How ironic that I, who think of myself as a Socratic conversationalist, should instead be launching mini-lectures into the inky void of the Net!
I have only ventured into Facebook with reluctance. The Net and its social networks seem to me a bizarre mixture of letting it all hang out and moving through crowds without leaving a trace, of avatar exhibitionism paired with watchful anonymity. I guess I’m Old School that way.
But maybe it’s just what it seems to be, a new set of possibilities, with new strengths and new weaknesses, and new threats as well as new opportunities.
James Scott shows in “State Simplification” how the need for low, transparent costs and standardized measures required by mass-manufactured commodities (with their long supply chains and global markets) ultimately prevails against the local standards of measure and flexible pricing required by artesanal products.
In the age of mass maufacturing, commodities are for the masses, and luxury items are for the 1%: Lamborghini’s, yachts and items auctioned at Sotheby’s.
In the coming digital age, a broader luxury market is developing: fine German automotive engineering, portable computers and, at the everyday level, artesanal food products of all kinds (locally-grown, fair-trade, free-range, etc.), small splurges that the the emerging 10% of university-educated professionals can routinely afford. Welcome to the post-industrial age!
Did you know that before the 14th Century surnames were not widespread in Europe?
They were mandated by the sovereigns of emerging nation-states, eager to have accurate head counts for taxing and conscripting.
In the 16th Century a Welshman from Moston identified himself before an English judge as Thomas, son of William, son of Thomas, son of Richard, son of Hoel, son of Evan Vaghn. You are Thomas Moston, the judge corrected him.
Do the standardized assessments used by bureaucrats accurately portray what they administer, or do they impose the interests and agendas of centralizers on those over whom they seek an augmented authority?
James Scott uses in-depth analysis of Prussian forest management and Napoleonic and Tsarist attempts to reconfigure rural land ownership to demonstrate the tendencies of the administrative bureaucracies under which we all now live.
Pragmatism is often seen as a peculiarly American science-first and results-oriented counterpoint to, among other more traditional philosophies, German idealism.
Of course, German idealism is a broad grouping, ranging from the two-feet-on-the ground Kantian version to the full-flight versions of Hegel and T.H. Green, the Oxford Hegelian that logical positivists and pragmatists loved to disparage.
However, in reading Dewey’s short essay “The Practical Character of Reality,” I’ve realized that, at least as far as empirical science, his position and Kant’s are in agreement concerning how we come to know things in an empirical sense, differing in the scope with which they address the problem and in the presuppositions each thinks necessary to support similar procedural accounts.
Kant requires a whole metaphysical support system, what he calls the “transcendental conditions of any possible experience,” while Dewey prefers to limit himself to the conditions under which our knowledge of an object enlarges.
In a nutshell, Kant argues that the mind’s grasp of empirical objects is limited by its internal constitution, that is, by what it is capable of registering. The mind imposes categories, concepts are conceived from within rather than imprinted from without.
Upshot #1: We have no way to understand the phenomenal world except through the lens of cause-and-effect.
Upshot #2: Space and time are the media, or channels through which experience comes to us. We cannot presume that they are features of what really is, the noumenal world. What must have sounded like science-fiction at the time, opened the door to several of Einstein’s most striking positions — that time is relative to the dispositions of observer and observed, that time is best viewed as part of a 4-dimensional matrix — as well as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and that version of String Theory which posits 11 dimensions.
Our world of phenomenal experience is deformed by the limitations of our inbuilt perspective; we live in the phenomenal world, always partly a function of our own limitations, while things-as-they-are-in-themselves exist in a noumenal world forever beyond our reach.
Back to Dewey. Dewey’s pragmatism can be seen as taking Kant’s distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds down to the scope of our apprehension of individual objects and their classes.
When Dewey insists that there is no meaningfully separate object, or truth about that object, he means that the inaccessible part of the truth of that object is, by definition, always beyond our grasp — is noumenal, in Kant’s terms. What we know of the object is what we have so far been able to determine about it. We begin with whatever familiarity with the object and its uses we garner from common sense. So, the origin of the inquiry itself arises as a matter of practice (i.e., how we should conduct ourselves regarding it in the future).
To advance from there, a problem must arise with our existing knowledge, an irritant leading to doubt, and then to inquiry to resolve that doubt. We entertain hypotheses and then put them to the test, by judging their adequacy by their practical consequences, meaning their ability to be confirmed experimentally, to produce acceptable results when presumed as a principle for actions, their ability to stand up to our own and others’ scrutiny. And so, the outcome of the inquiry is also a matter of practice.
For Dewey, then, what we really have is an evolving understanding of the object, whose incremental enlargement is both triggered and confirmed by practical considerations. The truth of the object as it is in itself is eternal, unchanging, and absolutely empty. It is a goal we have in mind before we have discovered the means by which we will approach it and begin to register whatever part of it we are currently able to access given our circumstances and practices.
John Dewey’s article runs about 15 pages, appearing, under the same title, in Philosophy and Civilization. New York: Minton, Balch and Co., 1934, pp. 36-55.
If, as pragmatism holds, any belief that a mind relies on as true must correspond to some favorable practical outcome for the organism, then true beliefs would be useful when they enabled helpful anticipations of, or responses to, future experiences, that is, future interactions of the organism and its environment.
It’s easy to see how this accounts for the usefulness of well-formed empirical generalizations of all kinds, both the rigorously inductive generalizations of science and the less systematic inferences of practical wisdom.
