There was a shepherd who kept himself invisible from his sheep because the sight of him was so horrifying, more horrifying than a wolf, as to kill the sheep that saw him. The invisible shepherd knew there were some among the wild sheep in the wilderness who
Where is your focus? Is it in something you can learn about and enjoy forever? If not, how is that working out for you?
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Norris' Epistemology Ch.2, I
Book Discussion of Christopher Norris' "Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy"
Chapter 2: Realism, Reference and Possible Worlds - Section I.
I gotta say it straight out-Professor Norris' style is not accessible to the undergrad. This is not a fun type of learning-it becomes fun when I finally figure it out-but it would've been way funner, and from the start, if it had been written at my reading level. Here's what I "could" grasp (or think I did grasp, anyway) from the first section--
This section was mostly about Saul Kripke's reference-fixing (naming), in comparison with Frege and Russell's descriptivist theory (emphasis on Frege). There's background involving "problems bequeathed by Kant's great attempt-in the Critique of Pure Reason-to delimit the sphere of cognitive understanding (where sensuous intuitions must be 'brought under' adequate concepts) from that of metaphysics where reason has a license to raise such speculative issues but only on condition that it not lay claim to any kind of determinate knowledge." Whatever THAT means. There is talk of "redrawing the Kantian line" … of taking "full stock of the 'linguistic turn'" -whatever that means-of Kripke and Putnam (apparently a guy named Hilary-sorry, man) putting the case "for a strong causal-realist and objectivist approach to epistemological issues". Causal-realism is defined in section II. Here's what comes up in section I--
So basically the two theories compared are descriptivism (Frege) and naming (Kripke). You've got the name of something (gold), and then you've got a description of something (formerly: "yellow, ductile metal that dissolves in weak nitric acid"; now: "metallic element with atomic number 79"). The name, and the description, are called "referents".
Descriptivism (Frege) says that names do not always refer to the same thing if we attach conflicting descriptions to the same name, and that descriptions are more important (the "former" description of "gold" is not the same "gold" as the "now" description of "gold"-it's like they should be given different names…but consider the underlying reasoning of that). It gets weirder. "Strong descriptivists or paradigm-relativists like Thomas Kuhn [conclude] that shifts in the range of identifying criteria from one theory or classificatory system to the next can at times be so drastic as to break the referential chain of transmission." This is called "radical 'incommensurability' between paradigms". This 'desperate position' is adopted because of Frege's "sense determines reference" and an idea Frege rejected: "the sense of any given term can only be specified in relation to the entire language, discourse or received body of knowledge within which it plays a role." So, according to this position, the two things don't just need different names now-they inhabit different worlds (harkens back to Quine's "web of belief"). There is therefore no accounting for scientific progress, since you're stuck in the world-web of your preferred description.
Naming (Kripke) would say that descriptions of a thing may change and so do not always refer to what they are describing-which has a name which stays the same and refers to what is being described even if the description changes (the two descriptions of gold are describing one thing named "gold"). Kripke is saying (1) the reference of the name "gold" (to that thing to which the name "gold" refers) is "necessarily" fixed at its conception (in the mind) and (2) is preserved throughout "every shift in its associated range of descriptive criteria". If that word "necessarily" trips you up-that is explained next:
The explanation of "necessarily" has to do with modal logic - "the branch of logic having to do with possibility and necessity". Kripke "makes a case for the existence of a posteriori necessary truths…which are neither analytic, i.e., true-by-definition, nor a priori, that is to say, self-evident to reason, but which nonetheless hold necessarily in any world where their referents exist or once existed." Did that clear it up for you? Me, neither. Not even when Norris used examples. [See link in reply below on a priori / a posteriori, the water example.] Anyway, somehow that means thatnames are "truth-tracking"-they stick even when descriptions change ("sensitive to future discovery")-name-reference transcends the 'paradigm-shift'. This is called reference-fixing.
The rest of the section I couldn't quite make out, unless the example I'm about to provide (not provided by Norris) explains it well: when it comes to language translation, different languages all have different names (at least one per language) for the same thing (assuming they all have a name for that thing), so all those names refer to that one thing. How else do we know all the names refer to that one thing, but that the names all have similar descriptions? Somehow, according to some philosophers, the Kripkean approach "allows-indeed requires-some additional descriptivist component."
And I wanted to re-paste what I wrote in section IV of the Introduction:
"I think a descriptivist account says that features are not essential, that they fail to refer, that imputed properties before discovery (about some object), and imputed properties after discovery (about that object), will not be referring to the same object (if so-then how do you know what object you made a discovery about?)."
[Side-question, prob'ly stupid: Does all this discussion about referents assume all names (or even descriptions, for the descriptivist) refer to something that actually exists? For example-what about names like "unicorn" (or descriptions of them)? Probably it would only count as referring to an idea (based on lack of evidence for their corresponding to reality)?]
*****
A helpful reply from Professor Norris to my side-question, which also explains Frege's "sense determines reference" which I didn't really get until now:
*****
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_turn There's other turns, too.
*****
I thank Professor Norris for the above explanation, as it was absolutely essential that I understand Frege's "sense determines essence" in order to go forward.This is cool: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori#Relation_to_the_necessary.2Fcontingent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics ... think it might have something to do with this. Fascinating.
Chapter 2: Realism, Reference and Possible Worlds - Section I.
