Arnold, thanks for a long and rich respnse.
For now I'll just confine myself to resonding to your brief "coda" --
which as any conversational discourse analyst - canonically in this
case William Labov - will tell you, is when the speaker - in this
case writer AS - tries to connect the possible world of the "tale"
just told to the actual world, or common ground of everyday
experience.
Labov's idea is that this particular communicative act has the
function of legitimising (or attempting to) for the audience the
possible pragmatic relevance of the tale he or she has just told (but
it could also be an argument, an explanation, a joke, whatever, and
essentially too, as a way of thanking the others for the gift of
being "conceded the floor" for the period of time necessary to
recount the tale.
In your "coda" you wrote:
AS: I won't take this further for now, because I suspect I'm going
to start blathering on without getting all my ducks in a row first.
But I guess that what I wanted to suggest to Patrick and the List is
that the "trend in our time" need not be accepted as fatalistically
as all that. It does, after all, represent perhaps 100-150 years' of
debate in a tradition going back maybe 2500 years or more (I mean:
how long ago did the distinction between naturwissenschaften and
geisteswissenchaften enter the conversational lexicon of academia?).
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but surely it won't take that long for
the fashion to fade away?
Couldn't agree more, and I passionately share your hopes in this respect.
I also believe that in any case some degree of "oscillation" between
different degrees of "intimacy" and "distance" is a quite healthy and
natural part of the growth and development of any ongoing
"relationship".
Isn't this kind of oscillation between being and becoming what the
notion of indeterminacy in quantum physics is all about really?
Even more, I think it would also be a wonderful idea of we could
manage to get it into our individual and collective heads that ALL
sciences are first and foremost HUMAN enterprises, and that we will
in any case always be talking about "Human Sciences", whether we are
talking about maths, philosophy, physics, chemistry psychology or the
applied sciences and arts...
Where we differ most, of course, are in the different symbol systems
and languages we use, and in the different practices, methodologies
ands technologies we develop and use in order to to try to winkle our
way in towards the "truth" of the matter (sic.) as well as we
possibly can.
This, I think, is essentially what Peirce essentially was onto when
he wrote his "The Basis of Pragmaticism in the Normative Sciences"
(EP: 371-397)
This he ends as follows:
Best regards
Patrick
PS If we try "getting all our ducks in a row" before we start trying
to share our nascent ideas with others, we might never actually get
started on that delightful journey of (self)discovery...
P
Pat, List
Pat Coppock (PC) wrote:
PC: I do sometimes feel that science, the humanities and the arts
have become rather "estranged" from one another these days, and I
personally think that is unfortunate, but it seems to be a trend in
our time for now.
PC: The kinds of constructive falsifiable predictions that are
possible to make and test systematically in in the physical/
applied/technological sciences are of course far more difficult to
make and test in the human sciences and the arts.
AS: In developing my PhD dissertation proposal, I make the point
that the Humanities, primarily, and a significant (although not a
major) constituency in the social sciences, seem to take it as a
given that `science' (they always use scare quotes!) is somehow
fundamentally `reductionist' because of its basis in measurable
phenomena and the logic of computation that follows from inquiry
into these.
AS: However, I sometimes wonder whether developments in mathematics
over the last century or so have not encouraged the rather
restricted public understanding of math as a sort of `theory of
computation'? Peirce and his father both treated mathematics as the
`science of necessary reasoning', of which computational matters
constituted a rather restricted sub-field within the broader
endeavour. Humanities academics (as quite distinct from Humanities
scholars), especially, seem to have taken for granted the following
line of reasoning:
THAT:
1) mathematics is an essentially computational enterprise, and
2) the `sciences' (I'm sort of caricaturing their way of arguing,
here) either operate directly by measurement and calculation or by
using technical devices that derive from such activity,
AND FURTHER, THAT
3) human experience involves measurable phenomena only to a small
degree, the most fundamental sources of experience being essentially
emotional and individual, hence escaping generalization through
measurability;
IT NECESSARILY FOLLOW THAT
4) the Human Sciences MUST employ methods that engage with the
personal and the emotional by developing interpretive techniques
based on aesthetic, linguistic, and other Qualitative techniques.
