board77

Iavas, are you saying that no one should study this because it lacks importance in some general sense, or that no particular scientist should have to study it?

Jadeval, let’s see is I can squeeze some luxury time out of the day ...

Going back to this idea of how we map the concept to the thing, and whether concept and method are necessarily distinct, it’s hard for me to talk about abstraction abstractly. I’m always wanting to ask in which sort of argument would a particular abstraction be fruitful to the advancement of the argument.

So, talking about Cartesian coordinates ...

On TORC a few years ago a poster (Jallan, I think) put up a link to a delightful philology article that jumped from Tolkien’s tongue-in-cheek story about the origins of golf, to the origins of the word ‘golf,’ to the IE mapping system behind words in IE languages. The word ‘golf,’ iirc, comes from an IE root that meant “sheltering curve,” which is the root of all sorts of words that indicate a particular functionality -- our heads for instance, which are curved and shelter our brains.

It struck me at the time I was reading that article ... well, first of all what a useful word that is, for survival purposes! ... but also, that having words which generalize a property over many individual things may well be the initial abstraction hit upon by users of the IE language. Signifiers for individual things most certainly preceded linguistically the use of abstractions, so there does exist the question of which abstractions were the earliest. And when I see an IE root that describes a property like that, I wonder whether generalizing over experiential properties isn’t the first thing that IE languages did. (Without knowing other language roots I can’t really say whether Asian languages, for example, had that as their starting point or whether they hit upon a different approach.) But what strikes me about the nature of this particular word in IE, generalizing over a property, is that this is exactly how Socrates approached the question of “how do we know stuff?” (Did he hit on this solution because that is the way his language was structured?) So I’m thinking, hmm, we progeny of western thought seem to map the concept to the thing first of all by generalizing over properties.

It is an approach that strikes me as both liberating and constraining. Liberating in that the use of abstraction in this manner permits boundless tiers of generalization -- we not only generalize over properties, we also have the word ‘property’ to describe the organizing principle of our generalization, and we have the word ‘generalizing’ for the process itself, which is probably itself contained within some other category of functions for which we have some other word root, and so on. It is constraining in that once you assign those three letters to a particular property, all signifiers which use that root must possess that property. Your language can’t go just anywhere. And it’s a pretty amazing thing that language manages to stay within those bounds, imo, because language changes at whiplash speed.

What got me thinking about all this was your casual statement, Jadeval, that the Cartesian coordinate system allows us to abstract ‘location.’ Relative location is a property of things over which we might generalize, and yes, this is of course what a Cartesian system does, and so it might be considered as pushing the traditional notion of taxonomy into a new realm ... what Iavas called ‘every-expanding awareness.’ New ways to use old stuff.

But my second thought was that this is a very odd way to describe Cartesian coordinates, from my point of view, because this is not at all the feature of the Cartesian system that I, as an economist, find useful or important. I never think about this system in terms of location, and it catches me short to be reminded that this is what it does before it does anything else, because when I think about abstracting location I think about it in quite a different way.

There is one course in political economy that I teach which begins by studying the bias in geographic maps - the problem of choosing a method by which to abstract a spherical world onto a flat surface so as to preserve the necessary information about ‘location,’ where what is necessary of course varies from user to user. Now, the one thing that a Cartesian coordinate system can NOT be used for is to create a map of the relative location of real things in the real world, because the Cartesian map employes a highly rarified concept of location as being uniformly calibrated, and this is simply not a property of location that appears anywhere in the real world. Even to impose the Cartesian system on teeny tiny bits of real estate for titling purposes, as we do, we must immediately fall back on further abstractions like ‘projection’ which then distort in potentially drastic ways the user’s experience of the location. (It occurs to me that the Newtonian concept of time shares this feature; all moments are uniformly calibrated, and this is not true of real time, neither experiential time nor time as physics currently models it).

But the adoption of this concept of uniformly calibrated location, which has no counterpart in the real world, does allow us to derive certain other properties which CAN be mapped to real things in the real world, like the relative speeds at which different things are moving from one state to another. That is how an economist uses a Cartesian system, and the expression of this ratio originating in a Cartesian system can be manipulated successfully even if we drop the assumption of uniform calibration and move to some other scale. (The Newtonian concept of time is what presumably allows for the same sort of derivations in classical mechanics.)

So I am thinking about how this relates to your question about the relationship between the concept and the method, and I am thinking that the relationship must really be quite complex. It is not true (I don’t think) that a Cartesian (or Newtonian) system is derived experientially, that it depends somehow on the ‘phenomenon’ in the sense that a phenomenologist would use that word. It is a pure abstraction that cannot have been experienced before prior to its conception because it has no experiential counterpart, unlike those more fundamental abstractions that generalize over properties which we do experience, such as ‘shelter’ and ‘curve.’ In one way the process of generalization itself seems to me the same - the Cartesian system is but an extension of something begun long ago when we first said that a head is like a forest canopy or a rocky outcrop - but there is another way in which these two processes seem to me totally different. No one has ever experienced the earth as a Cartesian system. We only think of ourselves as having experienced the Cartesian system after we have learned how to use it in school. We then learn to map things in the real world to this acquired concept, rather than the other way around, making adjustments and inserting provisos as we go along (adding dimensions or multiple representations, or switching to the even more abstract representative capability of an equation) to account for the inevitable departure from experience.

