Adrian Selby

"This leaves us with only perspectives and interpretations, and none of them unchangeable or consistent with one another. The downside is that there is no hope for convergence of these perspectives, so no absolute knowledge is to be had. "--Ender

Are you saying that it is not possible for people's perspectives to converge on an issue, where their perspectives relate to their experience of their environment for example? Or, that the convergence is not any evidence for a perspective being 'better' or 'closer to a true understanding' than another?

Is the explanation of a sick man's illness in witch-doctor terms no better than the explanation from a western doctor? They of course have different vocabularies, and their experience may be no more than their perspective, but where would this leave what might be seen as deficiencies in the explanatory vocabulary of illness the witch doctor has. Is it that the witch doctor's fiction is less useful? If so, I wonder how we define useful?

Adrian

Ender

Hello Agnostic Pope! Thank you for addressing my post. I figure the best way to learn is to take a controversial standpoint and argue with those of deep-seated convictions. Since most of your post wasn't too contentious, I will address only what you found to be objectionable:

I think here you overreact by misidentifying perspectivism with postmodernism, and pull an Ayn Rand by making a sweeping generalization over a very broad category. When you stated postmodernism, which critical theory were you referring to: deconstruction, poststructuralism, second-wave feminism, new historicism, cultural materialism, postcolonialism, black critics, queer theorists?

I already addressed Intensity why perspectivism isn't necessarily out-and-out relativism above.

As for your moral outrage against the relativistic tenets in postmodernism, that's a topic deserving its own thread. In a nutshell I deny your implication that morals are objective. I stated this elsewhere: Do you have an opinion of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue?

By who? What realism? Don't you mean logical atomism? Bertrand Russell never published a true, working theory of knowledge, due to Wittgenstein's acidic criticism.

If you told Berkeley that, the old bishop would shrug and mutter something along the lines- "there aren't any trees."


What are your thoughts of the Kantian program? Or do you commit to the same epistemic fallacy Intensity does?

And so we have the Agnostic Pope's sketch of the mind- completely passive and inert. Am I right? If not, then the activity on the brain's part in assessing the raw data is precisely what I am arguing about- that the mind imposes certain constraints (whatever they may be) upon reality in order to render it intelligible.

This statement is incoherent. How exactly does a "tyrannical" universe does not entail the "source of our existence?" A tyrannical state does provide for its constituents, as long as they did not violate certain restrictions. I think I smell something very dank here- something related to pantheism.

This is a massive non-sequitur. How does this follow that the universe is not tyrannical?

I have not read that book, but I have very little respect for Daniel Dennett and his pedantic treatment of the consciousness. Dennett as well as you and as well as I are stuck behind a biological perspective that evaluates nature as "orderly." Order is necessary for our livelihood- but in no way does that guarantee its validity. This is a symptom of the belief in that 2300 year-old platonic doctrine, that truth is divine. The solution to the problem of truth may not be at all the supposed 'holy grail' of epistemology.

You overlook the enormous part of how our human nature arranges the raw data of the external world to make it intelligible. After all, Kant did say that reason was the fabrication of the intellect.

Calling evolution an orderly process is questionable- the causal mechanism of evolution is simply that- an anthropomorphic description. That we are here is merely a matter of luck. Suppose an asteroid did not wipe out the dinosaurs? (assuming the extremely high level of iridium in the sediments around 65 million years ago is sufficient grounds for an asteroid impact)

Beep beep- my strawman fallacy just went off. I stated that the universe does not have a moral order- not that man has no moral order. In your rush to refute postmodernism, you've read me sloppily. Plus, where in the "official postmodernist doctrine" that says moral order does not exist?

Bollocks. When you do read some postmodernists, come back and substantiate your sweeping assertions next time with actual passages.

I could go existential on you but I'm dog-tired. So i'll let this slide for the time being.