I gotta say it straight out-Professor Norris' style is not accessible to the undergrad. This is not a fun type of learning-it becomes fun when I finally figure it out-but it would've been way funner, and from the start, if it had been written at my reading level. Here's what I "could" grasp (or think I did grasp, anyway) from the first section--
This section was mostly about Saul Kripke's reference-fixing (naming), in comparison with Frege and Russell's descriptivist theory (emphasis on Frege). There's background involving "problems bequeathed by Kant's great attempt-in the Critique of Pure Reason-to delimit the sphere of cognitive understanding (where sensuous intuitions must be 'brought under' adequate concepts) from that of metaphysics where reason has a license to raise such speculative issues but only on condition that it not lay claim to any kind of determinate knowledge." Whatever THAT means. There is talk of "redrawing the Kantian line" … of taking "full stock of the 'linguistic turn'" -whatever that means-of Kripke and Putnam (apparently a guy named Hilary-sorry, man) putting the case "for a strong causal-realist and objectivist approach to epistemological issues". Causal-realism is defined in section II. Here's what comes up in section I--
So basically the two theories compared are descriptivism (Frege) and naming (Kripke). You've got the name of something (gold), and then you've got a description of something (formerly: "yellow, ductile metal that dissolves in weak nitric acid"; now: "metallic element with atomic number 79"). The name, and the description, are called "referents".
Descriptivism (Frege) says that names do not always refer to the same thing if we attach conflicting descriptions to the same name, and that descriptions are more important (the "former" description of "gold" is not the same "gold" as the "now" description of "gold"-it's like they should be given different names…but consider the underlying reasoning of that). It gets weirder. "Strong descriptivists or paradigm-relativists like Thomas Kuhn [conclude] that shifts in the range of identifying criteria from one theory or classificatory system to the next can at times be so drastic as to break the referential chain of transmission." This is called "radical 'incommensurability' between paradigms". This 'desperate position' is adopted because of Frege's "sense determines reference" and an idea Frege rejected: "the sense of any given term can only be specified in relation to the entire language, discourse or received body of knowledge within which it plays a role." So, according to this position, the two things don't just need different names now-they inhabit different worlds (harkens back to Quine's "web of belief"). There is therefore no accounting for scientific progress, since you're stuck in the world-web of your preferred description.
Naming (Kripke) would say that descriptions of a thing may change and so do not always refer to what they are describing-which has a name which stays the same and refers to what is being described even if the description changes (the two descriptions of gold are describing one thing named "gold"). Kripke is saying (1) the reference of the name "gold" (to that thing to which the name "gold" refers) is "necessarily" fixed at its conception (in the mind) and (2) is preserved throughout "every shift in its associated range of descriptive criteria". If that word "necessarily" trips you up-that is explained next:
The explanation of "necessarily" has to do with modal logic - "the branch of logic having to do with possibility and necessity". Kripke "makes a case for the existence of a posteriori necessary truths…which are neither analytic, i.e., true-by-definition, nor a priori, that is to say, self-evident to reason, but which nonetheless hold necessarily in any world where their referents exist or once existed." Did that clear it up for you? Me, neither. Not even when Norris used examples. [See link in reply below on a priori / a posteriori, the water example.] Anyway, somehow that means thatnames are "truth-tracking"-they stick even when descriptions change ("sensitive to future discovery")-name-reference transcends the 'paradigm-shift'. This is called reference-fixing.
The rest of the section I couldn't quite make out, unless the example I'm about to provide (not provided by Norris) explains it well: when it comes to language translation, different languages all have different names (at least one per language) for the same thing (assuming they all have a name for that thing), so all those names refer to that one thing. How else do we know all the names refer to that one thing, but that the names all have similar descriptions? Somehow, according to some philosophers, the Kripkean approach "allows-indeed requires-some additional descriptivist component."
And I wanted to re-paste what I wrote in section IV of the Introduction:
"I think a descriptivist account says that features are not essential, that they fail to refer, that imputed properties before discovery (about some object), and imputed properties after discovery (about that object), will not be referring to the same object (if so-then how do you know what object you made a discovery about?)."
[Side-question, prob'ly stupid: Does all this discussion about referents assume all names (or even descriptions, for the descriptivist) refer to something that actually exists? For example-what about names like "unicorn" (or descriptions of them)? Probably it would only count as referring to an idea (based on lack of evidence for their corresponding to reality)?]
*****
A helpful reply from Professor Norris to my side-question, which also explains Frege's "sense determines reference" which I didn't really get until now:
Yes, the normal assumption is that the objects or events referred to (described, specified, picked out, etc.) really do or did once exist - as per Frege's distinction between 'sense' and 'reference', where 'sense' is the range of properties or attributes that people have in mind when they talk about something and 'reference' is what the description picks out when and if it 'goes through' in the normal way. So allusions to fictive characters and events (or to imaginary objects like unicorns) have sense but not reference.
*****
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_turn There's other turns, too.
*****
I thank Professor Norris for the above explanation, as it was absolutely essential that I understand Frege's "sense determines essence" in order to go forward.This is cool: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori#Relation_to_the_necessary.2Fcontingent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics ... think it might have something to do with this. Fascinating.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Norris' Epistemology Ch1, II-III
Book Discussion of Christopher Norris' "Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy"
Chapter 1: Staying for an Answer: Truth, Knowledge, and the Rumsfeld Creed -
Sections II-III.
These sections deal with Michael Dummett and what has come to be called Dummettian anti-realism. The Verification Principle gets a new twist with Dummett's three arguments: acquisition, manifestation, and recognition, but also TIME (knowledge of the past; history) and backwards causality of answered prayer is brought up-so this is going to be a fascinating discussion (which will hopefully not get too off-track) even if I'm only talking to myself. Also discussed are 'testimony' and Mill's defense of the validity of induction. Norris brings Rumsfeld's comments back up again, but I think we can look at this topic w/o referring to them.