Whether our ability to abstract in this particular manner, to think of something like ‘uniform calibration’ which we have never experienced, arises from the structure of our brain is quite a different question, I think. (That’s what we were discussing before, as I understood the discussion.) Knowing that this capability was purely material in origin would not really shed light on the relationship between concept and method. Info about material origins would be static and structural - the brain has such and such a lobe where ‘lining things up’ is the way it accomplishes pattern recognition - whereas the question you are asking now is dynamic - how do we move comparatively between experience and abstraction? If we wanted to invalidate the Cartesian system, how would we proceed? Can something that is non-experiential be invalidated by experience? Do we ever actually do that, or do we only invalidate bottom-up concepts in this manner? Is it only a question of choosing the map that best suits the purpose, i.e. goal-directed evaluation? Or can an abstraction be self-validating, true in some sense and relative to logical argument independent of any experiential correlates?

I think a lot can be known about this process. It is not something that I personally have studied, beyond reading Kuhn’s history of science as everyone else has done. But I think that a distinction between a concept and the means by which we evaluate that concept would be rather central in answering the question, and I also think that they are in some ‘real’ sense two different things.

Ok, this is a bit random since my head is a little cloudy yesterday and today... but here goes.

Jnyusa wrote:

I’m always wanting to ask in which sort of argument would a particular abstraction be fruitful to the advancement of the argument.

Yes, or, I think, in what type of thinking would a particular method be useful.

Jnyusa wrote:

On TORC a few years ago a poster (Jallan, I think) put up a link to a delightful philology article that jumped from Tolkien’s tongue-in-cheek story about the origins of golf, to the origins of the word ‘golf,’ to the IE mapping system behind words in IE languages. The word ‘golf,’ iirc, comes from an IE root that meant “sheltering curve,” which is the root of all sorts of words that indicate a particular functionality -- our heads for instance, which are curved and shelter our brains.

hmm... language is weird. Or maybe the guys who first played golf just had a bad hook.

Jnyusa wrote:

It struck me at the time I was reading that article ... well, first of all what a useful word that is, for survival purposes! ... but also, that having words which generalize a property over many individual things may well be the initial abstraction hit upon by users of the IE language. Signifiers for individual things most certainly preceded linguistically the use of abstractions, so there does exist the question of which abstractions were the earliest. And when I see an IE root that describes a property like that, I wonder whether generalizing over experiential properties isn’t the first thing that IE languages did. (Without knowing other language roots I can’t really say whether Asian languages, for example, had that as their starting point or whether they hit upon a different approach.) But what strikes me about the nature of this particular word in IE, generalizing over a property, is that this is exactly how Socrates approached the question of “how do we know stuff?” (Did he hit on this solution because that is the way his language was structured?)

Maybe you can expand on the connection to Socrates. I’m not very knowledgeable when it comes to languages, and I wouldn’t know how to generalize this “generalize over a property” into proper linguistic terminology, but it would seem strange to me if other languages didn’t do something very similar.

As a random side note, I just watched an interesting documentary called Land of Silence and Darkness by Werner Herzog on the deaf-blind. The film lets us observe a few children who are deaf-blind from birth, how some of them seem to inhabit a world almost entirely of their own. The teachers say it is very difficult to teach them abstraction, so they give them concrete examples: “Bob hits Jane. Bob steals money. Bob is bad” or “Bob buys flowers for Jane. Bob fixes Jane’s watch. Bob is good.” But the teachers also say that we’ll never know what they’re conceptions of good and bad actually are. Maybe the same is true for “normal” people, just in a less dramatic way.

But there are intermediate examples too: “Bob is mean to Jane.” Well, “mean” would presumably be “bad” but not always. Being mean to one’s enemy is not necessarily bad, although being mean to one’s mother is probably bad. “Mean” doesn’t seem to be the same kind of abstraction as “bad” or “good”. “Mean” would seem to be more empirical, more to do with pain. But neither pain nor its infliction are necessarily bad things.

One of the things I'm fond of harping on is an issue related to happiness, itself related to "good". The issue with these kinds of terms is that they don't seem at all empirical because, well, there is no necessary argument or way of determining that they actually mean something definite in relation to physical reality. Our consensus on them, to the extent that this consensus is real and actual, seems to be, at least in large part, a matter of social convention or construction. Nevertheless, the terms do suggests some "thing" very real in the sense that they point to something completely beyond us but which is whatever is ultimate or best for us or for everyone.

What I mean is that we simply don't know happiness or good generally because, for instance, even in our "worst" moments there may still be a broader horizon of good or happiness. We are not always aware of it, and if you think about it, it is impossible for anyone to really say much about happiness because it can literally BE anything at all. The term seems utterly "transcendental" beyond the physical situation.

