From: ant.mcwatt@ntlworld.com
Date: Tue Feb 03 2004 - 19:53:29 GMT
Dear all interested in the recent Rorty discussions,
Professor Ronald Pine at Honolulu Community College in Hawaii has kindly provided a substantial (and often hilarious) reply to Matt’s criticisms of the conclusion of his thesis “Intelligent Inference and the Web of Belief: In Defense of a Post-Foundational Epistemology” at:
http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/~pine/Thesis.htm
I hope it encourages further interest in the thesis and Professor’s Pine's other books which can all be found on-line at his homepage at:
http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/~pine
Best wishes,
Anthony.
“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is
fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's
going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or
religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because
these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”
(Pirsig, 1974, Chapter 13)
------------------------------------
Feb 1st 2004
Anthony,
I have had some time now to take a close look at the comments on the
conclusion to my thesis. Here is what I have to say.
First of all the Rorty apologetics reminded me of a new book on Feyerabend
(Feyerabend and Scientific Values) by Robert Farrell. The subtitle of
this book is "Tightrope-Walking Rationality." In my opinion there was a
lot of tightrope walking and weaseling in the criticism of my rendering of
Rorty. In fact, many statements just seem plain contradictory.
But let me start with what I hope would be a "shared" criterion for all
philosophical discussion. My conclusion is criticized without reading the
rest of the thesis. Hence, this criticism should be viewed as suspect
from the start. My critic notes that to have rational argument we need to
examine assumptions (premises) and that we "can't have an argument," if
you don't "share the premises." I disagree with this and much of my
thesis flushes out the wrongheadedness of this notion of radical
incommensurability, but clearly something is amiss if my critic has not
examined my premises.
That said, there are two main criticisms noted in what you sent me. One,
I have expanded the notion of metaphysics to the point that it loses its
meaning. Two, I have got Rorty wrong.
Let's take the Rorty claim first. For those of us that follow the Larry
Laudan version of modern pragmatism, have spent a considerable amount of
time studying science, and who find the premises of postmodernism worthy
(me) or no big deal (Laudan) but the conclusions mostly wrong, Rorty is a
relativist plain and simple. For us Rorty is just a less-schooled-in-science version
of Feyerabend. Now just as no existentialist wants to be called an existentialist,
supporters of Rorty and Feyerabend jump up and down in reaction to this
pigeon-holing of their heroes and make charges of poor scholarship and
then get published writing apologetic treatises. But let's take some concrete
Rorty conclusions and see if my critic can tightrope his way out of the relativism these
conclusions imply.
I think it is very telling to claim that Rorty believes it is fairly easy
to get commensuration in the sciences but not in the humanities or in
moral beliefs. The clear problem in my opinion that no amount of
apologetics or mental tightroping will alleviate is that given Rorty's
general claims about the elimination of foundationalism, argumentation
only within vocabularies, floating islands, edification rather than truth
seeking, and so on, Rorty is left with no story to tell as to WHY
agreement is often achieved in the sciences. And this lack of
adjudicatory ability then spills over into the humanities and moral
beliefs.
I claim that Rorty leaves us with no rational constraining process for
paths of propositions-brought-forward-in-defense-of-other-propositions,
and my critic claims this is just plain wrong. That Rorty is not saying
that the old notion of convergence of belief is being rejected, only that
we have no reason to believe that convergence will be successful.
(Nothing but tightrope walking here in my opinion.) This not only
contradicts the claim about the ease of achieving commensuration in
science (if we can achieve commensuration, our beliefs must be
converging), but the history of science provides us with much hope that
for rational human beings that our old-fashioned quaint nostalgic notion
of convergence in both metaphysics and morality is basically sound.
(One does not have to be a George Bush born again Christian to provide a
rational argument for democratic liberalism, though one may need to be a
Buddhist in part to adequately synthesize liberalism with the results of
experimental physics/metaphysics -- long story, maybe another time.
Interesting that you folks are also discussing Pirsig. Like Pirsig I
started out in science, mathematics, and logic and ended up sympathetic to
mysticism as a philosophical tradition that can provide a lot of
understanding for the results of modern science.). Although it will have
to go forward based on the twin insights that foundationalism is not
necessary and fallibilism cannot be avoided and is actually desirable.
In the introduction of my thesis I summarize these thoughts as follows.
"There is much in the above description of postmodern themes (my critic
should read the Introduction for the long list of citations) that this
thesis will be in agreement with: The demise of foundationalism and the
recognition (although trivial) of logical underdetermination; the
rejection of simplistic (entailment) confirmation theory, naive
correspondence theory and naive realism; the recognition and endorsement
of fallibilism and defeasible judgmental processes whereby epistemic
constraints are not employed algorithmically; the theory-influenced nature
of observation and interpretation of experimental results; and the
promotion of pluralism and the value of cultural diversity. However, the
main intent of this thesis is to defend within this broad context the view
that the epistemological project in the philosophy of science is alive and
well, that a humbler philosophy of science is possible that avoids the
polar evils of scientism and technological overconfidence on the one hand,
and epistemological melancholy, indolence, and anarchism on the other. In
other words, my intention is to defend the position that there are
epistemic constraints on our webs of belief, and that the use of these
constraints is best seen as what I will be calling acts of intelligent
contextual deliberation and inference given alternative hypertextual
justificatory trails."
