Ichthus77

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 3: ‘Fog Over Channel, Continent Isolated’: Epistemology in the ‘Two Traditions’ – Section IV, Part 2-Section V. Derrida.
Section IV, Part 2

“There is plentiful evidence in the writings of Jacques Derrida-especially his early work on Husserl and his Bachelard-influenced analyses of metaphor in the texts of philosophy-that Derridean deconstruction inherits something of the same epistemo-critical agenda. At any rate, it stands well apart from those other movements in recent French though (post-structuralism, postmodernism, and the Foucauldian ‘genealogy’ of knowledge) that adopts a highly skeptical approach to such issues.”

1. “presses hard on various antimonies in Husserl’s project-chief among them that of ‘genesis’ and ‘structure’–…with the utmost analytic rigour and with a keen sense of their taking rise from deep-laid yet conflicting necessities of thought which cannot be put down to mere confusion or failure of conceptual grasp.”
2. “instances the ‘undecidability’ of certain propositions with regard to the role of the metaphor in philosophical discourse, this term is not deployed in a loose or ad hoc way (=’vagueness’, ‘ambiguity’, etc.) but specifically with reference to Gödel’s proof that any formal system complex enough to generate the axioms of elementary arithmetic will contain at least one theorem that cannot be proved within the system itself.”
3. Pursues “with no less rigour and tenacity” “the ‘logic of supplementarity'” that he “finds everywhere at work in the texts of Rousseau and others” “for its contravening certain classical axioms, i.e., those of bivalence and excluded middle.”

There is widespread antipathy to Derrida’s work (just wiki Derrida for reasons)-Norris thinks it is mostly due to ignorance of all the background to Derrida’s thought. Derrida (and Norris, as we’ll soon see) disagrees with the ‘analytic’ tradition, that we can approach an issue without consulting earlier thought. On the one hand, I think if we have all the tools of previous thinkers, we don’t need to read everything they did to arrive at those tools in order to use them. On the other hand-if we want to speak their language, we have to use the terminology with which they are familiar-and to do that, we must read them. Hence, this book discussion…which makes me feel like I’ve merely chipped the tip of the iceberg. Only by reading folks can you find out where they got stuck, and be able to explain how to get unstuck. Only by reading folks can you save your efforts for work that is left to be done, and avoid reinventing the wheel or repeating the same old mistakes of past thinkers (“conjured away through a Wittgensteinian ‘therapeutic’ approach that most often leaves them firmly in place”)-which is what allowed cultural relativism to creep in.

Section V.

But at last there are signs that folks in the analytic camp are taking another look at issues addressed by post-Kantian epistemological thought, like “the question whether issues of knowledge come down to issues of first-hand epistemic warrant. …the question which divided Neurath and Schlick in the debates around ‘old-style’ 1930s logical positivism, namely their disagreement as to how far scientific truth-claims could be cashed out in terms of a phenomenalist (sense-datum) language which nevertheless eschewed any recourse to ‘subjectivist’ or ‘psychologistic’ modes of thought.”

This question still preoccupies recent analytical thinkers-refer back to John McDowell-but suggestions first proposed by Kant are often advanced as if nothing had happened on the continental side (“from Fichte and Schelling, via Hegel, down to Husserl”) since then-or that it “represented nothing more than a local aberration from reputable standards of truth, rationality or commonsense warrant. “The problems with McDowell’s revisionist reading of Kant-his strenuous attempt to dismount from the ‘seesaw’ of logical empiricism-are exactly those which first came to view in the quarrel between Fichte’s subjective idealism (his idea of the world-constituting Ego) and Schelling’s all-encompassing conception of nature as the ultimate source and ground of knowledge.” And folks try to appropriate Hegel’s work w/o considering “its fortunes in that other (mainland-European) tradition” (Norris says that a lot…maybe he just gets tired of saying ‘continental’…wants to mix it up a bit). They have ignored treatment of the issues by ‘continental’ thinkers from Husserl to Derrida.
Influenced by Wittgenstein, they invoke a naturalized Kant as if the problems which necessarily arise from this are “pseudo-problems that result from our chronic ‘bewitchment of language'”. But, “they are problems which necessarily arise for any project of thought that attempts to resolve the classic antinomy between truth as a matter of ‘absolute ideal objectivity’ and truth as lying within the compass of attainable human knowledge.” Hmm…maybe I still need to revise my ‘1’, ‘2’ thing from the last two sections? Lol. Oy vey.

The following is updated and corrected in my “starting point” thread.

1. Certain, mind-independent truth (ontology) histoire sanctionée (sanctioned history-hypotheses which have ‘transcended the metaphor’) ‘context of justification’–‘absolute ideal objectivity’-omniscience (which, granted, requires mind-but ‘facts’ are not dependent on that mind for their truth-kind of like how God “is” good, rather than “making” good exist).
2. Uncertain knowledge, belief (epistemology) ‘context of discovery’
–Genesis: “process of reasoning by which such truths [structure] are arrived at”-“the genesis of theories or the history of scientific thought”—Structure: “distinguishes the truths of mathematics or logic”-truth, knowledge, epistemic warrant… (can arrive at truth, but not at omniscience)histoire perimée (lapsed history) – applies to those theories which don’t pass muster

[When we come to believe what is true, then 1 and 2 come together (except for that which lapses). All we need to bring 1 and 2 together is a standard for distinguishing true from false-and minds who use the standard. The only being who doesn’t need to “use” the standard is an omniscient being, who does not “come to believe”-but eternally knows.]