We never really throw the term "happiness" out the window and say "well, happiness was just a fad and we're moving on to something else." I've said things like that before, but it's more a matter of putting the emphasis on another term. Sometimes I want to throw the term "happiness" out the window because it seems to have many overtly metaphysical, Aristotelian or medieval connotations that don't fit well with the existential stuff I'm interested in.

In a way, "goals" like "good" or "happiness" seem almost so generalized as to be methodological horizons themselves. When someone says "I want happiness" there is nothing really specific there. It's almost analytic and a priori to say that. "Happiness" or "good" are invariably connected up with a life method that always seems just beyond us.

Jnyusa wrote:

So I’m thinking, hmm, we progeny of western thought seem to map the concept to the thing first of all by generalizing over properties.

Ok, generalizing a property over things. You mean like “all these objects have a certain distance from me so let’s apply the concept of a coordinate pairs to each of them”?

So, as I understand it, you have two types of abstraction in mind: 1) conceptual abstraction (e.g. mathematics); 2) generalization-of-property abstraction (linguistic).

Jnyusa wrote:

No one has ever experienced the earth as a Cartesian system. We only think of ourselves as having experienced the Cartesian system after we have learned how to use it in school. We then learn to map things in the real world to this acquired concept, rather than the other way around, making adjustments and inserting provisos as we go along (adding dimensions or multiple representations, or switching to the even more abstract representative capability of an equation) to account for the inevitable departure from experience.

Yes, I would agree. Though I suppose if you were a real cognitivist (or whatever the name is for someone who thinks mathematical objects are mere mental constructs), you could ask why we didn’t think up a non-Euclidean geometry first instead of the Euclidean one that just happened to match our local, naïve conception of space. Because, although you’re right that the Cartesian plane has no counterpart in the physical world, we probably didn’t actually know this until after we began thinking of the ground beneath us as a two dimensional curved surface of a sphere or of objects very far apart on this surface or whatever. Then again, it might be possible to argue that non-Euclidean geometries are simply relative in their curvature to Euclidean geometry, thus making the conceptual or structural essence of all geometries something abstract but not merely abstracted from the empirical.

Jnyusa wrote:

If we wanted to invalidate the Cartesian system, how would we proceed? Can something that is non-experiential be invalidated by experience? Do we ever actually do that, or do we only invalidate bottom-up concepts in this manner? Is it only a question of choosing the map that best suits the purpose, i.e. goal-directed evaluation? Or can an abstraction be self-validating, true in some sense and relative to logical argument independent of any experiential correlates?

These are good questions, and to the point of the topic. With regard to mathematical concepts, I’m not so sure. The philosophy of mathematics, especially fitting it with a viable philosophy of nature or mind is, I think, a notoriously difficult and usually unsatisfying endeavor in the history of thought (e.g. Aristotle).

If we take the example of the heliocentric model, for instance, Copernicus’ “discovery” wasn’t really a discovery so much as a new model. It just makes the math a little simpler instead of having all these Ptolemaic ellipses. An arbitrarily smart mathematician could probably use whatever model he or she desires. But it was a discovery insofar as we might have finally learned that the statement “the Earth is the center of creation” probably has no viable empirical or astronomical translation. In a sense, then, with the application of a new conceptual model comes the realization that what one is doing is in fact a top down procedure: by replacing the geocentric model with the heliocentric model, one learns that both are in fact conceptual models and not empirical facts. However, we doubtless learn in some way that one model is more convenient by using it with the empirical facts, though the actual origin of the model is more mysterious.

So empiricism would seem to tell us which conceptual abstractions are better for everyday knowledge-use... though this "knowledge-use" itself is something empirical because the empirical demands it.

It may indeed by paradigmatic in a kind of Kuhnian way. I had a professor once who was an Aristotelian of sorts. He happened to be the teacher from whom I first learned of Kuhn’s book, and he argued that Kuhn’s approach was fundamentally Kantian (surprise surprise he rejected it on this basis), that the idea of paradigms seemed to be reminiscent of Kant’s phenomena over and against the ever-elusive and actual entity or noumena that scientific realists think they’re modeling... of course this isn’t surprising when you consider that basically everything after Kant is Kantian in this way, i.e. it has some conception of “reality” as inevitably modeled either by the human mind (Kant’s categories), by history (Nietzsche/Foucault), by our social environment (Wittgenstein), by our way of seeing (or phenomenology or however you want to fit in Heidegger), or simply sees reality itself as being too brazen a thing for us humans to strive after (Kierkegaard, Derrida).

To go back to your question, in general, insofar as philosophical thinking is concerned, I would go with the second option. I say this because I think one could only say otherwise if one believes that there are either context-free methods or truly objective goals (objectively objective goals!... then again no since "true" doesn't mean "objective"... but what I mean by "true" here is "objective" since I'm referring to those who think there are in reality "objective" goals apart from science's methodology).

As far as the heliocentric model is concerned, for instance, I wouldn’t say that the geocentric model was rejected on an empirical basis. There is nothing empirical which states or implies that the geocentric model is wrong unless we are willing to take something practical like “the math is too hard and therefore wastes too much time.” Nevertheless, it seems that by virtue of its very parsimoniousness, the heliocentric model has some “affinity” with the way empirical reality is.

