Change and permanence, science, pragmatism, etc.
- You cannot navigate change without some reference point that extends over that change, e.g. laws of gravitation used to predict planetary motion.
- Fixed reference points have a tendency to get blown to smithereens, e.g. Aristotle -> Galileo -> Newton -> Einstein
The popular pragmatic answer to this is just to stick with a reference point until it is falsified, which is more or less how science works. You can use a clever little reversal here and say, "Now we're stuck with that falsification as a fixed reference point, and we get tangled up in the question of whether or not it can be falsified." I want to take a different tack, however.
The problem of goals. Why are you doing this? What, exactly, do you want, and what are your motives? This, I conjecture, is the big problem with trying to analyze the whole history of science, because the people involved may not have even had the same goals. Indeed, Foucault (I am told) takes this angle, and states that different scientific paradigms have arisen due to differing investigative goals, i.e. the people who classified plants in medieval times had entirely different reasons for doing so than modern botanists.
This extends beyond science, by the way. The history of modern society is the history of us (ostensibly) trying our hardest to be good little children of the Enlightenment.
Hypothesis: pragmatic solutions to this problem do not work, because no matter how much time people like Rorty spend asserting that we should just ignore the idea of ultimate goals or transcendence or what have you, there is simply no way to stop humans from constantly asking "Why?". A lot of people are apathetic on this front, but should they be? More importantly, there are always people who aren't apathetic. Wittgensteinians go on and on about how philosophy ought to be therapeutic and there are no philosophical problems, but here we are nearly a century later and philosophers are still doing what they've always done, so that hasn't worked.
Thoughts?
Comments (36)
:-O I notice you said some blasphemy towards the Great One there...
They can ask why till they're blue in the face, the only thing is that I cannot even imagine an answer to that question. Why? What kind of answer would you even expect? What kind of answer would even satisfy you? One's ultimate goal is to live in Hawaii, another wants to become Emperor of China, and so forth. An ultimate goal is about how YOU relate with reality - what YOU identify as your purpose given your material and spiritual conditions. So the question why is personal, there is no universal answer that can be given.
As to imagining an answer to the question - well, what of it? "I can't imagine it" isn't gonna satisfy any of those transcendental nutbags, now will it?
Also, I said "Wittgensteinians," not Wittgenstein, although there is no philosopher with whom I fully agree, besides myself, and even that one is sometimes doubtful. Wittgenstein was my favorite for a long time, and I don't deny that he was head and shoulders above most philosophers of the past few centuries, but he's not perfect.
Wittgenstein's problem comes from his references to "mysticism" (wink) and stuff beyond language (wink wink) and general sentiment along the lines of "This is all you can say about this and as far as you can go, and there's no more to it, except there is," (wink wink wink.) Nobody has destroyed him, it is true, but did he succeed in ending philosophy? No. And nowhere is this more aptly illustrated than in his modern-day followers, who have taken his supercilious attitude toward philosophy as a career and made a career out of it. Poor bastard must be spinning in his grave.
Of course so? My reality and your reality are not the same, for the simple reason that we live in different communities, we have different backgrounds, desires, and so forth. We cannot have the same purpose for these reasons.
If you are born as Prince Charles, your purpose in life will be different than if you are born in a fishing village in Japan.
Quoting Pneumenon
No, but nothing will. That's exactly my point. There simply is no cure except that they give up the imagined itch.
Groups are formed by people who share similar purposes. In addition they are formed by those who can "sell" their large purpose unto others.
You seem to take the attitude that the transcendental nutbags will not be satisfied because there is nothing that can satisfy them, and the only winning move with such questions in not to play. You also appeal to personality and context, saying that such things are personal and different between different people.