II
Disputed class: hypotheses, conjectures, speculative statements, unproven theorems, etc. … "statements for which we lack any means of formal proof (in mathematics or logic) or empirical verification (in history or the natural sciences)."
Realists: statements in the "disputed class" can and do possess objective truth-value "just so long as the sentence in question is well-formed and truth-apt." Statements can be "truth bearers" (if they "refer") and the portions of reality to which the statements refer are "truth-makers" (they make the statements true). This means reality is a truth-maker even if no statement is made (truth is knowledge-independent, verification-transcendent, epistemically unconstrained). Reminds me of Russell-I like Russell. "A well-formed statement…will have its truth-value fixed by the way things once stood in reality quite aside from our lack of certainty."
Anti-realists: Dummett: "truth" should be replaced with "warranted assertibility" and "restricted to just those statements for which we possess some bona fide means of proof or verification." The word "truth" keeps being used, though. Again, the anti-realist position is that we shouldn't be able to say "this is true" (or false) if we cannot also say "this is verified" (or falsified). "Statements [in the disputed class] cannot have a truth-value since it is strictly inconceivable that truth should exceed the limits of assertoric warrant." He has three arguments to support this:
1. Acquisition-argument. I'm just gonna quote: "we could not possibly acquire a working knowledge of language except via a grasp of the truth-conditions (more precisely: the conditions for warranted assertibility) which apply to the various sentences endorsed by members of our speech community."
2. Manifestation-argument. "such knowledge must be manifestable in our own speech-behavior and thereby exhibit that working grasp-our understanding of the relevant conditions-in a way that enables other people to correctly interpret our meanings and beliefs."
3. Recognition-argument. "no sentence can legitimately count as true or false unless we are able to recognize those same conditions and hence interpret as falling within the scope of our best available knowledge concerning what would qualify as adequate grounds for asserting or denying its validity."
So (per Dummett) when we "assert the existence of objective truth-values for statements belonging to the 'disputed class'…[it] would amount to the self-refuting claim that we know something to be the case despite our not having acquired the capacity torecognize the conditions under which such a statement is warranted or to manifest our knowledge of those same conditions in a manner acceptable to others in possession of the relevant standards and criteria."
Norris notes Dummett's three arguments amount "to a more sophisticated, logico-semantic version of the Verification Principle." The chief problem with the Verification Principle was that "it met neither of its own criteria for meaningful statements, i.e., that such statements should be either empirically verifiable or self-evidently valid in virtue of their logical form." So Dummett attempts to shift the debate by raising it "as a topic within the philosophy of language and one that has to do with our warrant (or lack of it) for adopting a realist view of some particular area of discourse. … For the Dummettian anti-realist…there is no making sense of such claims [in the disputed class] since they involve the appeal to an order of verification-transcendent truth which ex hypothesi exceeds the furthest bounds of epistemic warrant."
Where this gets really interesting is that Dummett claims that any gaps in knowledge must also be gaps in reality. "…there cannot be a past fact no evidence of which exists to be discovered, because it is the existence of such evidence that would make it a fact, if it were one." "Equally strange-from any but a hard-line anti-realist viewpoint-is the claim that our evidence (or lack of it) is 'constitutive' not only of our state of knowledge with respect to those events at any given time but also of their very reality, i.e., their having actually occurred or not. In which case, quite simply, the historical past must be thought of as a highly selectively backward projection from whatever we are currently able to find out and hence as including lacunae-'gaps in reality', as Dummett says-corresponding to our areas of ignorance."
III.
So, one example Norris uses of Dummett thinking we can bring about the past by a change in our present knowledge, is retroactively granted prayer request. To Norris, this is Dummett agreeing that "wishing (praying) makes it so". I used to use this example (not Dummett's-didn't know about Dummett) when I would think about time and God's sovereignty over it. I think differently about it now, because, unlike Dummett, I think everything in the past, present, and future is fixed/complete from God's perspective (according to Einstein's relativity, they 'are' fixed)-all affirmatively answered prayers were answered (in our past, present, future) before it all began (from His perspective). So the guy's prayer about what already happened-isn't "retroactively" granted (nothing changes in the past from God's perspective-the past, present, and future are fixed/complete)-but "eternally" granted (from beyond time). And this is not a case of the guy changing the past with his knowledge, because nothing changes, and even if it does, it isn't his "knowing it" that changes it (he does not know how it turns out when he is praying about it), but God Himself that changes it (if that were possible, and it isn't-it's all fixed). So "praying makes it so" is not equivalent to "wishing makes it so".
At any rate, when you're talking about knowledge that makes the past real, you bring up the time travel paradox of the closed causal loop. Now that I've said that, I'm wondering if it has anything to do with causal realism. If you (the reader) don't know what a closed causal loop is, here's an example based off the TV series LOST (I won't get the details exactly correct, so it is only "based off" of it-it isn't the exact situation). In 2007 Richard gives John a compass and tells John "The next time you see me, give this back." John goes back in time and meets Richard again sometime in the 1950s, and gives Richard the compass, saying, "The next time you see me, give this back." Richard gives it back to John in 2007-the event we started with. So--who is the original owner of the compass? Who even manufactured it? Applying that to Dummett's reverse-causality powers of knowledge: If I make the past real with my knowledge-what made my knowledge happen? Shiver me timbers!