Then again, the purpose of science is not knowledge as such, but rather prediction, control, etc. In this sense, scientific method and criteria determine the correctness of the heliocentric model over and above other models.

It seems that we can only invalidate a model in relation to its application to experience insofar as we already know what we want to do with that experience, i.e. the goal is determined first and then a method for the goal (and perhaps broader methodological horizons which situate the goal or give rise to it). Conversely, perhaps it is possible for a contextualized method to reveal some sort of goal?

In any case, it seems to me wrongheaded to say that certain cognitive methods can be objectively ruled out. Science does it according to what’s most economical, what’s most utilitarian, simple or perhaps mathematically elegant. But these are not criteria that necessarily hold sway elsewhere.

Imo, the most Iavas can really justifiably claim is that this kind of thinking is necessary for the ordinary everyday practice of science. But we weren’t claiming that to begin with anyway. What he seems to want, in a sense, is a kind of all-or-nothing judgment where we either figure out that this philosophy is worthwhile or not worthwhile. It may be not worthwhile for a chemist who really wants to get his current research project finished. But that’s the thing about philosophy. It tries to coordinate all the other disciplines, methods, and knowledges into something more comprehensive. We have to ask what it means to be “useful” or “effective” or “worthwhile”. We have to ask what our ultimate “goals” are, if we can even know them at the outset.

I think the reason why this discussion is so difficult (and I experienced the same problem with Apostasy) is that it’s very hard to get some people to even see the problem or issue at stake here. We’re not even talking of a “solution”. We’re just talking about a nuanced formulation of the question, and that’s 99% of philosophy’s battle. If you haven’t studied it then you probably won’t even see the problem. And it’s not just linguistics. It’s actually a substantive debate, and it brings language into the argument because, I think, it is needed to show how language is not merely “language” in the way most people think. It is not just a matter of shifting around terms so that we students of philosophy can confuse everyone else. In part, it has to do with the way we get “stuck” in language and need occasionally to be wrestled a bit from its bindings. It’s a shift, but a substantive shift that sets up a new reality rather than just a new terminology.

Anyway, that may all seem very obvious. The philosophy of science is not my specialty, so without going off into wild tangents in, say, Heidegger or Schelling (something not so simply in this situation anyway), I can only offer my somewhat disjointed thoughts. I may have more to say later.

Oh, and just for the record, or perhaps for Iavas’ sake... we got onto this discussion because of the issue of materialism. But if you look at my original post the complaint was about translating factual/empirical findings inadvertently into ethical imperatives. So the issue is not precisely one of philosophical materialism or determinism, but of the erroneous derivation of an “ought” from an “is” as Hume put it. Right now, one might say we are discussing the "is of the is" or "just what is this is"?

This may seem like reaching a bit... but I tend to think that the terms "empirical" and "rational" are artificialities. I mean, if you look at the history of science, rational models like heliocentrism ultimately aid in giving rise to new paradigmatic shifts which give us in turn greater insight into the physical universe. So there seems to be a way in which conceptual models and empirical phenomena are really neither "conceptual" or "empirical" at all.

Jnyusa wrote:

Iavas, are you saying that no one should study this because it lacks importance in some general sense, or that no particular scientist should have to study it?

I think I said earlier that it was worth having the discussion on the grounds that humans naturally want to explore every avenue available to them. In the same way, there is a lot of abstract maths that is of no practical value, but as an inquisitive species we want to master everything we can. I guess I'm saying it's a valid thing to study/discuss for completeness sake, but I don't think it has much importance when trying to address things like my argument for determinism, or for scientists in general.

Iavas_Saar wrote:

Jnyusa wrote:

Iavas, are you saying that no one should study this because it lacks importance in some general sense, or that no particular scientist should have to study it?

I think I said earlier that it was worth having the discussion on the grounds that humans naturally want to explore every avenue available to them. In the same way, there is a lot of abstract maths that is of no practical value, but as an inquisitive species we want to master everything we can. I guess I'm saying it's a valid thing to study/discuss for completeness sake, but I don't think it has much importance when trying to address things like my argument for determinism, or for scientists in general.

Sorry, I'm not following all of this thread as much any more, but I MUST object to the statement that "there is a lot of abstract maths that is of no practical value"... I challenge you to name ANY math that is of no practical value...

One of the main problems with any deterministic argument is that we simply don't know the structure or nature of causality itself. Causality IS one of those pesky rational models Jnyusa and I are talking about.

halplm wrote:

Iavas_Saar wrote:

Jnyusa wrote:

Iavas, are you saying that no one should study this because it lacks importance in some general sense, or that no particular scientist should have to study it?

I think I said earlier that it was worth having the discussion on the grounds that humans naturally want to explore every avenue available to them. In the same way, there is a lot of abstract maths that is of no practical value, but as an inquisitive species we want to master everything we can. I guess I'm saying it's a valid thing to study/discuss for completeness sake, but I don't think it has much importance when trying to address things like my argument for determinism, or for scientists in general.