Here's the issue, though. You are engaged in a discussion. You say things like this on the internet, where they're meant to be read by many other people. If I make it a point of saying that people who seek some kind of transcendence ought to stop, then, if I am arguing in good faith, I really am trying to get at least some of them to stop. But, as we've seen in philosophy since Wittgenstein, this never actually happens, because the transcendental types keep doing their thing. So shouldn't the Wittgensteinian be the one to halt das maul?
(Not that you should, of course. I'm talking to you for a reason, after all.)
I anticipate (perhaps wrongly) that your response on this point will be "Well, they can do whatever they want! Meaning is personal, so it's not my problem." I don't think this response works, though, because if you really thought that, then why bother engaging in the discussion at all?
I'm not saying they should stop - I am not concerned about what they're doing. I'm merely indicating that I think their activity is pointless - "it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"
Quoting Pneumenon
Because I hope that maybe one of those lunatics will one day reveal some reason for their lunacy to me, which will make sense. I don't expect it, but maybe one day one will. And maybe that will be of use to me in achieving and following my own goals. So I have to challenge them. I would be surprised if they succeed - I don't see how they could go about it. You know @Pneumenon - a hunter never knows where the rabbit will jump from, so he must test and verify in all places.
I will venture a conjecture here, that you may tear apart or affirm as you see fit. You are willing to engage in discussion with the lunatics because you are not 100% certain that they are lunatics. That is to say, you are willing to entertain the idea that there could be a transcendental answer, or at least, a good reason to seek one. And the lunatics do their loony stuff because they believe the idea that you are only willing to entertain as a remote possibility. Have I understood you?
Sure
Quoting Pneumenon
Either that, or there could be something useful in their lunatic practices of relating with the transcendent that could be useful to me.
Quoting Pneumenon
Mostly.
Exactly, this is why I'm critical of physicalism, etc., because there's still some sort of motive behind it; it's essentially a religious belief. The call to lay all bias at the foot of Lord Science is essentially a religious call. It has some sort of undefined telos behind it.
To me, this illustrates how pervasive a teleological way of thinking is in society. And more importantly, how can anyone truly know all of the motives behind their own thinking in the first place? To fully be aware of ones own motives requires deep honesty with oneself. The discipline to "draw out the deep waters" itself requires a motive for why to even bother in the first place. Someone's "ultimate goal" is to live in Hawaii or be the Emperor of China, as Augustino says, but what's the motive behind the goal? Motives are deeply layered in us. I like how Tillich defines God as "ultimate concern".
The motive is strictly personal - one could want to live in Hawaii because they were born in very poor conditions, where life was very difficult and ardous - living in Hawaii would be a release for them and their family. Someone else could be motivated to become Emperor of China because he feels the destiny of his nation sits on his shoulders - feels he is asked to do something for it. And so on - these are very particular reasons, that are almost nonsense to people who aren't the person in question. I'll take the guy wanting to live in Hawaii, and the guy wanting to be Emperor of China as nutters from strictly my perspective. These things only make sense to them and for them.
But surely by learning about their reasons, you can make sense of it for yourself? The reasons you just laid out sound perfectly reasonable, why do they not make sense to you? I can put myself in their shoes and imagine why they feel that way. I can imagine myself feeling similarly if I was them.
Quoting Agustino
Yes, and so on. These motives are a chain, a series. Where exactly is the genesis? How many of the motives are conscious, and how many unconscious? Motives and decisions are almost like the dark matter of society. Motives, conscious and unconscious are what cause society to propagate. It seems dismissive to me to simply say that others motives don't make sense to anyone but the person who holds them, simply because they are different from yours. Empathy is built on the ability to understand someone else's motives, to make sense of them.
I can imagine being in their situation but I cannot imagine arriving there.
Because one's motives reveal themselves to them, and to no one else. I do not know how, for example, the guy wanting to become Chinese Emperor, how he started to perceive it as his duty to become the leader of the country, and start feeling it is his responsibility to do so.