This is the issue Derrida deals with when he “pursues the antinomy between ‘structure’ and ‘genesis’ which results from Husserl’s attempt to explain the possibility of objective mathematical truths as somehow resulting from a sequence of discoveries with their own historical and culture-specific conditions of emergence. Thus he shows that Husserl’s entire project is riven by these two contradictory imperatives, i.e., the requirement that geometry should on the one hand be conceived as possessing a character of timeless, eternal, a priori truth, while on the other it involves the ‘reactivation’ of certain cardinal insights that have made up the history of geometrical thought from Euclid to the present day. In particular Derrida brings out the problems that result from any striving to secure the apriority claim when confronted with developments-such as non-Euclidean geometry-which would seem to place large obstacles in its way.” What’s cool about Derrida is he approached these issues with respect to Husserl’s “exemplary rigour” and “the points at which phenomenology runs up against constitutive problems or aporias in its own undertaking.”

How to reconcile objectivist verification-transcendent mathematical truth with epistemic accounts which bring truth within reason’s grasp, as see in chapter 2, is a main topic of debate for analytic philosophers-and Derrida “takes due stock of the well-known exchange between Husserl and Frege on the status of truths in the formal sciences and the strict necessity-as Frege saw it-to redeem such ‘absolute ideal objectivities’ from any taint of empirical grounding or ‘psychologistic’ provenance.” His way of raising these issues gets him beyond Gilbert Ryle (recycles ‘psychologistic’ charge) and Michael Dummett (pro-Fregean)-and others from that ‘other’ (non-mainland European) tradition (like the ‘nothing works’ folks). “His reflections on the problematic status of a prior truth-claims are pursued in a way that contrasts sharply with the approach adopted by philosophers who either reject such claim out of hand or arrive-like Putnam-at the pyrrhic conclusion that the sole candidate for a priori status is a trivially self-evident proposition such as ‘not every statement is both true and false’.”

McDowell (refer to previous mention of him) suggests grasping Kant’s doing away with dichotomies like mind/world, subject/object, concept/intuition, logical form / empirical content, and “see that the mind’s ‘spontaneity’, i.e., its active role in our various processes of knowledge-acquisition, is in no way separable from the mind’s ‘receptivity’, that is to say, its (supposedly) passive registration of incoming sensory stimuli”-while ditching (or embracing? lol) the parts about scheme/content dualism (that knowledge is “a matter of bringing sensuous intuitions under adequate concepts”)-but in doing so, he merely “substitutes one dualism for another, that is, Kant’s talk of ‘spontaneity’ and ‘receptivity’ for his talk of ‘concepts of understanding’ vis-à-vis ‘sensuous intuitions’.” This part confused me, because it wasn’t clear if McDowell was in favor of the latter dichotomy…though, I’m assuming by how it ended that he was. In short: Derrida does it better.

The rest of the section/chapter basically ends the way section 1 begins-refer to that.

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 3: ‘Fog Over Channel, Continent Isolated’: Epistemology in the ‘Two Traditions’ – Section IV.

Part 1: Bachelard.

The shifting pattern of response is not “restricted to the work of German philosophers and critical theorists.” French philosophers to be discussed are Gaston Bachelard and Jacques Derrida (influenced by Bachelard), both of whom cut across the traditional divide. Discussion of Derrida will begin in Part II and continues as well in Section V.

Gaston Bachelard cut across the analytic/continental divide, adopting a critical-rationalist approach “which lays chief stress on the capacity of scientific thought to achieve advances in knowledge through the critique of naïve (commonsense) ideas and also of certain a priori intuitions and concepts to the extent that these have proved an obstacle to progress.” He was influenced by “mathematician and physicist Henri Poincare who considered such counter-intuitive developments as non-Euclidian geometry to have placed sharp limits on the role of a priori reasoning in science.” Bachelard’s approach can be considered ‘continental’ “in so far as it takes a detailed account of the genesis of scientific theories or the kinds of thought-process that are typically involved in the production of scientific knowledge. To that extent it stands within the rationalist traditions, descending from Descartes, which conceives knowledge as involving possession of ‘clear and distinct ideas’ arrived at through properly disciplined exercise of a priori reason. However, it also marks a break with that tradition by insisting that such clarity can only be attained through the constant critique of supposedly self-evident truths.” He retains an interest in the processes of thought through which scientific revolutions occur when received ways of thought are challenged. His study of paradigm-change throughout scientific history differs from Kuhn, because Bachelard recognizes scientific progress can be justified by improved description, prediction and explanation of empirical phenomena-so the continental tradition provides “strong grounds for resisting the cultural-relativist drift that has characterized some developments in post 1970 Anglophone thinking.” Bachelard can be contrasted against Kuhn’s paradigm-relativism/worlds, and Quine’s ontological schemes. Rather than an “outright rejection of that subject-centered or foundationalist epistemology” as displayed in the thought of Lyotard, Heidegger-influenced hermeneutic theorists, the Wittgensteinian ‘linguistic turn’-Bachelard’s thinking combines “a qualified acceptance of certain Cartesian precepts with a full recognition of the various ways in which it can be led into error through over-reliance on the witness of a priori intuitions and concepts.” This is why he concurs with Husserl about the need to account for both the ‘genesis’ and ‘structure’ of enquiry (I guess he considered both to be in the ‘context of discovery’).