Sorry, I'm not following all of this thread as much any more, but I MUST object to the statement that "there is a lot of abstract maths that is of no practical value"... I challenge you to name ANY math that is of no practical value...

Very true. Even the farthest reaches of topology and abstract algebra mathematicians do expect one day to have a bearing on scientific theories.

In a way, there isn't anything that has no practical value. This is precisely the issue Iavas isn't addressing... the issue of value itself and why anyone would do or study anything that they do if it weren't practical in one way or another. It's just the old "that isn't practical" charge being levelled polemically.

I dunno. I think the philosophy of science becomes relevant when one is asking if science is capable of answering certain questions, which is what I am finally understanding the topic of this thread to be. Our current society seems to believe that science can answer everything and at the same time few people outside of science really understand how science is done. Part of the blame rests on the scientists - we've let Hollywood represent us for too long. And part of it rests on the media and its tendency to turn anything and everything into a sensation.

What's amusing to me is within my lifetime (27 years) the paradigm in biology has undergone two shifts and is currently shifting again. It's kind of weird and fun to be part of something like this, like keeping your balance during a slow-motion earthquake but at the same time you're part of the earthquake...

Here's another question. If consciousness and language are linked, how do we know that we are the only species with language? We know other animals communicate, but would we recognize an animals language?

Quote:

but would we recognize an animals language?

*ducks in for a few minutes while the coffee is brewing*

Would most of us recognize Xhosi if presented to us without being labeled as a human language, say, through mechanical replication? I pick it because it's the least familiar sounding one I can think of off the top of my head.

I think there's a fair amount of evidence for several higher animals having fairly complex modes of communication, some of which might cross the line into language in terms of having syntax at least. But there are limits, more of opportunity for development--needfulness--than strict mental capacity.

jadeval wrote:

Very true. Even the farthest reaches of topology and abstract algebra mathematicians do expect one day to have a bearing on scientific theories.

Is that not based on the current paradigm though? If it changes in a very real way, say we suddenly found out that maths was fundementally flawed in some way, would the study of it in such an obscure way be still considered useful?

Mathematics is different from science, so I'm not sure the Kuhnian idea of paradigms quite works here. Math does not involve models of empirical phenomena. It's a language which is developed, well, analytically, so to speak. Wittgenstein said it was all one big tautology.

Applications of mathematics at the highest levels are already occuring, both to science and to mathematics on various rungs and different areas. So, unlike science, it's not a matter of testing and hypothesizing. Mathematics is, by definition, immediately true and applicable, at the very least, to other kinds of mathematics. There is simply no mathematics that isn't applicable because all mathematics develops from and extends other mathematics.

halplm wrote:

Iavas_Saar wrote:

Jnyusa wrote:

Iavas, are you saying that no one should study this because it lacks importance in some general sense, or that no particular scientist should have to study it?

I think I said earlier that it was worth having the discussion on the grounds that humans naturally want to explore every avenue available to them. In the same way, there is a lot of abstract maths that is of no practical value, but as an inquisitive species we want to master everything we can. I guess I'm saying it's a valid thing to study/discuss for completeness sake, but I don't think it has much importance when trying to address things like my argument for determinism, or for scientists in general.

Sorry, I'm not following all of this thread as much any more, but I MUST object to the statement that "there is a lot of abstract maths that is of no practical value"... I challenge you to name ANY math that is of no practical value...

It was 12 years ago that I studied Further Maths and the specifics have gone - our teacher told us upfront that we would be learning abstract maths that was mainly of theoretical interest and not something we'd be carrying through to our careers.

In any case, this is quibbling that misses the point. That human's are quite capable of exploring things simply for the sake of exploring.

Hitting a couple ideas randomly because I haven’t much time ...

Jadeval wrote:

Maybe you can expand on the connection to Socrates. I’m not very knowledgeable when it comes to languages, and I wouldn’t know how to generalize this “generalize over a property” into proper linguistic terminology, but it would seem strange to me if other languages didn’t do something very similar.

Generalizing over properties is taxonomy, and that is the first step in the Socratic method. I ask myself whether Socrates was predisposed to this approach because it was the first conceptual step in the construction of his language. (The question was not rhetorical; I don’t know the answer).

I must think that all languages generalize, but not necessarily over properties, and especially properties that indicate function, as ‘sheltering curve’ does. The only non-IE languages with which I have any familiarity at all are Hebrew and Arabic, and the Semitic languages, you know, also use three-letter roots, but the root is a verb, and the expansion into other words proceeds from their kinship with the verb. So, if the root were ktb, to write, then other words containing those three letters would not be similar functions, first of all, but related signifiers - what is written, who performs writing, things you can write on, etc. If I think instead about writing as a function, I might relate it to drawing (in taxonomy of body movement) or talking (in taxonomy of communication) or permanence (in taxonomy of motion) and so on.

At some point there must be a convergence on pure concept for all (or most) languages, but I was wondering, in the context of discussing the relationship between concept and method, whether the path toward convergence matters. Is that, in fact, what we mean by method?

In the story of the deaf-blind children ...

Quote:

Maybe the same is true for “normal” people, just in a less dramatic way.