Quoting Pneumenon
Pragmatiism highlights the place goals have in rational inquiry. So that in fact defines "reference points in nature" in explicitly self-interested fashion. Reality is the "view from us". Our goals become an active part of the triangulation.
Vulgar pragmatism says the world-defining goal (the purpose that forms the umwelt of sign, to use the semiotic jargon) is personal utility. The questions about existence are guided by the ultimate anchoring question of "what's in it for me?".
But a scientific pragmatism - that tries to speak as nakedly and disinterestedly of nature as it can - instead might seek the goal of generalised invariance.
If one could imagine the distillation of all possible points of view, then what would emerge is the invariant characterisation of being? Lets look at a rock or a star from the point of view of the "universe". What would we see if we were that kind of "mind".
So in full blown Peircean pragmatism, you get that final ontic shift. The Universe is granted a mind in the sense that it stabilises its being by having a generalised point of view .... that is guided by some central purpose.
Cue the second law, equilibrium dynamics and entropy maximisation.
What you call "a fixed reference point" seems just another way of talking about the invariance of a symmetry. So relativity arises simply from a demand for the symmetry of universal co-variance. The world should look the same at any spatiotemporal scale of observation. So the "special interests of observers" - their particular states of acceleration - have to be factored out as localised, very personal, symmetry breakings.
Quoting Pneumenon
Yep. Except the Enlightenment was based on atomism and Newtonian physics. And that reductionism - which presumes material being as brute existence, and spatiotemporal symmetry as transcendently fixed - has long since been revised by more holistic theory.
So society still understands existence in these classical terms. Science - pragmatically - has moved on.
Quoting Pneumenon
Rorty is hardly a pragmatist. But I guess even in his own time Peirce was having to relabel himself a pragmaticist because folk like James could only understand a simplified "Enlightenment" version of his holism. :)
But anyway, again one can always ask "why?". Yet if one's answers achieve the invariance of universality, the questions become merely repetition of differences that don't make a difference. The questions become about chance particulars and not about deep universal laws (or symmetries and the reasons for their breaking).
And note that the goals are emergently immanent. That is the point of pragmatism proper, the ontic kind - to show how the regularity of universal habit could arise.
Can't you just ask the guy? >:O
Really though, I partially agree, at least in that the motives of another are not always knowable or clear, but I think we can certainly apprehend some amount of another's motives. Actions also reveal motives, for instance. We can make decently accurate assessments, given enough time. We can make an assessment accurate enough, for instance, to make a judgement and then take an action. The results of our action could reveal that our judgement of the other's motives was accurate.
Knowing what his motives are is different than understanding why they are his motives. It's part of his freedom, having chosen those motives (or being chosen by them :P ). For example, why was Steve Jobs motivated by the idea of creating ground-breaking and revolutionary products for the world instead of, let's say, go and become a Buddhist monk? Both were viable alternatives, but he chose one of them. Why?
I definitely disagree here; understanding why his motives are what they are would just be discovering the further motives underneath those motives. We don't choose our motives, as you say. Steve Jobs chose his career path, but he did so because of underlying motives; he didn't choose those motives. If I had been one of his closest friends or family members, I could probably elaborate further on what some of his motivations probably were.
Do you disagree with what else I've said here about motives? You don't really seem to be responding to my thoughts, just to what I say about your thoughts.
I disagree because some motives are primary. It's simply what it means to be Noble Dust that you have such a driving motive. Without it, you lose your very own essence. Otherwise we'd have an infinite regress of motives, which is nonsense. Some motive has to be primary and foundational to one's character.
Steve Jobs chose his career path for an underlying motive - he didn't become a Buddhist monk, even though he could have become one. But if he had, he would no longer have been Steve Jobs. Because to be Steve Jobs was simply having that underlying motive that was the core of who he was.
So you're saying the foundational motive is unknowable? If so, I mostly agree with that, but it doesn't mean we can't learn about the other motives layered on top, and get a sense for someone's general motivations, even if it's not a perfect, exhaustive knowledge.