The defense of the totality of these claims would be a life-time project,
but in the work of Popper and Laudan and their followers such work is
ongoing. My thesis was narrowed to examine how postmodernists misused
historical analyses of the so-called Copernican Revolution and how some of
the historical analysis itself was wrong. As you know the battle between
followers of Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomy is often portrayed as
"just two ships passing in the night," as groups of scientists "having two
different conversations," as "two floating islands or platforms," as two
empirically equivalent paradigms to assimilate astronomical data.
Further, claims have been made that the revolutionary shift had nothing to
do with intelligent inference but was the result of idiosyncratic cultural
factors.
Feyerabend claimed until the end that if we had enough bright people and
funding committed to Ptolemaic astronomy, we would still believe the earth
is in the center of the universe. Larry, shall we say, disliked
Feyerabend intensely, and felt that his ideas were not even worth
considering in my thesis. (Feyerabend once wrote one of the meanest
reviews for one of Larry's books that I have ever seen in academia. He
essentially claimed that Larry pilfered everything from one of Popper's
seminars that they both attended at the London School of Economics.) Not
having this personal background with Feyerabend, I always argued that
Feyerabend was the most worthy of opponents (unlike Rorty), because he was
trained as an engineer and physicist. The premises he used for his claims
in quantum physics and the history of science had to be taken very
seriously. I thought his analysis (in Against Method) of the fallibilism
inherent in Galileo's use of the telescope was brilliant. So, I take it
very seriously in my Chapter on Feyerabend, but ultimately claim he
misused his original insight.
(Feyerabend died of a brain tumor. Larry responded along the lines of "it
figures"; he thought all relativists had brain tumors. In his book
"Science and Relativism" he lampoons Rorty's philosophy in the
Galilean-like dialogue as that defended by a Quincy Rortabender, author of
"Knowledge as Myth: The Outlines of Ethno-Deconstructivism, and Skepticism
about Everything Except the Social Sciences: A Postmodernist Guide.")
Responding further to what you forwarded me, at one point my critic quotes
me and places part of it in CAPS, then says Rorty would have no problem in
"believing the part in caps." I think he missed the "given many
alternatives" part. As has already been acknowledged Rorty does not think
people can have rational discussion when they don't share "vocabularies."
I argue for what my critic refers to as the "confused, nostaligic" (sic)
traditional view that the success of science depends upon data breaking
through even the most entrenched vocabularies. The data are never raw and
uninterpreted. And we must adjudicate conflicting claims about what
position the data best support. But we are capable of intelligent
inferences nevertheless and ending an infinite regress or circularity in
the propositions-brought-forward-in-defense-of-other-propositions. I spend
hundreds of pages defending this view in the rest of the thesis.
A few other comments on Rorty. My critic says "Rorty does not assume that
'we do not interface with one world that responds evidentially to our web
of belief, such that we learn that some belief networks are better than
others." Did my critic see the world 'evidentially' here? Although I
read very carefully the two books noted in my bibliography, I will admit I
make no pretensions to being a Rorty scholar. But I would like to see
some textual evidence for the above claim. I sure did not see any in the
two major books cited.
"Philosophy is parasitic on practices and not at the forefront of changing
them anymore." This shows Rorty's basic ignorance of science. Einstein,
Bohr, Heisenberg, Bohm, and Shrodinger would surely disagree.
Philosophical insights contributed greatly to their scientific practice.
Also, interest in Plato is alive and well in discussions of current String
Theory. See chapters 7 and 8 of another book I wrote at:
http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/~pine/Book2.htm
To sum up on Rorty, I think there is a significant difference between
Rorty's rendering of how tensions are fixed in a web of beliefs (he really
does not advance much beyond Quine) and the story I tell in my thesis.
But my critic would have to read the whole thesis to understand the
difference.
Now as for the notion of metaphysics I am using, let me start with a
comparison from quantum physics. For many decades, due to the influence
of logical positivism which also eschewed any desire for metaphysics,
Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation was proclaimed as a vindication of the
correct way to do science -- make no claims about the nature of reality
and simply devise experiments to capture the phenomena. But as the
influence of logical positivism has waned, we see that Bohr was claiming
that modern physics was involved in making revolutionary epistemological
and ontological discoveries. When the empirical evidence is overwhelming
that Newtonian-Kantian conceptualization does not match and cannot capture
reality, we have thus discovered that reality is not Newtonian. This
realization opens the door to alternative characterizations - the work of
Bohm, string theory, neoplatonism. Experimental metaphysics is alive and
well. See the work of Henry Stapp.
Similarly, when one makes claims about our inability to achieve convergence of
belief and provides a detailed analysis for why this convergence will be unlikely,
one is making probability claims about what reality is not.
---end----
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