His study of analogy and metaphor can be misunderstood to “promote a Nietzschean view of science-or of ‘truth’ in general-as nothing more than a host of sublimated metaphors and images whose origin has now been forgotten and which thus manage to pass themselves off as veridical concepts.” But Bachelard “insists on a process of ‘rectification and critique'” whereby the role of metaphor is left behind, transcended, and the theory becomes histoire sanctionée (Black’s caloric theory of heat giving way to ‘specific heat’; ether giving way to the electromagnetic field defined by Maxwell’s equations) [“the history of ‘sanctioned’ (knowledge-conducive) hypotheses]. That or the model becomes inadequate and relegated to histoire perimée (like the tetrahedral image of the carbon atom, or phlogiston) [the history of lapsed (referentially void) hypotheses]. “These particular examples have been worked out in detail by philosophers of science whose agenda is set by problems and concerns within the broadly ‘analytic’ tradition. Yet the fact that they converge so strikingly with Bachelard’s epistemo-critical approach” is evidence of cutting across “parochial or academic lines of demarcation”.

So, histoire sanctionée (sanctioned history) deals with ‘context of justification’ whereas histoire perimée (lapsed history) can be dealt with sociologically when considering ‘context of discovery’. Why theories in the latter category ‘lapsed’, is because they did not meet the standards of “empirical testing, the framing of apt hypotheses, inference to the best explanation, etc.” required of theories in the first category. Bachelard sought to combine these categories-perhaps the way I combined them in my commentary in the last section-that when we believe what is true, and when we use such methods which arrive at truth, then the two categories (a: truth which is true even if we don’t know it, b: what we know and how we know it) come together. But Bachelard considered both genesis and structure to be dealt with in the ‘context of discovery’

The following is corrected and updated in my “starting point” thread.

So perhaps it would be better to put it this way:

1. Certain, mind-independent truth (ontology) histoire sanctionée (sanctioned history) ‘context of justification’
2. Uncertain knowledge, belief (epistemology) ‘context of discovery’
–Genesis: “process of reasoning by which such truths are arrived at”-“the genesis of theories or the history of scientific thought”—Structure: “‘absolute ideal objectivity’ that distinguishes the truths of mathematics or logic”-truth, knowledge, epistemic warranthistoire perimée (lapsed history) – applies to those theories which don’t pass muster

[When we come to believe what is true, then 1 and 2 come together (except for that which lapses). All we need to bring 1 and 2 together is a standard for distinguishing true from false-and minds who use the standard. The only being who doesn’t need to “use” the standard is an omniscient being, who does not “come to believe”-but eternally knows.]

Personal note: It makes sense that since all of our knowledge is theory (as we are not omniscient and are incapable of certainty) that we consider genesis and structure not to be separate from eachother-the genesis is really the genesis of structure.

*****
Tiny problem: sanctioned history is defined as knowledge-conducive ‘hypotheses’ — but God (the omniscient) does not need hypotheses.

Either a) put sanctioned history down in “epistemology”, or b) don’t refer to them as ‘hypotheses’ anymore, since they’ve “transcended the metaphor”.

*****

Important distinction to make that I don’t think I made ‘very’ obvious (prob’ly ’cause the focus is supposed to be on how the traditions are not ‘quite’ so distinct):

The analytic trandition typically only wants to focus on “structure” (ditching “genesis” when it ditched the self’s involvement in enquiry), whereas the continental tradition also considers “genesis” important (helpful in explaining advances/progress). Could be wrong in parts/whole.

John McDowell (and other analytic revisionists) “recommend a return to certain Kantian insights, albeit through a highly selective (‘naturalized’ or ‘detranscendentalized’) reading of Kant.”

These ‘revaluations’ “still inherit something of the logical-empiricist prejudice against explaining both “structure” and “genesis” of knowledge, both “process of arrival” and standards for being able to say “we’ve arrived”. It was for want of these things that analytic philosophy “gave way” to “Quinean ‘ontological relativity’, Kuhnian paradigm-relativism, Richard Rorty’s far-out linguistic-constructivist creed, and the ‘strong’ programme in sociology of knowledge.”

Norris says we need to recognize “that these problems have arisen very largely in consequence of the artificial divide between developments in post-Kantian ‘continental’ and Anglophone ‘analytic’ thought.”

“One could instance Husserl’s great book The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenologyas the first to diagnose this widening gulf.” “…a long-range historical perspective going back to various nineteenth century debates about the role of scientific knowledge and enlightened rationality vis-à-vis the claims of hermeneutic understanding or immersion in the ‘lifeworld’ of humanly intelligible values and beliefs.” Whatever THAT means. Though Husserl ‘vacillated’ between these two priorities, he “took a stance squarely opposed to any form of irrationalist or counter-Enlightenment reaction.”

The same could be said “of those Frankfurt-School critical theorists (such as Jurgen Habermas) who defend the ‘unfinished project of modernity’ against its current detractors by examining the various orders of truth-claim-or the different spheres of validity-that have separated out within the discourse of the physical, social and human sciences.” Habermas conserved the critical/progressive impulses of Enlightenment thought, “deriving those emancipatory values from a theory of ‘communicative action’ based on the idea of free and equal exchange between all parties with access to the relevant (more or less specialized) information sources. In which case philosophy can take on board the whole range of anti-foundationalist arguments brought against more traditional forms of epistemology by proponents of the present-day ‘linguistic turn’ and yet maintain a principled commitment to the standing possibility of truth and progress in the scientific, ethical and socio-political spheres. This approach abandons the old subject-centred epistemological paradigm, but does so-crucially-without yielding ground to the kinds of cultural-relativist thinking that have often been advanced by followers of Wittgenstein or by those who appeal to ‘language games’ or ‘forms of life’ as the furthest we can get in the quest for validating grounds, reasons or principles.” Can learn from this as from Husserl.