No I'm not saying it is unknowable. I'm saying that its source is unknowable - it's not known why Steve Jobs has that motive.
Another way to engage with this motive is to despair for not being able to actualise it at the present moment. Such a person may jump from activity to activity and experience a sort of restlessness and inability to quiet themselves down.
Others may not know the motive at all - because they lack self-awareness. They will be rushing from here to there, and back, not knowing what they're looking for, troubled by an itch whose origin they do not know.
We don't share fundamental motives with others. However, them reaching their goal may help me to reach mine and conversely, in which case we'll both work together.
So what exactly is the point you're driving at? You're slowly revising your position. You originally said:
Quoting Agustino
Which isn't the same as saying
Quoting Agustino
These two ideas, that 1) our own motive is knowable to us, while 2) it's source is not knowable, seem arbitrary to me.
Quoting Agustino
Quoting Agustino
Quoting Agustino
The path as to how these persons arrive at having such fundamental motivations is not known. Why? Because their motives emerge from their own particular relationship with reality, which is unknowable. You can know their motivation is X - you can imagine being in their situation and having that motivation - but you cannot imagine ARRIVING there - you cannot imagine their relationship with reality that grounds that motive.
Not only our own motive, the motive of others too are knowable.
Quoting Noble Dust
The source of our own motive is not knowable because it cannot be put into concepts. The source of others' motives is not known because we have no direct access to their relationship with reality, since we are not them.
Let me paraphrase you here - I want to make sure I got it right. You're saying that proper pragmatism is an ontic inquiry; you can always ask "why," but once you do this past the point of universal invariance, you hit a wall because there's no answer in terms of a more general kind of invariance. Since scientific pragmatism, on your definition, is about explanation in terms of more general kinds of invariance, it follows that the pump runs dry once we get to universal invariance. Basically, a qualified Principle of Sufficient Reason with a restriction on the kinds of explanations allowed, viz. they must be in terms of more general invariance.
Now I want to talk about something else here: why that particular restriction? I would assume that this is motivated by the success of natural science, but that's a guess because you have not yet said so. Does this methodology bootstrap itself out of scientific pragmatism, from "Let's do this because it works" to a more general method, a sort of conceptual ascent? Or is it some other reason?
No, in the bit about the Emperor, you're saying that his motivations "are almost nonsense to people who aren't the person in question". But you just said that we can know the motivations of others. That's the inconsistency I was pointing out.
They are almost nonsense to the person in question because they don't have access to their first person relationship with reality, not because they cannot imagine being in that situation and having that motive.
It was clear from my second reply to you. A motive is grounded in something - in the relationship of the person with reality - hence why I said that I know their motive but not how they arrive to it. Without having access to the ground - not through knowledge, which is impossible, but through first person awareness, how can I make sense of their motives? They are almost nonsense to me = I know the motive but not how it is arrived at.
That's why I pointed out the discrepancy in your original reply. :-} Whatever. Anyway, I can tentatively get with the idea of a fundamental motive being grounded in how someone perceives reality, especially since our perception of reality is by definition so steeped in a self-centric way of life, if not overcome through various disciplines. I would even say a fundamental motive is often grounded in how the person views themselves, in relation to the world around them. In other words, our perception of the world around us is fundamentally grounded in a perception of self.
I mention invariance as Nozick did a good book on that (if you want a more contemporary reference to answer Rorty).
But yes, invariance is the natural limit of skepticism. It defines the point where asking "why" no longer makes a difference. And so you might as well be quiet.
And indeed, Witty was channeling Peirce via the proddings of Ramsey if you check out Cheryl Misak's lastest retelling of the history. So quietism does not simply have to be an epistemic cut-off, it can become the ontic terminus. Invariance is the equilibrium state where further detail cannot disrupt the global whole.
