Stephen – Politics is about how we should live – policy. I take it that what we value is what we incorporate as the aim of our policies – of our deliberate actions. It seems obvious to me. How would you distinguish these?
All politics is of course experimental. And I think that 'how we should live' is always controversial. I take it that morality and justice as 'essentially contested concepts.' (Look at 'essentially contested concept' in wikipedia.) This is why the 'Parliamentary Attitude' expressed in terms of the notion of a 'loyal opposition' is a wise political structure. Consequently, what is of value and what is the best politics are not questions with 'objective' answers. (From the wikipedia entry, ftn 31: Connolly (1974, p.40) expressed the view that once the participants in a particular political dispute realized that the concept was an essentially contested concept, the ensuing political discussions would be far more "enlightened" (Connolly, 1974, p.40).) This is all related to JR's Communicational Communities – mutually respectful 'negotiation' allowing perhaps a creative cross-fertilization of perspectives? Terry ================================ On Sep 5, 2011, at 11:07 AM, Stephen C. Rose wrote: In what sense are these words synonymous? ...politics (values)... ================================= On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 1:33 PM, Terry Bristol <[email protected]> wrote: Sally – Thank you for your lead on this thread. I agree with most everything you have said. I am coming in a little late on this read, but I trust that is OK. Since my background is philosophy of science (Berkeley/London with Feyerabend and Lakatos as mentors) I have some interest in the current topic and JR's comments. (I did a year of grad work at UCSB when JR was there and received some Peircean guidance from him, but I missed the chance to get close to him.) I always have problems with a focus on what someone (either JR or Peirce) said or meant in a paper without an inclusion of thoughts on the topic independently presented. We are all likely to understand JR, to at least some extent, in terms of what we think the real issues are. With that as introduction.... Point One: The term 'objectivity' has a very different meaning in the Mechanical Philosophy (and Logical Positivism) than it does in Pragmatism. This was pointed out – that JR's 'objective reality' is (must be) consistent with freewill, with choice. James pointed out that acceptance of freewill is the beginning of Pragmatism. The challenge then is to make sense of a world where we can acquire mechanical knowledge – that is nonetheless not objective in the sense of being true from all possible perspectives. It is because mechanical knowledge is (somehow) inherently limited that freewill action is possible. Point Two: Another core theme that distinguishes Pragmatism from the Mechanical Philosophy is that in Pragmatism the universe evolves. The Laplacean mechanical deterministic universe just rearranges (at best) the same eternal elements or phenomena. Peirce in particular voices his debt to the evolutionary thinkers. The challenge then is to be able to make sense of the repeatability (viz time-space invariance) of mechanical knowledge while allowing for development of the system. Point Three: Once you lose classical (universal, mechanical) objectivity then the image of inquiry as converging on a fixed (viz universally time-space invariant) reality is lost. The notion that a later superseding scientific theory is 'better' because it more closely corresponds to this fixed reality is lost – at least in the universal global sense. You can still argue for local 'objectivity' (viz how many chairs are in this room) where making sense of the claim depends on a background (assumed) specification of when and where (and in many cases who and how) the observation is made. –– So 'better' needs to be judged by some More General standard than correspondence to a fixed, non-evolving, reality. The Pragmatic standard is that 'meaningful knowledge is always potentially useful.' (Arguably this is closely tied to the fact that it is always fallible – and (ala Popper et al) indeed false. In other words to say that a statement is meaningful and falsifiable – means that in this universe it is possible to falsify it (viz it is a property of this universe), possible to show that it is not universally (classically objectively) true. (Popper et al.: All meaningful theories are false.) If all theories are false and yet some seem to be 'better' than others, one way to characterize the situation is to say that the choice of what is 'better' to believe, how to 'better' observe and how to act 'better' is under-determined by reality. The 'appropriate choices' depend upon but are not determined by one's current circumstance and purposes. There are always options. But given a particular local circumstance and aim, only a few are viable. Better knowledge 'can' expand the opportunities (viz greater freedom). Point Four: The relation between science and politics (values) is complete independence in the Mechanical (Positivist) Philosophy. Values simply don't make sense, cannot be made sense of in terms of a world of material, mechanically determined, facts. Pragmatism is a post-scientific understanding of reality, where 'scientific' is understood in the classical mechanical objectivist sense. I think it best to think of Pragmatism as making a Turn – one that calls for a More General Theory, one that can make sense of the success of mechanical knowledge and freewill together. Pragmatism is what Dewey called a Participant theory as distinct from the classical, objectivist (completely) observer-independent Spectator theory. The Turn involves a fundamental problem shift. In classical Mechanical Philosophy 'the problem of inquiry' to discover the truth – where the truth is a fixed, completely observer-independent reality. It must be 'fixed' in order for us to be able to converge on the truth, for our knowledge to eventually correspond to the fixed reality. The Turn is to a new inherently developmental (and developing) problem: How should we live? This context supersedes the classical scientific. The mantra: engineering (free (existential) constructive activity) is not 'merely' applied science. Rather (classical) science is engineering research. How should we design the irrigation of our fields, how should we design our houses, how should we design our neighborhoods, how should we design our cities, how should we design our economy, how should we design our politics so as to preserve our economic system. These are all questions of how we should live, all served by – but not strictly determined by – better scientific knowledge. The US Constitution is a design document – an experiment in how we might live better. Classical science is meaningful only in a context where we have the ability to alter the course of events and change the organizational structure of the universe. Terry ============================================================ On Sep 3, 2011, at 7:27 PM, Sally Ness wrote: Segment 2 Dear List: I progress on, now, to paragraphs 7-11 of the paper "Sciences as Communicational Communities," Again, the text segment is reproduced at the bottom of this email in its entirety. In this segment, JR focuses mainly on the details of the case made against scientists by academic politicians. He describes two false images of scientists that academic politicians employ in order to justify their own intrusion into the internal governance of scientific inquiry. In my reading, JR is speaking very clearly in "the spirit of Peirce" in conceptualizing these images and in a way that relates back to earlier papers discussed in the slow read. The first false image, which JR notes is held plausible by "large numbers of students and faculty alike" (p7), is one of scientists as being "infallible knowers of the truth" (p 7 emphasis mine). Peirce's concept of fallibilism here becomes plainly visible in JR's argument. JR establishes fallibilism as a basic character of the scientist--so important that without it any notion of what it means to be a scientist is not only false but preposterously so. The strength of JR's criticism of this false image of science can be read, in this regard, as a way to emphasize to his audience the importance of fallibilism in any scientific identity, including theirs. At this point, fallibilism would seem to have been, in hindsight, the main concept that JR had in mind when he emphasized earlier that scientific inquiry should be understood, first and foremost, as a matter of "discovery processes"--that is to say, as processes that are not infallible, not mechanistic, not perfect. Once fallibilism is recognized, in JRs view, the false image of the scientist as a magical, omniscient figure becomes obviously and entirely untenable--so a great deal is hanging on the recognition of fallibilism in JR's argument. This would seem to be very much in the spirit, as well as in the letter, of Peirce. As a matter of rhetoric, at least, JR assumes that his audience is already in agreement with his comments along these lines, already on board Peirce's fallibilist scientific band wagon so to speak. One question that comes to mind here is whether or not the previous posts on fallibilism add anything to JR's remarks here. At this point in the essay, JR turns his critical attention onto the scientific community itself for a moment, stating that the widespread dissemination of this false infallible image "should surely give scientists pause that they apparently present themselves so poorly" (p7) He warns against using this false image in order to "sell" science to the general public (implying that this may well already have been done and done as a matter of regular practice). JR finds this strategy unnecessary (given how impressive the current record of scientific achievement is) as well as dehumanizing (p7). This is the first indication that JR holds the scientific community partially responsible for whatever success academic politicians are currently enjoying. The second false image of scientists, which is directly and specifically tied to the academic politicians (who claim it as their own contribution to knowledge, according to JR), is that scientists are negotiators who do not really seek truth but who falsely represent themselves as doing so in order to "buttress their institutional status as authoritarian dogmatists" (p8). Here, again, JR turns his critical gaze toward the scientific community, holding its membership accountable for allowing such a false image to stand unchallenged and to gain adherents (p9). The question that comes to mind here is, who is JR (in the spirit of Peirce) really going after when he goes after the false image falsely "discovered" by "academic politicians"? JR is careful to name only Kleinman, but he even relegates Kleinman to an unoriginal role, repeatedly characterizing him as being only a generic token of this academic politician type. Who are the leaders of this type? What philosophical approaches or influential social science research is the "academic politician" representing? As I mentioned in a previous post, my first guess would be proponents of Foucault's theories of power/knowledge. However, perhaps there are other philosophical figures that JR was more interested in taking on. In the final paragraph of this section, JR concedes that the second false image of scientists does contain at least one important grain of truth: that there is a communicational aspect of scientific inquiry that does require individual scientists to settle certain matters of truth and knowledge by "collegial communication" (p10). This kind of communication is not absolutely different from the "negotiations" on which the academic politicians fix their attention. While JR largely rejects the "political model" that the idea of negotiation entails, he does grant that a detailed examination of scientific communicational processes is necessary to sort out what is and isn't involved in it and to determine what is false and what is of value in the work the academic politicians have done. This brings JR to the main focus of his paper: the nature of the communicational process and professional scientific communicational practices. JR complicates the picture of the relation between professional scientists and academic politicians in this segment, as he zeroes in on what--as Jon A. asked in an earlier post--to do about the problems evident in this relation. What JR wants to do is clear: 1) get a handle on the difference between political negotiation and truth/knowledge communication and 2) motivate scientists to be more pro-active in representing the fallible, discovery-oriented character of scientific inquiry. He will spend much more time on 1) than on 2) in the segments that follow. At this point, JR has done a masterful job of translating Peirce into non-specialist terms, identifying how the scientists in the audience are already Peircean in certain critically important respects, and demonstrating the value of setting some of Peirce's main ideas to work on serious problems of current interest to these scientists. Yet, he also seems to have made it clear that Peirce is a hard scientist's philosopher in the main, that there is a special bond between Peirce and the physical sciences. Would listers agree? The mainstreams of the soft sciences certainly have worked very hard to replicate the hard sciences in every way possible, including (I would even argue especially) their communicational practices. Are the communicational practices of hard scientists nonetheless distinctive in some general respect that JR is here illuminating, in the spirit of Peirce? I plan to post on the next segment in 3-4 days time. Best regards, Sally --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to [email protected] with the line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to [email protected] with the line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to [email protected]
