to use geometry for. Likewise Newtonian physics is incorrect but still incredibly useful. I know that there are not little people inside the television set but I find it useful to think they are there. It may be true that by applying useful ideas I will obtain desired results but I can do that without reference to whether or not the ideas are correct.
Matt: I'm not sure I quite understand your line of thinking here. For one, I'm not quite clear on whether you're challenging something I said. But with respect to the examples you forwarded, those are prime examples of why correctness doesn't seem to apply with vocabulary shifts. The only reason we suspect that the universe is non-Euclidean is because Riemannian geometry seems to work better with Einstein--it is more useful. Likewise, it would be just weird to say Newtonian physics isn't incorrect, but is rather not as useful for stuff that's really small or going really fast. I think Pirsig was right when he said that, when discussing vocabulary shifts, like that between his SOM and MoQ or between Einstein and Newton, saying one was correct while the other not is like saying that polar coordinates are correct and rectangular not. Now, it kind of seems like I was just repeating what you said, so I'm not quite sure in what manner you were responding to me. Why does usefulness trouble you? Krimel said: When you say, "this is partly because philosophy is the kind of field where people are encouraged to toss over and rethink any particular set of rules and criteria at will. That's what we've learned "investigation into the nature of reality" means." Isn't that what comes of just talking about reality without actually making contact with it? Matt: Some people think negatively of the so-called "linguistic turn" because of something like this, but from my understanding of contemporary philosophy and how language works, we can pretty much flip back and forth between talking about "the way we talk" and talking about "things" without losing much in most contexts--I don't think language unhinges from reality in a way in which talking about the way we talk has no effect on the way things are. This sounds like our language constitutes reality, but all it means is that we can't talk about our language in isolation to reality, so there's no real fear of "not making contact with reality." You can, for sure, talk about pseudo-scientific talk in philosophy, which is basically philosophy treading in on science's territory, doing badly what science does well, but saying the philosophers are not in contact with reality is, I think, a mistake. All I was trying to suggest by the above was the Socratic conception of questioning common sense, standing slightly askance to what happens around you. Krimel said: When you talk about Pirsig's philosophy relating betterness and correctness to DQ and SQ I don't see the connection at all. Equating betterness and usefulness sort of makes sense except that betterness seems to have the same problems as usefulness, while at least usefulness is actually a word. Matt: Well, it was just that in Pirsig's picture of DQ at the point and static patterns coalescing behind it, like a boat through water, we could see the difference between not having criteria that have solidified over continued, proven usefulness and having them. If one buys into Pirsig's redescription of reality into static patterns that range from the very rigid to the not as rigid, and DQ as newness, then when we choose a new thing over old things, we have a sense that the new thing is better, but our justification for the betterness only accrues afterwards, the static patterns. The new thing will only prove to be better over time. Things that don't so prove, fade away. Krimel said: In your analysis of the history of philosophy how does Hume produce a reductio ad absurdum that threatens empiricism? When you say rationalism morphed into transcendental philosophy isn't it just as fair to say that Kant was attempting to synthesize rationalism and empiricism? Also you have rationalism morphing into logical positivism which seems to me to be rather like empiricism on steroids. How'd that happen? Matt: On Hume, I'm thinking of Hume's analysis of causation in particular. Hume's problem was that if we take seriously the idea that we only get knowledge from the senses, then we have no knowledge of causation because we don't sense it: we only sense rock-at-point-A, rock-at-point-B, rock-at-point-C, our head bleeding, etc., but not the causation, which itself would seem to be needed to connect up rock-at-point-A to being in Person A's hand to our head bleeding, thus establishing responsibility. Pirsig does a good job of describing this kind of reading of Hume's relation to Kant in ZMM (end of Ch. 11). It involves a particular understanding of both "empirical" and "reason," one that isn't required of empiricism as a living philosophical tradition (so I wouldn't say Hume "threatened" empiricism, just showed up some of its early hang-ups, namely epistemology). On rationalism and Kant, it is more or less just as fair to say that Kant synthesized, or split the difference between, rationalism and empiricism. This was Kant's self-understanding, encapsulated in his "the only way to be an empirical realist is to be a transcendental idealist," and he passed it along to the first real historians of philosophy. The trouble with that understanding is that it implies he transumed both equally, whereas I want to play up the fact that what Kant did distinctively was keep rationalism going, though in a transformed way. William James reconstituted the division in a similar way in his first Pragmatism lecture, "The Present Dilemma in Philosophy," to try and punch up how the old division had continued on after Kant. On rationalism and logical positivism, you aren't wrong to think that its "empiricism on steroids," but I wanted to accentuate a different angle. I don't think it was pumped up empiricism so much as still working out what empiricism was going to be in philosophy, given that it had already won common sense. I mean, Hume was pretty extreme in giving up on causation because it wasn't given in senses. What I want to emphasize is how rationalism's chief contribution was in keeping epistemology alive by keeping people focused on that "special thing" humans have, reason. Logical positivism was the last gasp of empiricism as an epistemology, which is another way of saying it was the last gasp of epistemology because empiricism is pretty much it: common sense for everybody. Like I said before, though, your sense isn't wrong because after Kant, Germans like Fichte and English like Bradley latched on to the "transcendental idealism" side of the thing and forgot empiricism. Logical positivism was the swing back towards empiricism and science. The trouble was that it still held onto vestiges of rationalism, i.e. epistemology. The problem was that science was still new when empiricism was first being formulated, so there was a lot of work for philosophers to do in coming up with placeholders until science got around to them (like the various psychologies they developed). But by the 20th century, there wasn't a whole lot for logical positivists to do since they had happily handed over everything to science. The steroids feeling is when they shut down ethics to leave only things like philosophy of science and of language. But I think they ended doing that more because of their retainment of the common assumptions they had with Descartes. After one ditches epistemology, many of the old areas, particularly moral and political philosophy, open back up. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Back to work after baby–how do you know when you’re ready? http://lifestyle.msn.com/familyandparenting/articleNW.aspx?cp-documentid=5797498&ocid=T067MSN40A0701A Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