This gets tricky because it is about reaching a metaphysics where both epistemology and ontology are saying the same thing for the same reasons. The grand project is to re-unite what has become philosophically divided.
So Rorty is saying pragmatism means goals are entirely personal. And models of reality are completely socially constructed as a result. The distance between the phenomenal and the noumenal is .... an unbridgeable chasm in the end.
But Peircean pragmatism says, hey look, the universe itself has a "reasoning mind". Our best model of epistemology is thus our best model of ontology. It is the same modelling mechanism (or semiotic sign relation) at work in both cases. It is just that our human or Kantian-level relating is indeed highly specific and personal, while that of the universe is at the other end of the spectrum in being maximally general and "disinterested" in any particulars. That is why the universe can be described in terms of the most generic physical laws, or statements of mathematical symmetry and symmetry breaking.
So sure, this "pansemiosis" of Peirce (he called it objective idealism) sounds pretty mystic ... if you are still a reductionist. But it is a grand unifying project that makes plenty of sense. It accounts for what science has actually found (in itself needing to re-unite observers and observables to achieve any final theory).
Quoting Pneumenon
Well it is more complicated as you have a point of departure - vagueness - as well as one of arrival, in generality. So the genesis of questioning begins with the breaking of one (vague) level of symmetry and ends once continued questioning (or perturbation, or fluctuation) fails to make a general difference.
And Peirce defined that in terms of the Laws of Thought. Vagueness is that to which the principle of non-contradiction does not apply. Generality is that to which the principle of the excluded middle does not apply. So at the heart of logic, these are well defined terms.
Quoting Pneumenon
The success of natural science does prove that there is an epistemology (of modelling relations) that can lift humans out of their self-interested rut long enough to discover the disinterested invariance of existence "itself".
And historically, the "Let's do this because it works" version of pragmatism came after - if we are talking about the highly utilitarian kind of pragmatism that James made a big hit of, by tapping right into that Enlightenment point of view which then became the familiar Yankee disconnect between the social and economic spheres of life.
So it is crucial to point out that including the very idea of "doing this for a purpose" in pragmaticism is what makes it possible to think that the everyday desires of biologically-evolved and culturally-situated humans are far from an invariant fact of nature. Instead they are highly particular. But then also, by the same token, pragmatism can then model the notion of purpose in general. And thus it starts to make sense that even the universe is formed by its (thermodynamic) desires.
So yes, the whole argument is immanently bootstrapping in any direction you might care to slice it. That is why it is "naturalism". There can be no transcendent get out clauses. It all has to self organise.
Clearly for Peirce, it did arise out of scientific practice. He was - rare for a philosopher - a top scientist. But his metaphysics arose as a holistic and organicist retort to the overly reductionist and mechanical understanding of reality that Enlightenment science - the classical world of Newton - had produced in popular thought.
So Pragmatism proper is about the unity of things. It steers the middle course by being inclusive.
You can see the way philosophy went after the Enlightenment split things apart. You have the analytics who ran with the reductionism. They went for stories of bottom-up material and efficient cause, rejecting top-down formal and final cause as "spooky".
Then you have the Romantic-counter reaction that particular reduction engenders - such as Post Modernism. Now - reacting directly to the popular success of techno-analytic reductionism - you have the alternative camp that says form (or structure) and finality (or meaning) are the true foundation of things. Analytics are just "weird" because they have no soul, don't get poetry, and are generally just uncool and nerdy. Purpose must again be at the metaphysical centre of existence (even if existentialism says that just means purpose as it is to be understood multfariously by "any individual".)
But Peircean pragmatism unites by telling the Aristotelan systems story where existence is the result of a free interaction between bottom up and top down causality. The Universe is holistic in that it really is formed by all four of Aristotle's causes. They are all real and to be taken seriously.
So I get the feeling you want to read a historical direction to this - from science to metaphysics.
But Peirce was rejecting science as it had become (even for analytics and continentals) in order to return it to the more complete thing it once was (and is now becoming again).