On to math. "Dummett's intuitionist conception of truth in mathematics…whatever we are able to prove or ascertain by the best formal methods at our present or perhaps (on his more liberal account) our rationally optimized or future-best disposal. However, this leaves it a mystery how mathematical discoveries could ever have occurred unless through the proven capacity of thought to find out truths that went against currently accepted standards of proof or verification. What counts as epistemic, probative or assertoric warrant in such matters is always and in principle subject to disconfirmation by that which lies beyond our present-best powers of proof or epistemic warrant."
Skepticism's false dilemma: either truths that cannot be known (verified) (leading to "the skeptical impasse-the unbridgeable gulf between truth and knowledge"), or a redefinition of truth putting it in the bounds of knowability. This is a version of anti-realism's false dilemma, which results from confusing ontological with epistemological issues. [not sure how the two differ]
There are viable realist alternatives (paragraphs are numbered for convenience, not to denote different alternatives):
1. Gödelian realism-
From discussion w/ hughw (thankyou) in Philosophy Chat Forum's chatroom:
<hughw> Godel's incompleteness theorem is simply that each system has its own axioms that cannot be challenged from within that system-- since that system is based upon those axioms
2. "You can't prove there are no WMDs" is like "You can't prove there is no God". "…although it is the case…that absence of proof is not proof of absence, still we are entitled (on probabilistic but nonetheless rational grounds) to draw a negative conclusion [when] non-existence can justifiably be maintained as a matter of inference to the best, most rational, or least credibility-stretching explanation." "…it is a necessary presupposition…that there are truths which may or may not be discovered in the course of diligent enquiry and, moreover, that their standing is in no way affected by the extent of our knowledge, ignorance or uncertainty about them. Such is the starting-point or default assumption of any dispute-outside the realms of metaphysics or philosophy of language--…Beyond that, it is a matter of rationally weighing the evidence and attempting to reach an informed estimate which takes in as much of that evidence as possible, along with due allowance for the motivating interests of those whose judgements (or overt professions of belief) may always be subject in varying degrees to the pressure of ideological commitment or political self-interest."
3. Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Reid (commonsense realism): "…testimony of various sorts plays a large and philosophically underestimated role in a great many aspects of human knowledge and experience." … "can and should place trust in its various sources and means of transmission just so long as they stand up well to critical and methodological scrutiny."
4. "…wide range of reliably knowledge-conducive procedures which no doubt fall short of absolute, indubitable truth yet which nonetheless offer sufficient grounds for rejecting the kind of anti-realist 'solution' currently on offer." The skeptical/anti-realist false-dilemma is "another version of the fallacy that John Stuart Mill detected in Humean and other skeptical arguments against the validity of induction, that is to say, the mistake of imposing inappropriate (deductive) standards of truth on modes of reasoning-such as inference to the best explanation-that involved much wider, more practically accountable, sources of knowledge and evidence."
Chapter two "shall unpack some of the arguments and concepts that philosophers have lately developed by way of providing those additional resources." Nice segue.
*****
Dummett, nor his arguments, nor the term 'disputed class', nor anti-realism, are mentioned in my "Introduction to Philosophy: A Christian Perspective" (Geisler/Feinberg)--at least not in the index. In the chapter "How Do We Perceive the External World?" -- Dualism (Representative Perception, Phenomenalism) and Idealism (weak, strong) are mentioned as alternatives to Realism (extreme/primitive, common-sense). Skepticism is also discussed. I've heard Norris say "representative perception" I think...but, if I did, I failed to mention it in my threads. Too bad his book has no subject index.
Mill is mentioned as relating to induction, but not directly as 'the' dude who defended induction against skepticism (instead, Frederick Will and Antony Flew are mentioned, as being only two of a group of philosophers...love this sentence: "The skeptic, then...is unhappy simply because induction is not deduction!")--oddly his thoughts on logical and mathematical knowledge are also mentioned in such a way as to cast an interesting light on this discussion--"John Stuart Mill made it quite clear that he was not sure of the truth of the laws of logic. He wrote that the laws of logic are empirical generalizations, and, as such, are open to correction. He argued that just because we cannot conceive of another set of logical laws, it does not follow that another set of logical laws is impossible." Reminds me of this from my Intro/SectionII thread on Quine: "So there is no 'crucial experiment' which can decide one of rival theories or hypotheses. In short, we can always make excuses for the results…even revise 'laws' of logic."
Go here for some more info. on the Verification Principle: http://ichthus.yuku.com/topic/82. It's a paragraph in one of my replies.
Geisler/Feinberg discuss a lot of stuff I wonder if Norris will discuss.
I'm not going to post induction stuff yet 'cause I just have this weird feeling I should save it for later.
*****
Also--one should wiki Dummett.
Chapter 1: Staying for an Answer: Truth, Knowledge, and the Rumsfeld Creed -
Sections II-III.
These sections deal with Michael Dummett and what has come to be called Dummettian anti-realism. The Verification Principle gets a new twist with Dummett's three arguments: acquisition, manifestation, and recognition, but also TIME (knowledge of the past; history) and backwards causality of answered prayer is brought up-so this is going to be a fascinating discussion (which will hopefully not get too off-track) even if I'm only talking to myself. Also discussed are 'testimony' and Mill's defense of the validity of induction. Norris brings Rumsfeld's comments back up again, but I think we can look at this topic w/o referring to them.
II
Disputed class: hypotheses, conjectures, speculative statements, unproven theorems, etc. … "statements for which we lack any means of formal proof (in mathematics or logic) or empirical verification (in history or the natural sciences)."