My inclination would be to say that this is the case. We are constantly redefining the meaning of these terms for ourselves by communicating about them intensely with others.

Quote:

So, as I understand it, you have two types of abstraction in mind: 1) conceptual abstraction (e.g. mathematics); 2) generalization-of-property abstraction (linguistic).

Not exactly. I see language and math as being faculties that employ the same process. The process itself is generalization, and there is hierarchy to this process that is most fruitfully viewed, I think, as a continuum.

At the bottom of the hierarchy are the simplest generalizations - in language, all things that are curved and therefore offer shelter. Things that are branched is another fundamental linguistic concept. Things that are threatening is perhaps also one. In math, few versus many, and then ‘how many,’ and then ‘divided thus and such’ by gender or by use or by ‘yours and mine.’ Even (divisible) versus odd (not divisible), smooth and flat versus rough and hilly (geometry), time it takes to get there as a property of location ... you see how close we are to the rhetoricians here, and to the generalization of ‘opposition’ or contrast as Heraclitus would eventually formulate it.

At the top of the hierarchy would be concepts without empirical foundation and to which the experiential ‘thing’ must be made to conform, rather than the reverse.

Quote:

Yes, I would agree. Though I suppose if you were a real cognitivist (or whatever the name is for someone who thinks mathematical objects are mere mental constructs), you could ask why we didn’t think up a non-Euclidean geometry first instead of the Euclidean one that just happened to match our local, naïve conception of space.

Well I’m not sure that we didn’t. If you look at the kind of mapmaking that indigenous peoples do - those who’ve not had the luxury of studying Euclid - their representations are not Euclidean.

Quote:

Because, although you’re right that the Cartesian plane has no counterpart in the physical world, we probably didn’t actually know this until after we began thinking of the ground beneath us as a two dimensional curved surface of a sphere or of objects very far apart on this surface or whatever.

I would say rather than we didn’t realize how unsuitable the Cartesian plane was to this particular use until we had both the Cartesian plane and a mathematical representation of the sphere. Before we had either of those things we had a representation of ‘location’ that relied on something else abstracted more directly from signifiers .... some symbol is invented, for example, to represent “uphill,” or “horizon” (this is where our territory ends). And I believe that linguistic philosophers will call these ‘signs’ rather than ‘symbols’ because they cannot themselves be generalized beyond the context for which they were invented.

In other words, I do see this as a process, and one whose beginning may have looked very different from its ending.

Quote:

Then again, it might be possible to argue that non-Euclidean geometries are simply relative in their curvature to Euclidean geometry ...

This, like the question of heliocentric versus geocentric astronomy, is a question that I think can only be asked of systems that are conceptual in origin and not experiential in origin.

Comments above notwithstanding, by the time humans had migrated far enough to be in temperate zones, they certainly did know that the earth is spherical. The experiential truth of this is evident the minute you leave an horizon-obstructing city. The fact that stars revolve ‘around’ the earth in a predictable manner was a matter of great importance to early people living in temperate zones, and their migration patterns demonstrate that they used this information effectively.

The geocentric model is thus closer to experience than is the heliocentric model, but insofar as either one of them will accurately predict when in the year the Pliedes (sp?) will rise so many centimeters above the horizon, a farmer is indifferent to the choice of models. The relative efficiency of the heliocentric model is of concern only to the mathematician, who has a different interest in the relationship between earth and space than does the farmer. Neither model is objectively true, as you say, and they are both purely conceptual in the sense that until very recently (long after the concept was formed ) it was not possible to stand outside the earth and observe its movement relative to other things in space. But one model arose from observation and the other arose from a quest for a more efficient concept, independent of its ability to explain observation. From the experiential point of view, the heliocentric model does not improve at all on the geocentric model and questions about the objective truth of either model are simply irrelevant.

We have a tendency to think of all human conceptualization as if it arose from the kind of thinking that took place during the Enlightenment. But the Enlightenment was a point along a particular path having many, many antecedents. You are looking there at urban Europeans, speaking a language with its own predisposing structure, operating in opposition to a myth system that is geographically narrow and recent in origin .... the other 40,000 odd years of human history during which time we know that conceptual language and math must have existed, may have looked and sounded quite different. We have to be careful that we are not imprisoned in our own history.

Quote:

To go back to your question, in general, insofar as philosophical thinking is concerned, I would go with the second option. I say this because I think one could only say otherwise if one believes that there are either context-free methods or truly objective goals...

I wasn’t sure which question of mine you were referring to, but I would agree that methods are not context-free, and goals are not so much objective as they are salient. “What’s the best way to flee a predator” is a salient goal, and one that all of us have experienced at one time or another, whether facing a saber toothed tiger or a drunk driver on the expressway or bird flu on an airplane. The survival goal only becomes fuzzy around the edges when you launch into ontology, and ask questions like, “What is existence that we should wish to preserve it?”

There is a sense in which ontology is the most experiential of all subdisciplines - what could be more experiential than existence itself - but another way in which it is the least experiential, for nonexistence is purely conceptual. No one ever has, nor ever could, experience it. We cannot empirically query the alternative to our own existence.