~WiGGiN~

[ April 28, 2002: Message edited by: Ender ]</p>

Bill

This is the essential claim made by Luntley in <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=692" target="_blank">Language, Logic and Experience</a>, and after carefully considering his arguments, I'm willing to grant him that much. Luntley then claims that shared human knowledge cannot extend beyond the arena of what at least one human has experienced at one time or another, and that seems to also be a reasonable claim. Finally, Luntley explains that, properly construed, this is the sole extent of the argument advanced by Dummett, himself, and the other anti-realists against realism, and that granting this line of reasoning (as I do) has substantial implications for classical logic as it negates one of the foundations of the Principia by Russell and Whitehead. In essence, anti-realism denies that there is a fixed (determinate) reality that exists independant of our ability to investigate it, and once that point is granted, classical logic falls because logical negation cannot be asserted. In mathematical terms, anti-realism denies that ((A) or (not A)) always equals one when all that is available to human experience is (A). This denies the validity of the "Excluded Middle" and "Bivalence" (for more on this, see Floy E. Andrews, <a href="http://www.mun.ca/animus/1996vol1/andrews.htm" target="_blank">THE PRINCIPLE OF EXCLUDED MIDDLE THEN AND NOW: ARISTOTLE AND PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA</a>).

But just because something is unknown or indeterminate, that does not imply that it is entirely lawless. Casting out the logical manipulations asserted by the Law of Contradiction, the Law of Identity, and the Law of the Excluded Middle (all of which are merely interdefinitions that collapse into one another) does not eliminate any of the other laws of logic, and there is clearly plenty left for us to work with. Accordingly, it goes too far to claim (as Ender does) that there is nothing but subjectivity upon which to build a worldview. No, we can record and transmit our personal experiences, and we can assign coefficients of probable validity to each such transmitted experiential description. We do not have to begin with such scepticism that we refuse to assign ANY coefficient of validity to the experiences of others! Indeed, for us to do so is to, at the same time, claim that our own experiences are invalid to all others for any useful purpose. That is an extreme form of scepticism that belongs in the trashcan right on top of pure solipsism.

Likewise, just because the universe might currently appear to us to be operating in a way that appears to be modeled by chaos theory does not, in fact, prove that the universe is chaotic, and neither of these ideas in any way prove that the universe is "operating under blind chance." Such assertions are clearly outside of human experience and accordingly they cannot be take seriously.

== Bill

Ender

Hey Bone, welcome back to the mosh-pit of high-faulting 20 dollar words!

Nietzsche did not have a favorable opinion of the self, (he thought it a grammatical fiction) nor did he subscribe to a mind-body dualism. Since Nietzsche was a thoroughgoing skeptic and a naturalist, the prognosis on mysticism is not very good. But I found this <a href="http://skepdic.com/cabala.html" target="_blank">link</a> that states for Nietzsche, "mysticism is nihilism's expression of the will to power." Personally this sounds like a superficial interpretation.

As for "apprehending the world in its immediacy" that is a phrase of phenomenology, and indicates a bedeutung. Someday i hope to do a phenomenological reading of Nietzsche and rehabilitate some concepts for a possible programme of my own- with bits of Sartre, Hume, and the linguistic flavor of Wittgenstein.

Most of the other commentators aren't much help- but F. A. Lea makes an interesting conjecture: "...that the value of things is always a human value, prescribed by one generation and inherited from it by another, was the contention he had pitted against the metaphysicians: he could not relinquish it now, and at bottom he did not want to relinquish it. This is what constitutes his unique distinction. In no other philosopher is mysticism of so high an order combined with absolute skepticism." F. A. Lea goes on to comment on his unique combination of "mysticism" with skepticism that it cannot be called religious, much less "pantheistic."

In a letter he wrote "Music is an echo of states, the conceptual expression of which was mysticism: a feeling of transfiguration and illumination on the part of the individual. Or rather the reconciliation of internal antinomies in something new, the birth of a third reality."
Another letter, on the definition of a mystic: one who "has enough and too much of his own happiness, and seeks out a language for his happiness because he wishes to give away."