Realists: statements in the "disputed class" can and do possess objective truth-value "just so long as the sentence in question is well-formed and truth-apt." Statements can be "truth bearers" (if they "refer") and the portions of reality to which the statements refer are "truth-makers" (they make the statements true). This means reality is a truth-maker even if no statement is made (truth is knowledge-independent, verification-transcendent, epistemically unconstrained). Reminds me of Russell-I like Russell. "A well-formed statement…will have its truth-value fixed by the way things once stood in reality quite aside from our lack of certainty."
Anti-realists: Dummett: "truth" should be replaced with "warranted assertibility" and "restricted to just those statements for which we possess some bona fide means of proof or verification." The word "truth" keeps being used, though. Again, the anti-realist position is that we shouldn't be able to say "this is true" (or false) if we cannot also say "this is verified" (or falsified). "Statements [in the disputed class] cannot have a truth-value since it is strictly inconceivable that truth should exceed the limits of assertoric warrant." He has three arguments to support this:
1. Acquisition-argument. I'm just gonna quote: "we could not possibly acquire a working knowledge of language except via a grasp of the truth-conditions (more precisely: the conditions for warranted assertibility) which apply to the various sentences endorsed by members of our speech community."
2. Manifestation-argument. "such knowledge must be manifestable in our own speech-behavior and thereby exhibit that working grasp-our understanding of the relevant conditions-in a way that enables other people to correctly interpret our meanings and beliefs."
3. Recognition-argument. "no sentence can legitimately count as true or false unless we are able to recognize those same conditions and hence interpret as falling within the scope of our best available knowledge concerning what would qualify as adequate grounds for asserting or denying its validity."
So (per Dummett) when we "assert the existence of objective truth-values for statements belonging to the 'disputed class'…[it] would amount to the self-refuting claim that we know something to be the case despite our not having acquired the capacity torecognize the conditions under which such a statement is warranted or to manifest our knowledge of those same conditions in a manner acceptable to others in possession of the relevant standards and criteria."
Norris notes Dummett's three arguments amount "to a more sophisticated, logico-semantic version of the Verification Principle." The chief problem with the Verification Principle was that "it met neither of its own criteria for meaningful statements, i.e., that such statements should be either empirically verifiable or self-evidently valid in virtue of their logical form." So Dummett attempts to shift the debate by raising it "as a topic within the philosophy of language and one that has to do with our warrant (or lack of it) for adopting a realist view of some particular area of discourse. … For the Dummettian anti-realist…there is no making sense of such claims [in the disputed class] since they involve the appeal to an order of verification-transcendent truth which ex hypothesi exceeds the furthest bounds of epistemic warrant."
Where this gets really interesting is that Dummett claims that any gaps in knowledge must also be gaps in reality. "…there cannot be a past fact no evidence of which exists to be discovered, because it is the existence of such evidence that would make it a fact, if it were one." "Equally strange-from any but a hard-line anti-realist viewpoint-is the claim that our evidence (or lack of it) is 'constitutive' not only of our state of knowledge with respect to those events at any given time but also of their very reality, i.e., their having actually occurred or not. In which case, quite simply, the historical past must be thought of as a highly selectively backward projection from whatever we are currently able to find out and hence as including lacunae-'gaps in reality', as Dummett says-corresponding to our areas of ignorance."
III.
So, one example Norris uses of Dummett thinking we can bring about the past by a change in our present knowledge, is retroactively granted prayer request. To Norris, this is Dummett agreeing that "wishing (praying) makes it so". I used to use this example (not Dummett's-didn't know about Dummett) when I would think about time and God's sovereignty over it. I think differently about it now, because, unlike Dummett, I think everything in the past, present, and future is fixed/complete from God's perspective (according to Einstein's relativity, they 'are' fixed)-all affirmatively answered prayers were answered (in our past, present, future) before it all began (from His perspective). So the guy's prayer about what already happened-isn't "retroactively" granted (nothing changes in the past from God's perspective-the past, present, and future are fixed/complete)-but "eternally" granted (from beyond time). And this is not a case of the guy changing the past with his knowledge, because nothing changes, and even if it does, it isn't his "knowing it" that changes it (he does not know how it turns out when he is praying about it), but God Himself that changes it (if that were possible, and it isn't-it's all fixed). So "praying makes it so" is not equivalent to "wishing makes it so".
At any rate, when you're talking about knowledge that makes the past real, you bring up the time travel paradox of the closed causal loop. Now that I've said that, I'm wondering if it has anything to do with causal realism. If you (the reader) don't know what a closed causal loop is, here's an example based off the TV series LOST (I won't get the details exactly correct, so it is only "based off" of it-it isn't the exact situation). In 2007 Richard gives John a compass and tells John "The next time you see me, give this back." John goes back in time and meets Richard again sometime in the 1950s, and gives Richard the compass, saying, "The next time you see me, give this back." Richard gives it back to John in 2007-the event we started with. So--who is the original owner of the compass? Who even manufactured it? Applying that to Dummett's reverse-causality powers of knowledge: If I make the past real with my knowledge-what made my knowledge happen? Shiver me timbers!
On to math. "Dummett's intuitionist conception of truth in mathematics…whatever we are able to prove or ascertain by the best formal methods at our present or perhaps (on his more liberal account) our rationally optimized or future-best disposal. However, this leaves it a mystery how mathematical discoveries could ever have occurred unless through the proven capacity of thought to find out truths that went against currently accepted standards of proof or verification. What counts as epistemic, probative or assertoric warrant in such matters is always and in principle subject to disconfirmation by that which lies beyond our present-best powers of proof or epistemic warrant."