So, it cannot be said that cultural relativism is a disease spread by the post-Kantian ‘continental’ tradition, as 1) the most powerful arguments against it are from continental philosophers, 2) a limited number of continental philosophers attempted to spread it [Foucault, Lyotard’s “sweeping postmodernist pronouncements about the end of ‘grand narratives’ such as that of scientific truth at the end of enquiry”, Heidegger’s “sweeping diagnosis of modern techno-science as the predestined outcome of western (post-Hellenic) metaphysics and its drive to dominate nature and thought through an epochal forgetfulness of Being”] and 3) it is spread by some in recent Anglophone epistemology and philosophy of science (Rorty’s and others’ improbable attempt “to enlist Heidegger’s depth-hermeneutic approach in the service of a highly selective reading that tallies well enough with a homegrown pragmatist outlook”; similarities between “‘strong’ sociologists of knowledge and hermeneutic thinkers in the Heidegger-to-Gadamer line of descent”), 4) one must “take full account of its sources in Wittgenstein, Kuhn, American pragmatism, and other influences nearer home.” Home…hmm.

I wonder why Heidegger isn’t discussed more. Maybe he will be. Also wonder why “hermeneutics” isn’t discussed more.

*****
This perked up my ears:

1. Truth is more important than you think.

v4-5 freedom in Christ because of truth of the Gospel (truth will set you free) John 8
Foucault-“truth is a thing of this world, it is produced only by multiple forms of constraint, and that includes the regular effects of power” – truth claims are power plays
–disciple of Nietzsche (hermeneutics of suspicion) (philosophical squinting) (motive?)
–same thing Jesus says of Pharisees-your truth claims are power plays
But, if you conclude “all” truth claims are power plays, you’re wrong. C.S. Lewis in “The Abolition of Man”–
“You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things forever” – if you say “all truth claims are power plays” – you are saying ‘that’ truth claim is just a power play (not true)
It’s not the truth claim (the “fundamental”)-it’s what’s “in” the truth claim (the “fundamental”)-that leads or does not lead to oppression.
Fundamental truth claim: grace. If you’re out of touch with that reality/truth-no freedom (truth will set you free). Everything else is “real” slavery/addiction to whatever else it is you build your identity on.

http://ichthus.yuku.com/reply/323/t/RFG-3-Christianity-Is-a-Straitjacket.html#reply-323

*****

Oddly–I used the words “grand narrative” in my paper before I even knew Lyotard, or his phrase grand/meta narrative, even existed. But–it still works, either way you take it, I think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanarrative
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 3: ‘Fog Over Channel, Continent Isolated’: Epistemology in the ‘Two Traditions’ – Section II.

Part 2: Koyré (Norris does not split the section into parts.)

Alexandre Koyré also transcends the rift between the analytic and continental traditions. “Best known as a philosopher-historian of early modern science,” he was a Russian exile who went from Germany to France and taught in both the U.S. and France after WWII. His “intense speculative bent and vast range of interests (in mathematics, physics, cosmology, philosophy, theology and various traditions of Neo-Platonic and mystical thought) place his work far apart from mainstream approaches to the subject.”
In common with Duhem:
1. “rejected the conventional view that genuine scientific knowledge got started only with the passage from ‘medieval’ to ‘renaissance’ modes of thought, that is, through a decisive enabling break with the legacy of hidebound scholastic doctrine which prevailed in the earlier period.”
2. “shared Duhem’s great aim of reawakening philosophers to the range and vitality of medieval thought, while stressing just the opposite (realist) aspects of what he took to constitute its chief and enduring legacy.”

Koyré was a realist (opposed to instrumentalist thinking like that of Duhem) because:
1. Believed “science could deliver objective knowledge of a mind-independent physical reality…” (as did some medieval thinkers)
2. which consists of “objects, properties and causal powers whose essential nature was such as to determine whether or not scientific enquiry was on the right track,” (as did Aristotle).
3. Espoused “a basically Platonist outlook which aspired to transcend the epistemic contingencies of scientific knowledge at this or that state in its advancement to date.”
Koyré’s work [including Etudes galileennes (1939)] is characterized by:
1. “originality of mind…expansive vision of philosophy of science as a quest for universal yet historically emergent and culturally salient truths.”
2. “detailed and exacting analysis of scientific theories-…theories of movement, stasis and inertial force-while drawing out the kinds of problem and paradox that have preoccupied philosophers from Zeno to the present.”
3. “treats these issues within a larger metaphysical framework that takes them to involve fundamental questions such as those first broached by the conflicting claims of Platonic and Aristotelian ontologies.”
4. Preference for Plato seen “above all in Koyré’s realist philosophy of mathematics; antipathy toward empiricist conception of scientific method.”