~WiGGiN~
(edited to add: On your question of Logic- have you read this <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=21&t=000242" target="_blank">thread?</a>

[ April 28, 2002: Message edited by: Ender ]</p>

owleye

boneyard bill

"Really? So what is important is that we maintain faith in our theories, not whether or not the theories are right."

This would not be my interpretation, of course. Explanatory theories explain things by relating them to our experience of the world, not to a world as it is in itself. Reality, then, is what we experience, and not something we can never experience. Notwithstanding this, I do appreciate that there are two aspects of this experience, one, which, as above, _refers_ to a world which exists in itself. Thus, if we have some faith that a theory is a valid one, we would expect that all anomolies are explainable by positing entities responsible for it (much as we did, on the basis of a faith in Newton's theory of gravitation, when we proposed the existence of yet observed planets on the basis of anomolies in the orbits of those planets which we could observe). However, such a proposition about entities can only be serviceable if it can be related to our observations. The standard model in particle physics is the outcome of such researches. Despite this model, however, to the extent to which it applies to what I'm referring to as reality, such entities have an effect on us principally because we are not concerned with their individual welfare, but only in their collective welfare, where individuals are importantly indistinguishable, and this requires us to make use of statistical models.

owleye

owleye

Intensity...

"This is only sensible in non-chaotic systems."

In systems subject to deterministically chaotic behavior, the ordinary (linear) deterministic models break down to the extent that such chaos exists, since initial conditions can never be made precise enough in practice. More globally, however, if we can find certain "attractors" there is some merit to the determination of global effects. For example, we currently have a two-week weather prediction barrier, but this does not necessarily prevent prediction of climate changes over a longer period. Such models are of course statistical, not fully deterministic.


"Presented? By who?"

Well, in another context I probably would have chosen "represented" rather than "presented" but as you apparently require that if something is presented it must be presented by some agent, let me substitute "represented" to mean the way the world is experienced by us humans.

"Who explains anomalies using chance?"

Many people do, I think. I think this may be the origin of beliefs in fatalism. However, what I was referring to is rather that our basic human instinct is to assume there is a comparable cause for every signficant event in our lives (anomolies), despite that chance plays a significant role that a careful researcher would need to rule out.

owleye

Ierrellus

In Will and Ariel Durant's sensitive portrayals of philosophers one meets the "all too human" aspect of great thinkers. Imagine Nietzche, sitting at a piano. His fingers do not fall upon recognizeable chords. He says to his interviewer, "I, too wrote good books once."

In their youth Neitzche and Kierkegaard both visited brothels. To what extent is Kierkegaard's angst related to his sense of guilt? To what extent is Nietzche's "death of God' related to a corkscrew-shaped worm that destroyed his sense of order and replaced it with chaos?

Ierrellus

[ April 28, 2002: Message edited by: Ierrellus ]
edited for spelling

[ April 28, 2002: Message edited by: Ierrellus ]</p>

boneyard bill

Ender writes:

That sounds a whole lot like mysticism to me. At least it sounds like Buddhism which is the mysticism I am most familiar with. I don't quite get the point of your response. You seem to be saying the Nietzsche was, and was not, a mystic. Of course, Nietzsche would probably resent being classified in any case. But it seems to me that Nietzsche's critique of Western philosophy is nothing but Buddha's critique of Hinduism and Vedanta (the Buddha, or at least Buddhism, also denied the validity of inference. Are you familiar with Nagarjuna?). Only Nietszche stopped at the critique and produced nothing positive.

On the question of logic. Thanks for the thread. I do think I had read parts of it at least, but I didn't remember your response to the initial post. But aren't you excessively enthusiastic about Nietzsche? Is his critique of logic saying anything more than Kant said when he claimed that logic cannot produce new knowledge? Isn't Nietzsche just picking up where Kant left off and saying that Kant couldn't solve the problem because the problem can't be solved?