Skepticism's false dilemma: either truths that cannot be known (verified) (leading to "the skeptical impasse-the unbridgeable gulf between truth and knowledge"), or a redefinition of truth putting it in the bounds of knowability. This is a version of anti-realism's false dilemma, which results from confusing ontological with epistemological issues. [not sure how the two differ]
There are viable realist alternatives (paragraphs are numbered for convenience, not to denote different alternatives):
1. Gödelian realism-
From discussion w/ hughw (thankyou) in Philosophy Chat Forum's chatroom:
<hughw> Godel's incompleteness theorem is simply that each system has its own axioms that cannot be challenged from within that system-- since that system is based upon those axioms
<hughw> therefore if you are going to challenge those axioms they have to be challenged from outside the system itself
<hughw> challenging those axioms is one way to demonstrate that the system itself does not hold up-- since the axioms it is based upon are faulty
<Ichthus77> so the 'realism' part is the system-transcendence?
<hughw> yes--- because from within the system those axioms will always be held
From Prof Norris (thankyou) via e-mail:
From Prof Norris (thankyou) via e-mail:
Strictly speaking, it holds that for any mathematical, logical or other such formal system beyond a certain (fairly basic) level of complexity - e.g., first-order logic or basic arithmetic, there will always be one or more axioms within the system that cannot be proved using the logical resources of the system itself. But of course Goedel claims (and is generally agreed) to have formally proved this unprovability-theorem, which is a bit of a puzzle (to say the least). Hence the claim of some - Goedel himself, along with people like Penrose - that this demonstrates that human knowers have access to truths or ways of knowing (or proving) certain things that go beyond anything provable by purely formal means, such as the procedures instantiated by digital computers. This is what is usually meant by 'Goedelian realism', and - as Goedel was happy to accept - it amounts to a form of platonism about mathematics & the formal sciences.
2. "You can't prove there are no WMDs" is like "You can't prove there is no God". "…although it is the case…that absence of proof is not proof of absence, still we are entitled (on probabilistic but nonetheless rational grounds) to draw a negative conclusion [when] non-existence can justifiably be maintained as a matter of inference to the best, most rational, or least credibility-stretching explanation." "…it is a necessary presupposition…that there are truths which may or may not be discovered in the course of diligent enquiry and, moreover, that their standing is in no way affected by the extent of our knowledge, ignorance or uncertainty about them. Such is the starting-point or default assumption of any dispute-outside the realms of metaphysics or philosophy of language--…Beyond that, it is a matter of rationally weighing the evidence and attempting to reach an informed estimate which takes in as much of that evidence as possible, along with due allowance for the motivating interests of those whose judgements (or overt professions of belief) may always be subject in varying degrees to the pressure of ideological commitment or political self-interest."
3. Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Reid (commonsense realism): "…testimony of various sorts plays a large and philosophically underestimated role in a great many aspects of human knowledge and experience." … "can and should place trust in its various sources and means of transmission just so long as they stand up well to critical and methodological scrutiny."
4. "…wide range of reliably knowledge-conducive procedures which no doubt fall short of absolute, indubitable truth yet which nonetheless offer sufficient grounds for rejecting the kind of anti-realist 'solution' currently on offer." The skeptical/anti-realist false-dilemma is "another version of the fallacy that John Stuart Mill detected in Humean and other skeptical arguments against the validity of induction, that is to say, the mistake of imposing inappropriate (deductive) standards of truth on modes of reasoning-such as inference to the best explanation-that involved much wider, more practically accountable, sources of knowledge and evidence."
Chapter two "shall unpack some of the arguments and concepts that philosophers have lately developed by way of providing those additional resources." Nice segue.
*****
Dummett, nor his arguments, nor the term 'disputed class', nor anti-realism, are mentioned in my "Introduction to Philosophy: A Christian Perspective" (Geisler/Feinberg)--at least not in the index. In the chapter "How Do We Perceive the External World?" -- Dualism (Representative Perception, Phenomenalism) and Idealism (weak, strong) are mentioned as alternatives to Realism (extreme/primitive, common-sense). Skepticism is also discussed. I've heard Norris say "representative perception" I think...but, if I did, I failed to mention it in my threads. Too bad his book has no subject index.
Mill is mentioned as relating to induction, but not directly as 'the' dude who defended induction against skepticism (instead, Frederick Will and Antony Flew are mentioned, as being only two of a group of philosophers...love this sentence: "The skeptic, then...is unhappy simply because induction is not deduction!")--oddly his thoughts on logical and mathematical knowledge are also mentioned in such a way as to cast an interesting light on this discussion--"John Stuart Mill made it quite clear that he was not sure of the truth of the laws of logic. He wrote that the laws of logic are empirical generalizations, and, as such, are open to correction. He argued that just because we cannot conceive of another set of logical laws, it does not follow that another set of logical laws is impossible." Reminds me of this from my Intro/SectionII thread on Quine: "So there is no 'crucial experiment' which can decide one of rival theories or hypotheses. In short, we can always make excuses for the results…even revise 'laws' of logic."
Go here for some more info. on the Verification Principle: http://ichthus.yuku.com/topic/82. It's a paragraph in one of my replies.
Geisler/Feinberg discuss a lot of stuff I wonder if Norris will discuss.
I'm not going to post induction stuff yet 'cause I just have this weird feeling I should save it for later.