Quote:

... it’s very hard to get some people to even see the problem or issue at stake here .. <snip> ... It’s a shift, but a substantive shift that sets up a new reality rather than just a new terminology.

Anyway, that may all seem very obvious.

Well, it does seem obvious to me, but that’s because I did have to spend years in college learning it, and then other years teaching it (in a very narrow context). I agree that the challenge is getting people to understand what the question is. It’s one thing to read “No Exit” and understand, more or less, Sartre’s notion of freedom, something else to slug through Being and Nothingness and understand the arguments being made. These are realms of thought that are exceedingly subtle, and as soon as you get out of the popular translation and into the detail of the theory, you really do lose most of the audience. It breaks one’s brain to think about some of this stuff. It thrills me that on sites like this (and TORC and HOF) there are enough people sufficiently well-versed in these very complex topics that we can have exciting discussions about them, even if we do have to start with the definition of "is."

Quote:

But if you look at my original post the complaint was about translating factual/empirical findings inadvertently into ethical imperatives. So the issue is not precisely one of philosophical materialism or determinism, but of the erroneous derivation of an “ought” from an “is” as Hume put it. Right now, one might say we are discussing the "is of the is" or "just what is this is"?

Yes, and I would like to get back to the ethical question. It is for me, practicing a social science, a more engaging question.

I can’t write more about this now due to lack of time ... and would have to organize my thoughts better before writing ... but I think that positivism indulges in some sleight of hand where ethics are concerned. (And again, I think it is useful to be able to distinguish between concept and method and goal in this context.) I do not think that the goals of positivism can be separated from normative consideration. Goals are always normative, imo, and I doubt that humans are capable of fashioning goals that are not. So I think it is relevant to ask about the ethic of the scientist performing the research alongside the ethic of the media involved in translating it.

Iavas wrote:

I guess I'm saying it's a valid thing to study/discuss for completeness sake, but I don't think it has much importance when trying to address things like my argument for determinism, or for scientists in general.

I translated that in my mind to “many scientists in particular” so that I might agree with you.

I do disagree though that it is irrelevant to your argument for determinism. I view questions about the replicability of events as purely conceptual because perfect replicability is impossible to achieve in practice, not only because we lack sufficient information but because we do not have time machines. What does it mean to say, “I would be completely determined IF ....” when the ‘if’ is unachievable? Isn’t that the same as saying, “I can’t be completely determined” ?

Also .. yo! Din!

Jn

Stanley Fish's blog at the NYT touches on some of the discussion today.

The reader responses are almost as interesting as the entry.

Ax, thanks for that link! (Gotta read that book)

Quote:

A bunch of people threatening all kinds of subversion by means that couldn’t possibly produce it, and a bunch on the other side taking them at their word and waging cultural war. Not comedy, not tragedy, more like farce, but farce with consequences. Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep. I can hardly wait for the movie.

Wow, what a stunning capsulization of the half-century in which I've lived.

Axordil, thanks for that article... very interesting.

Stanely Fish wrote:

Criticizing something because it is socially constructed (and thus making the political turn) is what Judith Butler and Joan Scott are in danger of doing when they explain that deconstruction “is not strictly speaking a position, but rather a critical interrogation of the exclusionary operations by which ‘positions’ are established.” But those “exclusionary operations” could be held culpable only if they were out of the ordinary, if waiting around the next corner of analysis was a position that was genuinely inclusive. Deconstruction tells us (we don’t have to believe it) that there is no such position. Deconstruction’s technique of always going deeper has no natural stopping place, leads to no truth or falsehood that could then become the basis of a program of reform. Only by arresting the questioning and freeze-framing what Derrida called the endless play of signifiers can one make deconstruction into a political engine, at which point it is no longer deconstruction, but just another position awaiting deconstruction.

I think a simple two-fold distinction can clarify some of what the article is talking about. It's the difference between saying "this is a social construction" and "this or that social construction is wrong/right."

When Fish says that deconstruction can have no political agenda or incitement to action, I think the answer is "yes and no". There are two different levels:

1) epistemological: deconstruction does have an "imperative" in mind insofar as it argues that this or that is constructed rather than absolute. So to those who claim an absolute basis, deconstruction DOES level a challenge for change, but it is an epistemological change. Whether you want to call that imperative "moral" or "action-oriented" is another question.

2) "political": but it does not and cannot make any claim as to whether this or that construction is right or wrong.

So the only imperative to "action" is one which demands a shift in epistemology. But I think the claim of those like Butler, who works in queer theory and feminist studies, is that such a shift in epistemology will have more far-reaching ripple effects, so to speak.

So there is a very fine but very simple distinction here between the ordinary level of discourse (I choose this or that) and a meta-level of epistemological concern (there is no necessity for this or that per se). This is something that any careful reader of Derrida or Foucault, for instance, should pick up on fairly quickly, and I don't think I've ever transgressed it in my posts.

The frustration involved for those working in these areas is simply to get the point across that the NECESSITY which is commonly believed to inhere in certain practices or methods is simply not there absolutely, but relatively.