But let me get to my main point. It isn't Nietzsche's critique of logic which I object to so much as his hostility to concepts and abstractions. Because what seems implicit in his critique is that concepts and abstractions don't refer to any thing real. Well, it's true. The text doesn't refer to anything outside of itself. But when we create a new word we have, at least sometimes, expressed a new relationship. Now what is there to reality except relationships. So when we expand the text, through an abstraction or a concept, have we not learned something new about the world?

Admittedly, this isn't "ultimate truth" but if our effort is intellectually honest it isn't arbitray either. It isn't a faux Chinese taxonomy. If I come to realize the commonality of all human beings and invent the word "humanity" to express that, I am uttering neither an ultimate truth nor a falsehood. And I am, contrary to Kant, discovering something new.

So logic is, as Nietzsche claimed, an imperative. There must be no contradiction in my definitions. But it is a necessary imperative to allow us to discern new relationships. But it is relationships, not things, that world is all about.

I think Nietzsche was right to belittle our attempts to reify these concepts, but I think he is wrong to belittle the concepts themselves. And that, of course, is also my complaint with Post-modernism. Of course there's nothing outside the text because discovery takes place by alteration and expansion of the text itself.

[ April 28, 2002: Message edited by: boneyard bill ]

[ April 28, 2002: Message edited by: boneyard bill ]</p>

Ender

Does that mean whoever denies the Cartesian self is by default a mystic?
I apologize for not giving you a straight answer- given that there's no horse's mouth to be found! I wanted to get out what the commentators said and where did Nietzsche mention the word mysticism in his writings first before I could present my understanding. I would have to figure out what you meant by "mystic" and see if that concept can be superimposed on his philosophy, and how much is contorted in that ratiocinative process.
He was a deeply skeptical naturalist, whose all-inclusive description of the ceaseless forces in the universe as "will to power" could be interpreted as a variant of mysticism. You seem to be looking for an authoritarian reading of Nietzsche. Most readers fall into two camp- one that sees a consistent system, and the other sees a mass of contradictions.
Do you view the Ubermensch, the will to power doctrine, the Eternal return of the Same and amor fati negative concepts in Nietzschean philosophy? And would you mind explaining what the Naagarjuna is?
Yes, I'm a huge fan.
Sort of. Like Nietzsche, Kant maintained that the assorted structural features that we think are inherent in the world are actually only our ways of thinking about the world, and so they lack objective residency. Kant had argued that there are "things-in-themselves" that lie independent of time, space, and causality. But Nietzsche takes this much further with the feeling that there was a world which remained over that fluctuated like the black sea, chaotic relative to our distinction and maybe to all distinctions but there nevertheless. According to Will to Power 500 he thought that sensations and interpretation were inseparable.
No, we have learned something new about other words- something the old words lack is fossilized as a deferred conceptualization in the new word. Whether language does accurately reflects reality is really a moot point, an attempt to step beyond the text. In addition I think language has superfluous baggage that comes with it-a metaphysics of the world that it inescapably describe (which is chaos or becoming or will to power). And there's no other language to serve as a vantage point for a possible meta-analysis.
Ah, freezing the meaning of a word. This assertion is exposed, nakedly to Nietzsche's critical accusations of "fiction" or "invention" and as a Verdinglichung of grammar, where the grammatical subject of your sentence is transformed through the "mythopoetic" working of the understanding of man into the substance of the world.
I question your reading of Kant here, and the apparent loose employment of the word "logic." Kant never argued against the possibility of gaining new knowledge. I am afraid your entire polemic against Kant is a strawman.
Transferring the crown of philosophy from epistemology to sociology is what postmodernists have succeeded in the 20th century.
I just bought myself two books on pomo- The Postmodern Theory and The Postmodern Turn.
~WiGGiN~

Ted Hoffman

If reason led many great thinkers before Kant to reach certain philosophical positions that lay beyond the bound of sense, does that in itself mean reason is pretentious or unreliable?