*****
Adding this to section on Godel. From Professor Norris (thankyou very much)--
Strictly speaking, it holds that for any mathematical, logical or other such formal system beyond a certain (fairly basic) level of complexity - e.g., first-order logic or basic arithmetic, there will always be one or more axioms within the system that cannot be proved using the logical resources of the system itself. But of course Goedel claims (and is generally agreed) to have formally proved this unprovability-theorem, which is a bit of a puzzle (to say the least). Hence the claim of some - Goedel himself, along with people like Penrose - that this demonstrates that human knowers have access to truths or ways of knowing (or proving) certain things that go beyond anything provable by purely formal means, such as the procedures instantiated by digital computers. This is what is usually meant by 'Goedelian realism', and - as Goedel was happy to accept - it amounts to a form of platonism about mathematics & the formal sciences.
Also--one should wiki Dummett.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Norris' "Epistemology" Ch.1, I
Book Discussion of Christopher Norris' "Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy"
Chapter 1: Staying for an Answer: Truth, Knowledge, and the Rumsfeld Creed -
Section I.
This section is pretty interesting and examines this quote from former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, spoken during a press conference on February 12, 2003 (section written December 23, 2004): "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns-the ones we don't know we know." I vaguely remember hearing that press conference, can hear Rumsfeld's manner of speaking, but I don't remember what the context is surrounding that statement. Norris makes reference many times to the questionable existence of the WMDs that sold the invasion of Iraq to the U.S. public and the world. Norris' language makes it obvious he thinks poorly of Rumsfeld's creed-that it did not reflect a realist position, rather that Rumsfeld weaseled out of answering a question straightforwardly, of admitting there might not have been the WMDs that justified the invasion (and so no longer any justification), of the implication that the 'evidence' of them was perhaps a misinformation campaign, by masking "it is impossible to know (if there were or were not WMDs)" (iow, "you will never be able to know if there was/is no justification for the invasion of Iraq") (blatant skepticism) in seemingly realist language.
Norris brings this example to examine, because it clearly shows how the central issues of epistemological debate "can often have a close bearing on the conduct…of our moral and political lives as persons whose considered judgement in matters such as the supposed justification for invading Iraq must always involve the attempt to sift truth from falsehood, or knowledge from ignorance."
known knowns - things that we know we know
Most people would accept this, perhaps with caveats, because we all have experienced the reality of coming to find out that what we "thought" we knew-wasn't the way things really are (we didn't "actually" know it-we only "thought" we knew it). Observation-based beliefs and supposedly a priori truths ("thought to obtain as a matter of jointly intuitive and logical necessity quite apart from any such putative evidence for or against") can later be proved either false, or "only true relative to a certain (e.g., Euclidean) frame of reference." … "Hence the wide-spread debate as to whether there exist any statements that can rightly be considered 'synthetic a priori' in Kant's sense of the term, i.e., statements which are self-evident to reason yet which also articulate an item of knowledge concerning the physical world or our experience of it. Some would even extend this doubt to a priori truth-claims of whatever sort, or whittle them down to a point of purely logical (and trivial) self-confirmation where only one candidate survives, namely the sentence 'Not every statement is both true and false'. …extreme forms of skepticism."
Rumsfeld's "known knowns" isn't clear enough. We need to make clear the ("cardinal") distinction between (if we don't, we cannot make sense of scientific progress, and the WMD discussion would be pointless)…
1. Know: "believe without question to the best of our knowledge or powers of rational comprehension" - "first-person [I: internalist], 'psychological' state of mind ('I simply know this or that to be the case')" Knowledge about WMDs "has its truth-value fixed…by the strength of conviction (genuine or otherwise) expressed by partisans of either view." William James. "'Truth' can appear only under this or that currently accepted or preferred description." (descriptivist?) "Truth-values cannot (or should not) be thought of as exceeding the bounds of warranted assertibility." "Justification is principally a matter of 'what works' in the sense of promoting our best psychological, social and ethico-political interests." "truth just is whatever has gained credence"
2. Know: "correctly and justifiably believe on the best, most reliable or truth-conducive grounds" - "properly applies only to that subset of beliefs which meet the twofold requirement of truth and epistemic or justificatory warrant." Knowledge about WMDs "has its truth-value fixed by the fact of their existence or non-existence." Bertrand Russell. "Truth must be conceived (in realist terms) as always potentially transcending the limits of present-best, communally warranted, or socially desirable belief." "[I: pragmatic justification] 'works' only in so far as it encourages an attitude of placid and unthinking acquiescence in taken-for-granted (hence reassuring) habits of thought and belief." "wishing cannot make it so"
This of course perks up my ears because it is relevant to my paper-where I talk about living as if we "know" there is moral truth, when we are offended when others violate our expectations, etcetera. Will keep it in mind.
known unknowns - things we do not know
At face value, says Norris, a realist, a defender of objective-truth values, would accept this. It seems to say "truth cannot ever in principle be reduced to the limits of present-best belief or officially authorized opinion." The WMDs exist or they don't-we know that we don't know whether or not they exist. Norris thinks Rumsfeld actually means we will never be able to know (even when the search is concluded without finding WMDs, even if there is evidence of a misinformation campaign)-which is a skeptical, not a realist, position.
unknown unknowns - things we don't know we don't know
At this point I am reminded of the Venn diagram of self-knowledge. There are things we know about ourselves that others don't know, there are things others know about us, that we don't know about ourselves, there are things that others know about us that we also know, and there are things about ourselves that we don't know and nobody else knows, either. The things we or others don't know could either be known unknowns, or unknown unknowns. They are known unknowns if we can conceive of the question, but don't know the answer. They are unknown unknowns if the question has never even occurred to us. Norris thinks Rumsfeld is not saying "There are perhaps objective answers that we haven't even asked questions about," - he thinks Rumsfeld is saying "you can't prove a negative, so remain epistemically humble" so as to avoid "accusations of fraudulence, mendacity, faked 'evidence' and so forth".