AS: Although my summary of this reasoning may be rather cursory,
even to the point of appearing to ridicule a tradition with a long
provenance, I have heard this type of reasoning in arguments at
academic meetings for decades. Hell, before I began studying Peirce,
I used to use it myself (blush)! The fallacy, of course, is the even
more radically reductionist view that math is principally (if not
only) a science of computation. Listers may recall the release, some
3-4 years ago, of a book by Helen Verran, with the title
*Mathematics and an African Culture*, which received a fair bit of
exposure on commentary sites on the web; the value of the book, in
my opinion, lies not in any of its reflections on how Africans
approach the math curriculum in schools, but in how the whole
enterprise could be taken on by an anthropologist who lacked both
mathematical and logical training. Verran's experience of teaching
math schoolteachers in West Africa was undertaken purely on the
basis that because she came from a `western' society in which
measurement and computation were part of the wallpaper (so to
speak), she would `culturally' have been equipped to train math
teachers from another kind of society.
AS: Needless to say, Verran failed to make any real dent in the
situation, and what struck me in the book as being valuable to
philosophers of science was the extremely narrow range of sources
she consulted in making sense of the episode. She cites not a single
mathematician or logician, relying, instead, on the History and
Philosophy of Science programme at one or other university (I'm
writing at a student LAN, and don't have the book handy to provide
more detail; I guess I can't lug my entire library with me like one
of the sages of Swift's Laputa!). What struck me was the reliance
she placed on teaching teachers that the essence of mathematics is
the interpretation of measures into calculations. Formal Logic she
treats as `totalizing logic', and this term receives its due place
in the book's Index.
AS: Now, I guess what I am getting at here is that the more one
begins to grasp the history of both math and logic through the lens
of Peirce's undoubted mastery of both (however idiosyncratic some of
his inferences from history may appear to some), the more one should
be led to take a wider view of both. As the `science of necessary
reasoning', the discipline (as in self-control) required for
mathematical inquiry seems to me to indicate that there should be no
reason why one can't undertake the study of the diagrammatic forms
of necessary reasoning about human experience in a non-computational
way. Peirce treats the foundations of mathematics as a form of
relational reasoning (which, I am led to understand, runs counter to
the modern mathematical tradition; I won't debate that because I am
no mathematician, but am never the less fascinated by the potential
arcaneness of the topic). At 3.562 he essays an accessible account
of this relational foundation (the CP source consists of material
left out of an article in an educational journal of 1898), and
anybody with some familiarity of anthropological field methods will
immediately recognize a relation that lies at the core of ALL
possible experience: the relation of sequence. Surely there can be
no continuity in human affairs, the basis upon which one could say
we make all those judgements and inferences we call `experience',
without a sequence of generations, which Peirce very accessibly
shows has proprties that are quite mathematical.
AS: I won't take this further for now, because I suspect I'm going
to start blathering on without getting all my ducks in a row first.
But I guess that what I wanted to suggest to Patrick and the List is
that the "
trend in our time" need not be accepted as fatalistically as all
that. It does, after all, represent perhaps 100-150 years' of debate
in a tradition going back maybe 2500 years or more (I mean: how long
ago did the distinction between naturwissenschaften and
geisteswissenchaften enter the conversational lexicon of academia?).
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but surely it won't take that long for
the fashion to fade away?
Cheers
Arnold Shepperson
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Patrick J. Coppock
Researcher: Philosophy and Theory of Language
Department of Social, Cognitive and Quantitative Sciences
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
Reggio Emilia
Italy
phone: + 39 0522.522404 : fax. + 39 0522.522512
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
www: http://coppock-violi.com/work/
faculty: http://www.cei.unimore.it
the voice: http://morattiddl.blogspot.com
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