Hi Matt, This is really a side track to the original thread, and it deals with the influence of modern psychology. I like the way you use the term "dovetail", and appreciate its significance. I am responding to your post below.
On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 5:43 PM, Matt Kundert <[email protected]> wrote: > > Matt: > I know the conversation has moved on since this portion, and I > haven't been following it closely as it has proceeded, but I wanted to > clarify my own relation to your point in your post about psychology. > I find Dave's formulation, "our philosophical positions are > psychologically motivated," a little unhappy, but in the same way as > my "psychology and concepts dovetail" is a little unhappy, which my > parenthetical right before is intended to convey. > > I'm not concerned with a discipline called "psychology," exactly, but > more with your note about the psyche. If I grasp the importance of > empiricism in generating a picture of the mind, the trouble with > it--under the slogan of "associationism"--is that it _reduces_ > concepts to psychology, such that a person's beliefs are what they > are because of what the person associates with them. My > "dovetail" was my way of trying to avoid that reduction. I have no > wish to suggest, as you put it Mark, that "all philosophy can be > eventually reduced (with data) to some fundamental urges, just like > belching." Mark: I suppose I do have a concern of the influence of psychology in our everyday thought process. This "anxiety" comes from the current societal consideration of psychology as a science. In that light, interpretations of the mind are distinctly tied to evolutionary theory, and thus mandate the projections that such theory provides. So indeed, unhappiness is a good phrase. Being a scientist myself, I am fully aware of the reductionist tendencies of that discipline. While I am enamoured with the scientific method, I can also see its faults when it comes to the discipline of philosophy, or any kind of personal questioning. Reality as the sum of its parts leaves out a lot, imo. When a quasi-scientific discipline such as psychology is used to describe philosophy, I find it to be somewhat misleading and perhaps derogatory. Science does not analyze concepts, it applies concepts. Psychology is being "applied" to philosophy so as to modify it towards psychological ends. The governence of psychology thus stands over philosophy. This, I know is not your perspective, but I see this tendency in some of these posts. > > As a pragmatist, I think that philosophies do come out of urges > (though I hesitate to start handing out golden apples of > "fundamental" to any of them) and from our response to life. > (Steve correctly supplied my reaction to Dave's interpretation of my > suggestion that philosophical positions are "just covers for habits," > concurrent with my use of "belching," had cynical or nihilistic > impulses--as Steve said, I intended only to gesture to the pragmatic > maxim that "beliefs are habits of action.") But I've also come to > think that Hegel had it right when he said that there is an important > ontological realm that comes in between the biological/physical and > the conceptual/intellectual--the social realm (this is his argument in > the first section, "Consciousness," in the Phenomenology of Spirit). > This social realm mediates between our own brain activity--which > could be reduced to biology--and the realm of concepts, where > things like mathematics have a truth of their own divorced from > what we think about them. This commonsensical platitude about > math can be explained, by Pirsigian and Jamesian idealists who > don't think things _can_ have a truth divorced from us, by referring > to the process by which concepts become divorced from their user: > when they become public in the form of language. Mark Well, we can assert (as analogy) that our reality is the result of an interfacial awareness that results from the action of the environment with the workings of our brain/body. It is this process of constant adjustment between both the environment and our bodies that provides a dynamic awareness of our presence. Once that interaction stops we are of course dead. Note that when I use the term "our bodies" I am pointing to that "I" that lies outside of our bodies. That "I" could possible be construed as that dynamic interaction which changes moment to moment. This would be similar to the concept of "shoreline" which of itself does not exist but is formed by the water and the land, and is constantly changing. Or another analogy I like is the concept of a waterfall, where such a concept is not the water, but its act of falling, but I digress. If we try to step out of our current predicament and objectively analyze that interaction (awareness), we are indeed saying that this act of analysis is not part of the interaction in question. This is like thinking about all our thoughts, which is what psychology pretends to do in a scientific manner. We have seen the conundrum that arises in particle physics when it is found that our act of measuring a particle actually changes that measurment in real time. This is no different from psychology. So the advent of modern psychology has actually changed our pysche, which is what it is intending to measure. This can for better or for worse, and I cannot see the forest for the trees. In the same way, our philosphizing can change the origins of that philosphy, or in effect change the reasons for which we belch. In this way, the stated objectiveness of psychology is non-existent. This brings into question its usefulness, and probably more importantly, the true intentions behind the uses of psychological truisms. > > This is very sketchy portrait, indeed. But it is intended suggest how I > try and avoid the implication that philosophical positions can be > _reduced_ to our psychology, even if there is a relationship. Mark: Yes, it is kind of a give and take situation if we draw a distinct separation between the disciplines of psychology and philosophy. We could also say that psychology can be reduced to our philosophy. I believe this is possibly a view of higher value than the former. Philosphy as a discipline has been around much longer than the upstart psychology. Cheers, Mark > > Matt > 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/md/archives.html 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/md/archives.html
