From: Ian Glendinning (ian@psybertron.org)
Date: Tue Feb 15 2005 - 10:58:57 GMT
Matt ...
You said
I think this is the most important point to understand ... we follow
Wittgenstein in thinking that there is nothing more to the meaning of a word
than how it is used.
I agree
It's a couple of years since we enganed in any correspondence, but there is
lttle doubt you and I are aligned on this pragmatic point. You make another
point of mine too, about the point of "debate". No-one "wins an argument by
intoducing logical analysis to undermine their "opponent" (unless their
opponent happens to agree) - that's destructive - what is needed is
synthesis, not analysis - careful with that razor Aristotle / Occam /
Eugene - choose your weapon. Creative addition of the two views, changing
the words if it helps. All life is problems (Popper / Wittgenstein) - all
problems are lingusitic (Ian / Matt) - all life is linguistic (any
logician).
Actually you do have an interesting definining of science - just another
vocabulary you say. Agreed.
Philosophy / Physics, Meta or not - the question is the same, "how does that
work ?" - the answer ought to be the same the closer we get to agreement,
the only difference being the language used IMHO. This "great convergence"
is often pooh-poohed by expert / specialists, but I think it is real in
these days of mass communication. Rightly or wrongly, we all use / misuse
jargon (with our own understood meaning) arising from walks of life beyond
our own, daily - the ultimate lexical soup.
I'm reading Searle's "Mind - A Brief Introduction" - I impatiently crticised
him in some earlier blog posts, but I have to say he talks about as much
common sense as I've seen in a long time. I don't think he'd disagree with
the synthesis above, even if you feel I may be stretching it.
Ian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Kundert" <pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 7:50 PM
Subject: Re: MD Pure experience and the Kantian problematic
> 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." 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
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Don't just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
> http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/
>
>
>
> MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
> Mail Archives:
> Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
> Nov '02 Onward -
> http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
> MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
>
> To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
> http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
>
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Feb 15 2005 - 11:03:49 GMT