So pragmatism is a foretaste of that future science, and a return to the roots of metaphysical understanding we see across many ancient cultures in fact - not just the Greeks with Anaximander or the Hesiod, but Buddhism, Taoism, even Judaism (as in ein sof).
The problem is weak philosophy - that is, subjective values. This leaves us in a hazy, nebulous, and clueless state, where the best we can do is live 'good but clueless lives' - not even knowing what 'good' is exactly.
I've answered all the Great Questions of Life adequately - my answers being based on current verified knowledge and our best models of reality (since my philosophy addresses broader survival), and I've even identified the REAL Greatest of the Great Questions of Life: "Why Bother?" (admit it - you must answer that question before you even begin to address the now 'lesser' questions - and note that science will never address that question - which means philosophy is still relevant (tell that to Stephen Hawking).
Answering this Greatest of the Great Questions of Life just happened to be the Ultimate Value of Life: Higher consciousness (of which humans are the current sole owners of (on Earth), though in a very primitive state). So to put the Greatest Answer into a sentence, the answer to "Why bother?" is "because consciousness is a good thing" (consider the alternative).
Now we have the Ultimate Value of Life, which has an associated Ultimate Goal - to secure the Ultimate Value (which currently happens to be unsecured). So in our case, the Ultimate Goal would be worded, "to secure higher consciousness in a harsh and deadly universe".
Now that we have an Ultimate Goal, we have an Ultimate Arbitrator in distinguishing good from evil (their being goal-driven), which gives us a solid foundation for building worthwhile lives (with a clue) and relevant civilizations (finally).
So now, when you are asked, "Why are you doing that?" "What is it you want?" "What are your motives?" You can put on a philosopher's hat and stand tall and say, "To secure higher consciousness in a harsh and deadly universe" (and you can add "thou fool!" just for impact).
The other "Great Questions of Life"? They have been answered by science in the form of verified knowledge (which is still largely ignored in favor of one's own uninformed imagination and social needs).
"Why are we here?" Verified Knowledge: "All evidence says there is no purpose. This is the universe that we have just awakened to. It is up to us to do with our awakening what we will."
"How did we come to exist?" Verified Knowledge: "All evidence points to pure chance in a chaos system of inanimate matter and energy."
"What is the meaning of life?" Verified Knowledge: "We make our own meaning, and if it is anything less than securing higher consciousness in a harsh and deadly universe, than you are a fool, a knave, or both, and your philosophy is death."
"Is there a God?" Verified Knowledge: "All evidence says 'no, and that all religions have been exposed as make-believe."
"Is there life after death?" Verified Knowledge: "All evidence says 'no', and further, it would be prudent to assume 'no' - that we have to work for it. Consider if we 'believed' that it existed and it did not, and we did not work for it, then we would be signing our death warrant.
"In the beginning, how did matter and energy come out of nothingness, i.e. how did 'something' come from 'nothing'?" This is a question for science, and it has not been answered yet. Philosophically I've answered it as follows: Infinity and eternity do not exist in the physical world, for anything that 'exists' needs 'bounds', and they are both 'boundless' - hence they are only words for 'nothingness'. Infinity is the nothingness in which everything exists, and eternity is the changelessness in which everything changes. The best we can do is define and broaden our time and space bounds in nothingness and changelessness (infinity and eternity), and hope that one day it intersects with other enlightened beings. Also, given infinity, 'everything' cannot exist (there being ever-more space for ever-more 'things' to exist in); and given eternity, 'eternal life' is rendered impossible (there being no end to stop and look back and say, 'Finally, I've lived forever!").
To finally address how 'something' came from 'nothing' - it can't, so the issue must be that there is something fundamentally wrong with our concepts of 'nothing' and 'something'... (and I suspect that infinity and eternity have something to do with it, but I of course can't be certain - it is a mere possibility to be further investigated).