He was influenced by Husserl‘s transcendental phenomenology (very often dissenting from it)-and took from Husserl “the idea of philosophy as a rigorous, reflective, self-critical activity of thought which suspended (or bracketed) our commonsense beliefs and thereby sought to reveal the underlying, a priori, and hence universally valid structures of knowledge and experience.” Like Husserl, he went back and forth between this and acknowledging the task’s dependence “on modes of intuitive self-evidence…being-in-the-world as historically and culturally situated agents.” He criticized “the strain of transcendental idealism” in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, which he felt fell away from “the vocation of rigorous, scientifically disciplined enquiry.” Had recourse to “the evidence of modern (post-Galilean) scientific thought but also to the Thomist theological tradition which likewise-albeit for different reasons-rejected any notion of human knowledge (even at the limit of idealized rational acceptability) as the ultimate arbiter of truth.” [At the same time he claimed “that modern science had by no means shed its ‘metaphysical’ commitments-as argued by hard-line positivists-but on the contrary continued to enlist such resources so as it render its truth-claims and its theories intelligible.”] “No philosopher in recent times has done more to uphold the claims of scientific rationality and truth while taking on board such a range of arguments from (seemingly) opposed viewpoints. Thus his critique of positivism for its anti-metaphysical prejudice went along with his equally trenchant critique of those idealist-‘metaphysical’-currents of thought which paid insufficient regard to the manifest achievements of physical science.”

This explains his impact “during that period of pre-war French intellectual debate when thinkers like Sartre were attempting a synthesis of Husserlian transcendental with Heideggerian existentialist phenomenology, and these in turn with an understanding of Hegel mediated by Kojeve’s strong-revisionist reading.” Koyré had a good historical grasp of the sources of the debate.

Koyré “made no sharp distinction between the sorts of theological issue (such as realism versus nominalism) that had so preoccupied medieval thinkers and the sorts ofmetaphysical issue that continued to emerge with undiminished force when science took its turn toward a broadly secularized worldview.” This is due to his attraction to Levy-Bruhl’s thought (collective mind-sets) and “nineteenth-century hermeneutic philosophy” [like Wilhelm Dilthey’s ‘worldviews’ or Weltanschauungen] both of which gave him the “sense of the problems involved in negotiating differences of cultural outlook or deep-laid metaphysical commitment.” Yet-he didn’t go the way of Michel Foucault‘s skeptical nominalism, treating all knowledge as cultural construct, relative to period of discourse. Nor was he ever a paradigm-relativist like Kuhn. Koyré believed “science is indeed a continuing venture of discovery and that differences of mind-set-however profound-can nonetheless be rendered intelligible from a sufficiently informed historico-philosophical viewpoint.” It was his (realist) conviction that “scientific knowledge was properly aimed toward discovering the essence of things rather than contenting itself with merely nominal definitions.” Totally clashed with anti-metaphysical positivism.

So he went outside the box a bit-“Renaissance hermetic philosophies (Paracelsus), Romantic mysticism (Boehme) and various nineteenth-century Russian proto-existentialist ideas-all of which he sought to bring within the compass of a unified history of thought. …his chief motive was to vindicate the claims of mathematics and the physical sciences as aimed toward a truth which transcended the socio-cultural vicissitudes of time and place.” -one indicator being the diverse thinkers he chose to study under…. “while nonetheless respecting those essential standards-of truth, objectivity and conceptual rigor-that characterized mathematics and the physical sciences.” In the ‘science wars’ or ‘culture wars’ debate, composed of hard-line scientific realism, cultural-relativism/social-constructivism, Koyré “held out…the prospect of achieving a perspective atop these particular kinds of academic or interdisciplinary dispute…points a way forward from some of the more sterile or deadlocked disputes in recent epistemology and philosophy of science.”These things keep popping up (not just in Norris’ book) and I would eventually like to explore them at more depth (hopefully Norris does this)–
Nominalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalism
Problem of universals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals
Apparently realism is non-nominalism-believes in universals. I’m wondering if the section on descriptivism/naming had anything to do with it? I’m hoping not…I’m thinking not.

*****
a synthesis of Husserlian transcendental with Heideggerian existentialist phenomenology, and these in turn with an understanding of Hegel mediated by Kojeve’s strong-revisionist reading
–would love to know the ins and outs of that

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 3: ‘Fog Over Channel, Continent Isolated’: Epistemology in the ‘Two Traditions’ – Section II.

Part 1: Duhem (this will be followed by Part 2: Koyré, though Norris didn’t split section II into parts).

So, few folks these days think the ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’ (Anglophone) traditions are worlds apart. Mostly that attitude was held by positivists like Rudolf Carnap back in the day (1930s)-and then Wittgenstein-influenced empiricists of the linguistic turn (1950s) “that found no room for the overly ‘metaphysical’ tendencies of continental thought.” Carnap saw Heidegger (and others) as offering “inflated rhetoric and … meaningless pseudo-statements” and thought Husserlian phenomenology bore some analytic resemblances but “strayed from the path of empirical method and logical rigour into various ‘psychological’ excesses.” This charge was taken up more by those who “endorsed Frege’s criticisms of Husserl…This despite Husserl’s strenuous insistence that his was a rigorously argued project of transcendental phenomenology which entailed a radical suspension or putting-into-doubt of all merely psychological attitudes, beliefs or modes of thought.” So, though Husserl “bears analytic resemblances” a rift is maintained-why? In a nutshell…

Eventually it became group-reinforcing to say continental epistemology went wayward with Kant, construing “the theory of knowledge as having to do with a priori intuitions, ‘concepts of understanding’, and suchlike dubious appeals to the supposed self-evidence of first-person apodictic warrant.” Analytics thought we should stick with the scientific method, which took the “self” out of the picture and required verification. With a similar attitude, Quine attacked the last two dogmas of empiricism-the analytic/synthetic dichotomy, and the idea that “observation-statements or predictions could be checked one-by-one against discrete items of empirical evidence.” That any statement/theory could be saved by adjusting parts of the ‘web of belief’ was thought to be the end of empiricism, but he “came out firmly in support of the empiricist position…by adopting a thoroughly naturalized (behaviourist) approach to epistemological issues and avoiding all forms of ‘metaphysical’ obfuscation.” One example of such obfuscation: “the typically continental idea that epistemology must have to do with intuitions or thoughts ‘in the mind’ of this or that individual knower. Similar objections were later raised by followers of Wittgenstein who took the view that any such appeal must involve some version of the ‘private language’ (or privileged epistemic access) fallacy.” “Most often the quarrel was played out along familiar British-empiricist versus continental-rationalist lines, with Cartesian dualism (and its notion of privileged epistemic access) figuring as the chief source of philosophic error.” The privileged access fallacy is not explained, and I didn’t get it when I read about it elsewhere (can you read my mind?), but I’ll revisit it soon and see if I can figure it out.

