From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Feb 14 2005 - 19:50:04 GMT
Hey Ian,
You mentioned that, though you don't like the definitions I was using, you
liked that I was "honest enough to introduce them as your working
definitions for the purpose of debate." I think this is the most important
point to understand about pragmatism and its reversion to the Socratic/Greek
meaning of philosophy (as opposed to what turned into Platonism) and I just
wanted to expand on it for a moment. All of our definitions are "working
definitions" because we follow Wittgenstein in thinking that there is
nothing more to the meaning of a word than how it is used. In the
conversation known as philosophy, all we can do is find better and better
ways of saying things, which means proposing theses and definitions and
hashing out their pluses and minuses. Even if you think that philosophy (or
some other activity) can get at the way things really are, the activity of
having a conversation is nothing more than this. Scott reflects this in a
recent reply to Ron when he says that philosophy is the "activity of
evaluating, challenging, and reshaping the philosophic vocabulary."
Depending on what we are trying to do, we'll use different definitions. If
a person is doing history, they'll dig around and try and find out what
people from a particular time period were doing and how they defined their
words. If a person is actively trying to change the course of a
conversation, they'll find creative redescriptions of old words (and maybe
create some new ones) to get their point across. The technique that works
the best, I think, is balancing between the two, summing up the past and
trying to move beyond it.
Oh, and I don't have any interesting definitions of natural science or
physics. Pragmatists like myself are moved to call a science "a vocabulary
that is good at predicting and controlling." Obviously such a definition
like that is in dire need of some further qualification (like "physical
stuff" or "by using microstructural explanations"), but I don't have the
energy to work up something appropriate right now, and there isn't really
any pressing need to. But Scott pretty much sums up a pragmatist view of
science when he responds to Ron when Ron suggested that the sciences are
much different now then they were, say, when the logical positivists were
around:
"I don't see any 'real science' changing in all this. All the disciplines,
scientific or otherwise, would be just the same whether they are called
"empirical" or not. What counts for physics and chemistry are that
experiments are reproducible, that theories are testable, and so on. What
counts for, say, economics is if the theories make good predictions. If it
works, it is good. If it doesn't, it is not good."
The thing that Scott brings out nicely here is how disciplines create their
own problematic and what counts and does not count as a satisfactory
disciplinary production. Physics, chemistry, and economics are all in the
game of predicting and controlling and, based on their different purposes,
they've come up with ways in which to tell a good theory from a bad theory.
Like the idea that "intelligent design" is a scientific theory. I'm not
sure how Scott feels about it (based on his feelings about Darwinianism),
but as far as I can see, from what I've read, "intelligent design" isn't so
much a theory whose purpose is to displace evolutionary theory, as an
attempt to block the road of inquiry (by saying, "nah, nah, evolution won't
explain the things you want it to"). Pragmatists have very little truck
with blocking the road of inquiry, we'd rather let inquiries die out on
there own. People will simply stop doing them when they are found to not be
profitable anymore. And from what I've read (like Micheal Behe's
"biochemical attack" on evolution), there just isn't enough evidence to
warrant a stop to evolutionary theory. But we'll see. That's the best
thing about inquiry: we'll more than likely never know whether we're right
or wrong in our predictions or suggestions about what is better or worse.
Its up to the historians of a couple generations down the line to sum up
those things, who was wrong and who was prescient beyond their years.
Matt
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