From: ant.mcwatt@ntlworld.com
Date: Sun Oct 26 2003 - 12:13:58 GMT
Matt said:
>The reason why pragmatists don't get too uptight about >Platt's criticisms of the pragmatist "theory" of truth is >because we don't think the concept of truth or a
>theory of truth has much of anything at all to do with >faking, lying, misrepresenting, deceiving, or falsifying.
In this context, it would be clearer to state Rortyan pragmatism as opposed to Pirsigian pragmatism. Otherwise, it sounds like Pirsig (as a pragmatist) is arguing with himself in the phrase:
>“We (i.e. the pragmatists) also don't think the moral >question of scientists being honest with each other is, >pace Pirsig, a scientific question.”
Moreover, I think the argument of Pirsig’s in the specific section of LILA (in Chapter 24) that Matt is referring to here, is more subtle than he is suggesting. Pirsig is not just stating that the moral question of scientists being honest with each other is a scientific question. Rather, Pirsig is revealing the dilemma of scientists concerning the scientific status (or otherwise) of morals because if morals are outside the remit of science then this is an acknowledgement that there is part of the world that science can not comprehend though essential if such issues as the faking of scientific data are of any concern. In other words, scientists can’t have it both ways.
Moreover, Pirsig notes further that this state of affairs developed due to historic reasons (i.e. the requirement for the independence of scientific truth from social opinion and especially from Renaissance religious authority) rather than any scientific ones. As he later notes, this distinction is important to make because scientific truth is largely provisional (i.e. Dynamic) while religious doctrine is largely dogmatic (i.e. static).
“Science always contains an eraser, a mechanism whereby new Dynamic insight could wipe out old static patterns without destroying science itself. Thus science, unlike orthodox theology, has been capable of continuous, evolutionary growth. As Phædrus had written on one of his slips, ‘The pencil is mightier than the pen.’” (Pirsig, LILA, Chap.24)
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Matt further states:
>Pragmatists don't think Galileo and Newton were doing >anything all that different from what Plato, Aristotle, >and Ptolemy did. The only difference was that Galileo and >Newton came up with and used a better and more useful >vocabulary than their predecessors did.
I don’t think this assertion is completely accurate. The essential difference between Ancient Greek science and the science of the Renaissance is in the methodology used. This is described in some detail by Northrop in “Logic of the Sciences & Humanities” (1947). For example, note the following paragraph from page 37:
“With respect to Aristotle, it should be noted that his science was so excessively qualitative and lacking in predictive power, not, as so many have supposed, because he was a speculative arm-chair thinker, but because he was such a pure empiricist, and so exclusively inductive in his procedure, using only the methods of observation, description and classification. Predictive power and a quantitative, non-qualitative science come only to a science which passes beyond Baconian empiricism to
deductively formulated theory. This, Aristotelian science did not do, for scientific reasons relevant in Aristotle's time, but no longer relevant in our day. In fact, Aristotelian physics was the second stage in the physical inquiry of Western science, for which the deductively formulated physics of Galilei and Newton is the third stage.”
Returning to the MOQ... what is especially interesting from Northrop’s text, is that you can see how SOM developed from first just being a methodological assumption for mechanics with Galileo (i.e. where the observer is abstracted out of the picture), then to Newton who (when developing Galileo’s work on mechanics) added the assertion that an observer only has perceptions when acted upon by material substances, then finally, as an ontological assumption in philosophy when Locke and Descartes concluded (wrongly) that a Newtonian observer had to be some sort of mental substance absolutely different from a material one.
Anyway, I hope the above is of some help,
Anthony.
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