The Duhem-Quine thesis (in epistemology and philosophy of science) is a link between the continental and analytic traditions. “In [Pierre Duhem’s] earliest publications…his thought manifested…a disdain for ontological commitments (such as atomism) which went beyond the empirical evidence and-concordant with that-a fixed aversion to any form of ‘metaphysical’ realism which claimed to reveal the ultimate nature of things or the underlying causal powers that explained phenomenal appearances.” He was inclined toward “a Machian (positivist) view.” Quine naturally receptive. Norris’ description of Duhem’s position sounds very much like Quine’s thoughts on “theory-ladenness” and theories being “undetermined”, and the “web of belief” explained in an earlier chapter.

1. Thesis subject to widespread debate/criticism-“it appears to undermine the rationality of theory-choice and to deprive science of any normative standard by which to adjudicate rival truth-claims or hypotheses.
2. “It comes rather sharply into conflict with certain of Duhem’s working principles as a physicist, among them his theory of thermodynamics as providing a unitary framework-or grounding rationale-for the entirety of physics and chemistry.”

So some folks think it shouldn’t be called the “Duhem-Quine” thesis-that Duhem’s name should be left out of it.

However, Duhem does lean that way later on in his politically motivated book German Science (Duhem was French) where “he champions the ‘typically’ French preference for a find-tuned balance of commonsense, intuition and rational procedure as against the ‘typically’ Germanic style of rigorous axiomatic-deductive thought. In support of this claim Duhem calls Pascal to witness on the two supposedly distinct mentalities-‘l’esprit de Wnesse’ and ‘l’esprit geometrique’-which he (Duhem) takes to characterize the French and German approaches to science.” (was that French?-I don’t parlevoo) So there’s a tension between his methods/practice as physicist (“his commitment to the values of rigour, objectivity and truth”), and his thoughts on the history and philosophy of science (“his attraction to an instrumentalist doctrine which has at least something in common with the ruse whereby Galileo was required to affirm not the truth but merely the ’empirical adequacy’ of the heliocentric hypothesis”).

Duhem made an effort to “reconcile the claims of philosophy” (“the long-run scientific ‘context of justification'”) “and history of science” (“conditions obtaining in the original ‘context of discovery'”). He didn’t want to collapse the distinction, or the (‘strong’ sociologist) idea “that scientific truth-claims are subject to assessment by standards quite distinct from those deployed by social or cultural historians.” Even so, his work has been used to support such a collapse because of its association with Quine’s naturalism and hence (though Quine would reject it) Kuhn’s paradigm-relativism.

*****

Here’s some timely input:

Well, I think the ‘private language’ debate is a bit of a red herring or distraction from more important matters, like so much in late Wittgenstein, but there is a kind of plausibility about saying – as he does – that nobody could ever understand a ‘private’ (purely first-person, entirely unshared, hence non-communicable) ‘language’ since even the solitary speaker/listener wouldn’t have command of the various conventions (grammatical, semantic, pragmatic, etc.) by which to make sense of it. Still Wittgenstein typically does more to muddy the waters and bamboozle his numerous commentators than to sort things out in a constructive way.

— Professor Norris

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 2: Realism, Reference and Possible Worlds – Section IV.

Realism: “the claim that there exists a real-world domain of physical objects, events, structures, properties, causal powers and so forth which decide the truth-value of our various statements or theories and which cannot be treated as in any sense dependent on our current-best or even future-best-attainable state of knowledge concerning them.” This is an alethic, not epistemic, account of knowledge.

Events not naturally occurring in nature are still governed by its laws. Cool thought.

Transcendental Realism (TR)-

two senses of “transcendental”–
Sense 1: “pertaining to an order of objective reality and a range of likewise objective truth-values that may always in principle transcend or surpass the limits of human knowledge.”
Sense 2: Kant’s answer to Humean skepticism, a “deduction which accounts for our capacity to acquire such knowledge or to have such experience in terms of certain strictly a priori intuitions or concepts (e.g., those of time, space and causality) that alone make it possible for the mind to impose an intelligible order on the otherwise inchoate flux of sensory impressions.” Kant’s dictum: ‘intuitions without concepts are blind’ while ‘concepts without intuitions are empty’. [Intuitions must be ‘brought under’ concepts.] “Knowledge must confine itself strictly to the limits of phenomenal experience.” The title Critique of Pure Reason epitomizes his point that reason cannot go beyond intuition to the “thing in itself” (to go beyond intuition is to imagine, which is just to reorder previous intuition). We can’t strip the “thing in itself” of our intuitions of it. Norris says Kant does “little to support the alethic realist’s claim that there exists both a mind-independent (objective) reality and also-in consequence of that-a great range of to us unknown (perhaps unknowable) truths.” He also says Kant’s attempt to “explain how the manifold of sensuous intuitions can be somehow ‘brought under’ concepts of understanding” is “problematical”.