But where would this leave knowledge of rule-based sytems that seem independent of experience, either because they are always the same everywhere (i.e., universal) or because they are thoroughly arbitrary and artificial (i.e., social constructs)?
The answer is to be found in the conditions under which social practices can be shared and communicated.
Consider first an arbitrary but naturally evolving system of rules : natural language.
Language is a tool, the most versatile and plastic tool in the arsenal of the tool-making animal. Although entirely arbitrary, its usefulness depends on each user mastering its rules: vocabulary, grammar, and so on.
Failure in mastery limits the tool’s usefulness, so the best exploiters of this tool master its rules, however voluminous or arbitrary they may be.
Thus, all competent members of this language culture will internalize a set of rules governing their linguistic behavior, because doing so maximizes their effectiveness in the socila situations on which their thriving depends.
So, this system of rules, though not a direct response to its interactions with its physical environment, is a very useful response to its social environment, a crucial element of its physical environment for a social animal.
Consider next an arbitrary but deliberately designed system of rules, the kind we call a game: chess.
Though chess exists by fiat, a deliberate design with an inventor, it works within the social environment very much as does a naturally evolved language. Wittgenstein coined the term language-game to stress at once the arbitrariness of the rules and their inseparability from social practices.
So, once again, the internalization of these wholly artificial rules is enforced by the conditoins of success in the social practice called playing chess.
Master the rules or go down to defeat!
Consider last a non-arbitrary system of rules: arithmetic.
Unlike the two previous examples, the rules of arithmetic are not arbitrary.
One defines, as axiomatic to the arithmetical system, a unit, 1, the absence of a unit, 0, and the successor operation, n + 1, and all the rules of arithmetic unfold from there. This unfolding follows by definition, and therefore can be proven deductively.
The truths of mathematics are independent of the needs of organisms altogether, but no one participating in social practices depending on arithemetic will thrive without internalizing those truths.
No miscounting accountants will prosper, nor innumerate economists, nor data analysts who routinely produce mistaken calculations from the data.
In conclusion, formal systems, whether universal or arbitrary, are enforced among rational and social animals by success and failure in those social practices that depend upon them. In one sense, they are useful habits learned through experienece by individuals, while, in another sense, they can arise both by fiat and as self-defined systems of rules with axiomatic foundations. The former are pure social constructs, the latter are not.
It does not mean that if a belief pleases you it’s true.
It means that for a belief to count as true it must either improve your ability to predict phenomena or must support actions that improve your situation, predicting phenomena and improving situations both being beneficial practical consequences.
For the purpose of predicting phenomena, verification procedures within a discipline can enforce consensus, to varying degrees.
Natural sciences: the scientific method enforces consensus effectively, except for brief interims of revolutionary science, until one of two rival paradigms eliminates the other with a deicisive experiment (Kuhn, The Theory of Scientific Revolutions).
Human sciences: the scientific method here can only enforce a partial consensus, culminating in the lengthy or permanent coexistence of rival paradigms, theories, or schools of thought.
History: the historical method can only enforce a partial consensus, as with the human sciences. In both cases, the difficulty of observing subjects fully is the obstacle.
For the purpose of proving propositions independent of experience (which, however, can be useful for organizing experience), the generating procedure of pure deduction (from definitional givens by rules of logic) enforces consensus.
Logic: abstracts from all content.
Mathematics: abstracts from all empirical content, leaving only such definitinal content as numbers, space, and the like.
Rights-based Ethics: interestingly, if one takes rights as given (i.e., as an axiom), one can deduce a rough consensus about formal justice along the lines of the Golden Rule, the social contract, or the categorical imperative.
For the purpose of improving situations, we learn from experience what works and what doesn’t, and what are the chances of success and risks of failure.
Common sense: our starting-point.
Technical know-how: folkloric or scientific.
Practical judgment: knowledge through experience of risks and rewards, of the expedient and the feasible.
Ethics (habitual and cultural): knowledge through experience of what practices tend to lead to, over the long run, contented and functional individuals and communities.
Absent either verifying or generating procedures, differences among individuals will produce different outcomes that “work” for that individual or community:
Religion: differences of worship.
Ethics (as self-perfection): differences of aspiration.
Caveat: This is not a summary or consensus of the discussion, merely my own musings triggered by the discussion. Responses from those who attended, or anyone, are welcome.
Evolution is a process without purpose that creates the first system of purposes. Those purposes all begin with survival, but proliferate as niche adaptation and colonization, since each evolutionary lineage seeks its own survival.
Dennett’s three stances (physical, design, and intentional) correspond to things without functions, things with functions imposed from without, and things with functions determined from within the thing itself.
Dennett is clearing hinting that much that looks to belong to the third, autonomous, category, does so only in the sense that their genetic and cultural determinants are carried within in their genetic nature and cultural nurture, and thus are only apparently autonomous. He does not make that case in the brief excerpt we read, but he clearly leaves the door open for it.
How far are we autonomous beings capable of forming our own purposes, and how far are we the product of external engineering by nature (evolution) or nurture (culture)?
A question raised by some: Is the human practice of science an unbiased form of receptivity to all that in any sense exists? Or is it a discipline, a motivated practice developed by human beings to serve the purpose of predicting and controlling anything conceivable as an object?
A further question: can subjects be conceived as objects? Does doing so capture all that is important about them, or some of that only? Ought we to conceive of subjects as objects? Must we conceive of them as such, at least to some degree, when we manage them, whether as citizen-subjects, soldiers, employees, students, or any other group organized to cooperate to achieve group benefits?
When All Is Said and Dunn 