How can we know that we cannot rely on what we perceive? Its what keeps us alive. We have tested perception and found it to work. Should we stop relying on our perceptions and conceptualizations just because some thinkers got deluded?

You haven't answered my question Ender. We dont get to decide how the earth should rotate. We dont get to decide how planets should be arranged. If that is not the real world, what is the "real" world? And whatever "real world" you hold - isn't it still a conceptualization?
Statements of knowledge and statements of being (as far as the epistemic fallacy is concerned) is an unnecessary bifurcation that doesnt give us any "higher" ground. As far as the ontic fallacy is concerned, I have not ignored cognitive and social mechanisms by which knowledge is produced. I am just asking what is so bad about conceptualization and perception and why cant we rely on them as a means of understanding the world (for our purposes like space travel - they have worked very well).
That is your response?
little defenceless scientific method?
I dont see the relevance of this. However I dont know anything about Paul Feyerabend that I can talk about. Ender, I don't have a philisophical background. I am a computer programmer.
The grounds people seize for evaluating knowledge is not subjective on ones value system. When a christian doctor is told there is a tenth planet, he will not refer to the book of proverbs. He will check from scientific sources. If he is told his senator has resigned, he will check with other politically informed sources.
His value system will not come into play when he is evaluating these kinds of knowledge.
In any case Ender, we are not just looseley discussing knowledge, we are discussing knowledge about the universe, not personal preferences of dispositions. Value systems adress moral questions ours is not a moral subject so your idea is misplaced.
You don't sound sober at this point. I will leave it at that.
What are these competing ideologies? Please provide an example. Try to relate it to the nature of the cosmos as far as chaotic vis-a-vis ordered is concerned.
"huge difference"
acknowledging order: Ah, the earth rotates on its axis each rotation takes 24 hours. The nine planets revolve around the sun.

assigning purpose: The earth rotates on its own axis because God spun it. OR the earth rotates on its own axis so that we can have day and night.

As intelligent beings, we have a sense of what
Order exists irrespective of what mathematical models of reality propound pigs havd been known to shit at one corner and sleep in the rest of the sty. That is order.
Plants have been known to grow towards light phototrophically. That is order. Order being a state or a sequence or arrangement of successive things or events.
really? **looks around**
Ok, then we are in agreement. But even then, your previous statement remains a paralogism - you said the task of "judging, comparing or sentencing the universe... is a superfluous one that lies outside of life and nature, one that is not afforded to living creatures such as ourselves."
It was a baseless statement, for the arguments I gave before - which you either refute or admit error in your thinking.
I agree - I'd say though that you are, in a sense, preaching to the choir.
*after reading sth on Feyerbend*
I can see you have this anarchist approach to empiricism as an epistemological approach.
What about physics is a mythology? I still hold that creating laws of physics does not amount to anthropomorphism because we do not assign those "laws" to phenomena, but use them to study those phenomena. Explain the part of physics that you find mythological.
The fact that we are capable of self-deception does not mean we should not have any confidence in our cognitive and deductive abilities.
So what point do you mean to make by underlining mans potential for self-deception?
No, the greater the intellect, the less the possibility of errors.
Not true, a dogs sense of smell is way behond that of man.
I don't agree that they are anthropomorphic. We do not superimpose our perspective on other phenomena or ascribe human motives to them. Unless you care to provide examples.
I agree on you on the first point, but not on the latter. There is a lot to discover for example whether wormholes can exist. I dont know what you mean by "the truth" but I know there is "the truth" concerning questions about where homo sapiens came from, life in other planets or universes, and how the universe came to be. We may have the truth or we may not have it. But there must be a truth about those questions including the possibility that they are wrong questions to ask.
If its not afforded to living creatures - its afforded to non-living creatures. Or its afforded to no-one.
Unless you want to talk of half-living creatures.
This is a thesis-antithesis situation that you created by that statement.
Unless you care to elaborate.
I mean, if someone says "such things cannot be afforded by poor people such an ourselves", it follows that they can be afforded by rich people unlike ourselves.
You specified the living aspect of our being. You implied we get disqualified on that basis.
God is not dead. Non-living things cannot die. There is no "Gods eye" perspective of the entire universe because God does not exist.
It's a pipedream philosophers "masturbate" about.