When, in this discussion, I argue against "erroneous" ethical imperatives, or when we are discussing the nature of scientific knowledge as methodologically circular, I am not saying--and I've said this above--that it is in any way wrong or that anything concrete about the practice of science should change. I am rather arguing for the epistemological change. But I do think that epistemological changes can be powerful in practical ways too. But the KEY is that I am arguing for the ABILITY to operate out of the resulting epistemological change, for the freedom of people and groups to move around and not be stuck to some totalizing, overarching, methodological hegemony. But it's NOT about whether these particular methods here or there are right or wrong... it's about BEING ABLE to move among them.

Quote:

I do disagree though that it is irrelevant to your argument for determinism. I view questions about the replicability of events as purely conceptual because perfect replicability is impossible to achieve in practice, not only because we lack sufficient information but because we do not have time machines. What does it mean to say, “I would be completely determined IF ....” when the ‘if’ is unachievable? Isn’t that the same as saying, “I can’t be completely determined” ?

I think it'd be more accurate to say Iavas thinks we would be completely predictable IF.....two different things.

Jadeval wrote:

So the only imperative to "action" is one which demands a shift in epistemology. But I think the claim of those like Butler, who works in queer theory and feminist studies, is that such a shift in epistemology will have more far-reaching ripple effects, so to speak.

It matters whether we think of deconstruction as necessitating social action or whether we think of it as simply implicating social action. Adrienne Rich is on firm ground, I think, when talking about the fact that we cannot think what we cannot say, and therefore the phenomenon does not have reality until we are able to speak about it. The language, used in that way, does not take us farther from the phenomenon but makes it accessible, possibly for the first time. So the linguistic identification of something - civil rights, for example - does precede anyone's ability to take action on it, and in this sense the language is activist in and of itself.

This is one step down, so to speak, from the imperative to adopt a new epistemology ... but also operates independently of that imperative, imo. The fact that "the other side" responded to deconstruction as if it could, by its very existence, impel social change, and that that response had social reality and physical consequence, means that deconstruction did by its very existence impel social change. The minute we were able to think about social situations as being linguistically provisional, we began to use that understanding to affect social situations, and could not have thought about social change that way until deconstruction came into being and allowed us to do so. It literally brought into being what would later be recognized as its own antithesis.

<momentarily channels Hegel, instantly regrets it, goes back to channeling Kuhn>

One of the more important ideas in Kuhn that frequently gets overlooked in popular translation is that the paradigm does not so much tell us what questions to ask as it tells us what questions we may not ask. It stands against (para) speech (deigma). And that is why the paradigm shift feels more like revolution than like evolution. What is included by the new paradigm is necessarily that which was excluded by the old.

Yov wrote:

I think it'd be more accurate to say Iavas thinks we would be completely predictable IF.....two different things.

I agree with you that these are two different things, but I'm not sure that Iavas is committed to that distinction. He seems to be saying that determinism is what makes things predictable, and if we only had sufficient information things could be predicted with perfect accuracy.

Jnyusa wrote:

It matters whether we think of deconstruction as necessitating social action or whether we think of it as simply implicating social action.

Right. I would say it’s the latter and not the former. It doesn’t necessitate any particular social action. But it does argue for a change in the way we think about social structures, a change in thinking which would undoubtedly lead to different way of acting, but again, not of necessity in any particular form.

Jnyusa wrote:

Adrienne Rich is on firm ground, I think, when talking about the fact that we cannot think what we cannot say, and therefore the phenomenon does not have reality until we are able to speak about it. The language, used in that way, does not take us farther from the phenomenon but makes it accessible, possibly for the first time. So the linguistic identification of something - civil rights, for example - does precede anyone's ability to take action on it, and in this sense the language is activist in and of itself.

I like a middle ground on this one. Thought and language, which comes first? Well, neither imo. My intuition tells me that there are “thoughts” (depending on what we mean by that) that are not very expressible (emotions for instance, if you want to somehow incorporate them in relation to cognition proper), and that matters like civil rights do have some non-linguistic priority. I say this because I think it’s important for the purposes of accounting for linguistic creativity. What I don’t think, however, is that we necessarily know the non-linguistic reality which precedes or lies “outside” language (at least not in the same way we know by way of language).

I don’t like to think of language as the be-all-end-all for “reality” to occur. But I also think language offers us a special kind of knowing in addition to non-linguistic approaches. Or, to put it another way, perhaps every way in which we “know” is linguistic, even if it’s not word and speech.

Jnyusa wrote:

This is one step down, so to speak, from the imperative to adopt a new epistemology ... but also operates independently of that imperative, imo. The fact that "the other side" responded to deconstruction as if it could, by its very existence, impel social change, and that that response had social reality and physical consequence, means that deconstruction did by its very existence impel social change. The minute we were able to think about social situations as being linguistically provisional, we began to use that understanding to affect social situations, and could not have thought about social change that way until deconstruction came into being and allowed us to do so. It literally brought into being what would later be recognized as its own antithesis.

By “the other side” you mean American influenced deconstruction? I agree with this I think. The important thing is that it “opens the gates” to new possibilities but doesn’t say anything about particulars after that, so to speak.