“Transcendental Realism breaks the hold of those dilemmas”-see sense 1, and refer to ‘convergent realism’ of last section. “This makes it transcendental in the Kantian sense of deriving from thought about the very possibility of scientific knowledge and progress in general but also in the non-Kantian realist sense of allowing us to know-not merely ‘think’-how such claims can be warranted or justified.”

Critical realism “allows for an adequately complex or ‘stratified’ account of the relationship between subject and object, knower and known.” Avoids dualism and other errors. If the errors were true, “no belief is ‘immune from revision’ since even certain axioms of classical deductive logic-like bivalence and excluded middle-might ultimately have to be abandoned under pressure from conflicting empirical evidence, e.g., quantum phenomena such as superposition or wave/particle dualism. From a TR standpoint these post-logical-empiricist developments should be seen as so many symptoms of the deepening crisis of mainstream analytic philosophy of science rather than as pointing a hopeful way forward from the various problems bequeathed by Kant.” So scrap all that for the “dialectical exchange between theory, observation and experimental practice” of transcendental realism, which rejects the skeptical either/or as a false dilemma, embracing both (1) that every well-formed (truth-apt) statement has its truth-value fixed quite apart from our best knowledge concerning it, and (2) that veridical knowledge is yet within our cognitive grasp-or perhaps ideal limit-through various well-tried methods of enquiry. There is a human role in (2) (manifestation) but not in (1) (reality)-the situation is not a dualism (thing-in-itself/intuitions), but stratified (ontology/epistemology)-pardon if that last part didn’t quite “get it”. [Sort of reminds me of how it is argued that good-evil is not a duality-that, instead, evil is the privation of good.] This “complex, dialectical and stratified version of realism [was] developed by Roy Bhaskar and others.” This involves distinguishing between “the orders of contingent (‘might-have-been-otherwise’) fact, laws of nature which apply (necessarily so) to our own world and all others that physically resemble it, and ‘transworld necessary’ truths-such as those of logic and mathematics-which cannot be conceived as failing to apply in any possible world.”

Norris (an “actualist”) uses the word “actualize” in the sense that we actualize events not occurring in nature (but which are governed by its laws) (as opposed to actualizing one of Lewis’ possible/real worlds). I should mention the thought that keeps popping up about Lewis’ ideas is the phrase “a real possibility”. But that just means “viable option”. Options are merely concepts…abstractions… The “real” world is “actual”-which includes abstractions, but is not itself an abstraction. Mathematics are an abstraction of the mechanics of the real/actual-‘course that’s just a guess. Mathematics that do not explain (refer to) the real/actual-are like options we never “actualized”.

Anyway, to wrap it all up, a realist response to a skeptical confusion of ontology and epistemology is “to be found in a combination of modal realism with inference to the best (causal or counterfactual-supporting) explanation and a transcendental argument from the conditions of possibility for our knowledge of the growth of science.”

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 2: Realism, Reference and Possible Worlds – Section III.

A lingering question left from the last section-what IS the difference between the reality of David Lewis’ possible worlds, and Thomas Kuhn’s (via Quine) world-webs? Essentially, I think the answer is, that Lewis’ thinks they are real without verification, whereas Kuhn thinks they’re real ‘due to’ verification. That’s why Lewis is a realist, and Kuhn is an anti-realist. In this section, Norris notes Dummett would reject Lewis’ transworld necessary mathematical truths, and stuff like Goldbach’s Conjecture, putting them in the “disputed class” (neither true nor false, as they cannot be verified/falsified)-“as distinct from merely undecidable according to our best, most advanced or sophisticated proof procedures.” To the realist that seems unreasonable, but so does Lewis’ “outlook of intransigent realism with regard to possible worlds and his suggestion that the case for mathematical realism stands or falls with that for the reality (as distinct from the logical conceivability) of any and every such world.” And (if I read Norris correctly) Lewis’ position is inferior to Kripke-Putnam’s distinguishing between contingent and necessary truths, and analytic (transworld) necessity from a posteriori necessity-that such distinguishing is the only way “the realist [can] hope to produce the kind of argument that would challenge the case for anti-realism advanced by thinkers like Dummett…that treats every area of discourse as having no room for truth-apt statements whose objective truth-value transcends the limits of recognition or verification.”

How do we know current “knowledge” is any better than past errors/incompleteness? Lewis’ answer: “1) any talk of past errors presupposes our possession of other, more advanced or adequate truth-standards,” 2) the recommendation that we remain epistemically humble presupposes we might be wrong according to “(what else?) objective criteria of scientific truth and falsehood.” If it’s all in our head, we’re never wrong. If we can be wrong, the truth must be outside our head, waiting to be discovered. Norris mentions “convergent realism” – “science may be taken as converging on truth at the end of enquiry to the extent that its theories are increasingly borne out by the best evidence to hand.” The anti-realist would like to remain humble and not go so far as saying “atoms actually exist”-would rather “treat atoms and such-like as useful posits for the sake of upholding some empirically adequate theory.” Anti-realism, unlike realism, carries no ability to explain scientific progress, and Norris takes some time to speak of mathematics’ importance in that progress, which Wigner acknowledges but considers to be “bordering on the mysterious and…there is no rational explanation for it.” The Kripke-Putnam approach provides an explanation.