Who am I to ask for objective grounds from a subjective assessment?
I am someone who is confronted by someone who claims there is an objective view.

Even if Gods view existed, it could be true or correct but still subjective. Because we don't share that view. But he doesn't, therefore it doesn't and therefore is a non-issue.
Since you made a turnaround on the position you took earlier, I will leave it at that. In summary, I meant if other creatures existed outside our universe, there is no reason why their viewpoint should be superior to ours besides the fact that it would be different. You seemed to relegate our viewpoints to subjective and inaccurate snaps of reality and implied its futile for us to even try to comprehend the world.
Please explain how I equated perspectivism with relativism.
If you take away the sensory data from the object(which you cannot), you still have the object but it has not been perceived. If you do not have any sensory data from the word go, then the object does not exist at all.
This so called real world cannot be real to those who do not perceive it. Its like the christians saying that Jesus spoke to them. That is not real to the atheist.
Perception creates reality. Reality can exist without perception, but it remains unreal until its perceived.
Reality is the sum of human experience and knowledge. From the subjective, we create the objective.
As to "how do we conceive of unperceived matter?", we don't. The so called unperceived matter are figments of the imagination (like the IPUs) and are not having any practicality.
Thanks for the link, I will read it.
Only too well. In spite of its flaws, its our best bet in understanding reality and testing knowledge.
However, you would do well to state them. Otherwise your statement sounds like an attempt at casting doubt - where doubt would be unwarranted.
But I am not an empiricist, its just one approaches that I find reliable in life.
I am flattered.
They appeared just below...you seem to have got them.
I mean evidentiary proof. I mean you don't just wake up in the morning and then just because you had bad coffee, you say the universe is chaotic.
Where is the evidence for this chaos - Neitzches claim?
In summary, we learn nothing from what he says other than the fact that a great thinker is making a claim. Everyone can make a claim.
Chaos would be lack of apparent order (at least during Neitzsches time).
Neitzsche was adressing a universal feature (chaos) - it is incoherent to ask in which part of the universe he observed this chaos? If its incoherent to ask, is it then coherent to swallow everything he said just because he was a great thinker? Since you seem at a loss of any knowledge of any evidence he gave,
I take it he gave no evidence of the chaos then?
Reading this post can not constitute phenomenological experience. Its a subjective human act. Planets crashing against each other would be phenomenological experience.
Thanks for the info.
I am not safeguarding anything.
To this (philosophical constructions of God), I would say there is a God people want, and there is the God/ Gods that are written about in religious books (the so-called scriptures).
I think the former is a figment of the imagination (man creating what he isn't then labelling everything he isn't - God and putting him in the sky) and the latter is the one worthy of analysis.
*relieved* Thank you.
What does he need the infinite possibilities for if he already knows the best one?
If we know about the incompatible arguments properties, why should we find and argument that starts with "God is omnipotent" worthy of consideration? Because it was propounded by Leibniz?
I am flattered that this is my weakest.
They only become anthropomorphisms when we ascribe human motives, characteristics or behaviour to them. Which we havent done.
When we say action and reaction are equal but opposite, we dont imply the colliding bodies are sentient. When we say the earth rotates on its axis, that doesnt ascribe human characteristics to the earth.
Thank you. But you do not agree that there is order in the universe?
Wow, nice turn of phrase.
I agree with you completely.
Revert your moniker - what the heck.
Boneyard Bill
In the presence of that problem, the experiment is flawed. Thus it cannot be conclusive.
I am glad we are in agreement over this matter.
Owleye
I read your post, thanks for the clarification. Since we are in agreement, I dont have any issues I would like to raise with you