The rest of the section is spent prepping for the next section, which will avoid the problem of Lewis considering possible worlds to have the same ontology as our own (just not “actual”), and will introduce some ideas that are pertinent to “critical realism“-like the distinction between ontology (truth is outside head) and epistemology (knowledge requires verification).

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 2: Realism, Reference and Possible Worlds – Section II.

So, “the Kripkean treatment of issues in modal logic” is a main source for a revival of causal realism: “the claim that certain kinds of object necessarily and of their very nature possess certain properties, dispositions or causal powers”. Hilary Putnampushes even further toward causal realism with his “thought-experiments designed to drive home the realist point that meanings ‘just ain’t in the head‘. That is to say, what fixes the truth-conditions for our various statements concerning the physical world is not the range of descriptive criteria by which we pick out objects of this or that kind, but rather the existence of just such objects with just such uniquely identifying structures and properties.” So now we’re getting into internalism vs. externalism, with Putnam holding an externalist position. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internalism_and_Externalism

Norris goes into Putnam’s best-known thought-experiment (designed to show how “meanings just ain’t in the head”-in other words, the true properties of an object depend on that object’s existence, and are true independent of our sensing/describing them), called the Twin Earth thought experiment on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Earth_thought_experiment. Basically, an Earthian and Twin-Earthian end up accidentally naming two different objects “water” because they have the same descriptions (sense) of them-so the description does notnecessarily “refer” to the object H-2-O (as it can also ‘refer’ to XYZ). When Twin-Earthian says “Give me some water” you don’t automatically know what he is referring to (XYZ), even if he describes it to you. This experiment would work with any hetero/homonyms that share similar descriptions, but are not the same thing-though, I can’t think of any off the top of my head (that aren’t artificial, like Twin-Earthian water). Maybe I’ll come back and fool around with this and try to find a good example: http://www.fun-with-words.com/nym_homonyms.html Apparently Putnam restricted the thought-experiments to “natural kinds” (tigers, electrons), but Tyler Burge would think my hetero/homonym idea is cool, ’cause he extended it to other “artefacts or objects that don’t occur naturally but which, nonetheless, have their reference fixed through an inaugural act of naming and thereafter passed down through a communal ‘chain’ of transmission that ensures a sufficient degree of continuity despite any shifts in their range of descriptive criteria.” Here’s what I don’t get-if “descriptions” do not necessarily refer-why do names necessarily refer-since obviously the Earthian and Twin-Earthian incorrectly referred to the other’s wet stuff as water (the description was correct-the ‘name’ was not)? And where does “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet?” enter into this discussion? A name tells us nothing about the object, unless the description is part of the name (like the fruit we call “Orange”)-why is a name said to “refer” (is “refer” a synonym of “correspond”-as in the “correspond” of correspondence theory?-how can a “name” correspond to…correctly describe…reality?)(the “name” ‘meanie’ comes to mind)? Maybe names and descriptions are just two ways we smack a label on an object (maybe descriptions are just reeeeally long names, and names are just short-hand for descriptions?), and some descriptions/names “correspond” to the best of our knowledge-and some descriptions/names do not correspond (do not refer) (like the name/description of a unicorn)-even if they “have sense”. Maybe sometimes names survive paradigm-shifts, and maybe sometimes the shift is so huge that a new name is required to replace the old one, even though the new/old names both refer to the same object? But-that would mean the “referential chain of transmission” is still in tact-right? It seems that descriptions do refer, the same way names refer (when they refer)-it’s just harder to say “You know that thing we used to describe this way? Well, we’ve added this description to it,” -it’s easier to say, “Water has taken on a new description.” Both descriptions referred to the same object, but new descriptions give more of the picture-that is the way most scientific advancement works-the old theories are usually not totally wrong, just updated. Names are short-hand-descriptions are the real deal and tell us more about the object-but both names and descriptions are “place-holders” for the object being named/described. That’s my story and we’ll see if I stick to it throughout the book.

That talk of experts (Putnam’s “linguistic division of labor”) confused me and reminded me of John Stuart Mills letting the educated determine the higher pleasures. Right until proven wrong by experts? Kill all the experts and you’ll be right all the time. Seems like anti-realism to me. You’ve simply moved the mind-dependence out of your mind into someone else’s.

“Possible worlds” talk (modal logic) is rejected by Quine (physicalist) as ‘metaphysical indulgence’-whereas possible worlds are taken by David Lewis as being “as ‘real’ as our own but non-actual”. For more on that, wiki it. Goes back to Leibniz. Such a leap is not necessary, but apparently cannot be refuted. If there are truths we have yet to discover, they are not “possible” truths, they are actual truths-so I don’t think it is necessary to say all possibilities are “real” but non-actual. They don’t become actual just because we apprehend them-that would be anti-realism. Lewis’ position cannot be said to be realism, because all the possible worlds, even if they be counterfactual, share the same ontology, like Quine’s ontological relativity (consider simultaneously Thomas Kuhn’s related “world-web” from the last section). At any rate, Norris likes Lewis’ talk of certain transworld necessary mathematical truths, and the Kripke-Putnam modal realist distinction between transworld necessity (applying to math/logic) and a posteriori necessity (applying to our actual world)-answering Quine’s objection that ‘modal locutions run into trouble when it comes to distinguishing necessary from contingent truths’ (awkwardly depending on modal distinctions to enforce the point-suggesting modal logic is more basic than “first-order predicate calculus on which Quine supposedly builds his case”).

Every time I set out to do this I think “there’s no way” and before I know it, it’s done. I pray I finish this before I go back to work.