Brutal! Still no WMDs, though. Iraq is without a dictator, the U.S. is turning things over to the Iraqi people--steps in the right direction, methinks, unless it leaves Iraq vulnerable, of course, and a worse power than Hussein gains control over them.
*****
I am discussing my poll with RaspK over at Dawkins' forum, and it occurred to me that without minds, there is no morality, so without an eternal mind, there is no moral truth, so--moral truth is not independent of minds (and, yet, it is). That sounds like anti-realism (except not). Ack?
*****
Professor Norris' position:
I was thinkin' about it and--of course we can't expect (moral) truth to "transcend" an omniscient mind. Sort of parallel to the idea that only an omniscient mind is capable of certainty, and all other knowledge is varying degrees of faith. But would you call that sort of truth (which does not transcend divine mind) mind-dependent? I don't really think so...it sounds an awful lot like divine voluntarism. God does not create good/truth--He "is" good/truth. He creates what passes away--but all things eternal are what He is. But I will keep Professor Norris' thoughts in mind.
*****
On the other hand, some of us know certainty is impossible for all but the omniscient and are satisfied with certitude. Also, if we know that we are attracted to some beliefs because we need a "feeling" of certitude, and if we value "truth" rather than that "feeling"--we can stop ourselves from believing on the basis of "feeling". I think that feeling is maybe the initial spark that attracts us to the truth (route reconnaissance, as they say in the military)--and that reason can take the wheel from there. The underlying feeling can either be one of fear (to avoid existential nightmare) or curiosity (to go where no man has gone before)--or both. The "Why?!" is in us like webs are in spiders and nests are in birds.
I've been so busy and haven't had time to progress through the book, but did review some epistemology/truth stuff out of Geisler and Feinberg's "Introduction to Philosophy: A Christian Perspective" while waiting for jury selection to start yesterday (had jury duty). Hope to get back into this soon, but right now life is just zippin' past.
*****
To me, (based on his reply about moral truth), Professor Norris sounds ontologically realist, epistemologically anti-realist--but I'll wait until I make up my mind about that.
Chapter 1: Staying for an Answer: Truth, Knowledge, and the Rumsfeld Creed -
Section I.
This section is pretty interesting and examines this quote from former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, spoken during a press conference on February 12, 2003 (section written December 23, 2004): "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns-the ones we don't know we know." I vaguely remember hearing that press conference, can hear Rumsfeld's manner of speaking, but I don't remember what the context is surrounding that statement. Norris makes reference many times to the questionable existence of the WMDs that sold the invasion of Iraq to the U.S. public and the world. Norris' language makes it obvious he thinks poorly of Rumsfeld's creed-that it did not reflect a realist position, rather that Rumsfeld weaseled out of answering a question straightforwardly, of admitting there might not have been the WMDs that justified the invasion (and so no longer any justification), of the implication that the 'evidence' of them was perhaps a misinformation campaign, by masking "it is impossible to know (if there were or were not WMDs)" (iow, "you will never be able to know if there was/is no justification for the invasion of Iraq") (blatant skepticism) in seemingly realist language.
Norris brings this example to examine, because it clearly shows how the central issues of epistemological debate "can often have a close bearing on the conduct…of our moral and political lives as persons whose considered judgement in matters such as the supposed justification for invading Iraq must always involve the attempt to sift truth from falsehood, or knowledge from ignorance."
known knowns - things that we know we know
Most people would accept this, perhaps with caveats, because we all have experienced the reality of coming to find out that what we "thought" we knew-wasn't the way things really are (we didn't "actually" know it-we only "thought" we knew it). Observation-based beliefs and supposedly a priori truths ("thought to obtain as a matter of jointly intuitive and logical necessity quite apart from any such putative evidence for or against") can later be proved either false, or "only true relative to a certain (e.g., Euclidean) frame of reference." … "Hence the wide-spread debate as to whether there exist any statements that can rightly be considered 'synthetic a priori' in Kant's sense of the term, i.e., statements which are self-evident to reason yet which also articulate an item of knowledge concerning the physical world or our experience of it. Some would even extend this doubt to a priori truth-claims of whatever sort, or whittle them down to a point of purely logical (and trivial) self-confirmation where only one candidate survives, namely the sentence 'Not every statement is both true and false'. …extreme forms of skepticism."
Rumsfeld's "known knowns" isn't clear enough. We need to make clear the ("cardinal") distinction between (if we don't, we cannot make sense of scientific progress, and the WMD discussion would be pointless)…
1. Know: "believe without question to the best of our knowledge or powers of rational comprehension" - "first-person [I: internalist], 'psychological' state of mind ('I simply know this or that to be the case')" Knowledge about WMDs "has its truth-value fixed…by the strength of conviction (genuine or otherwise) expressed by partisans of either view." William James. "'Truth' can appear only under this or that currently accepted or preferred description." (descriptivist?) "Truth-values cannot (or should not) be thought of as exceeding the bounds of warranted assertibility." "Justification is principally a matter of 'what works' in the sense of promoting our best psychological, social and ethico-political interests." "truth just is whatever has gained credence"
2. Know: "correctly and justifiably believe on the best, most reliable or truth-conducive grounds" - "properly applies only to that subset of beliefs which meet the twofold requirement of truth and epistemic or justificatory warrant." Knowledge about WMDs "has its truth-value fixed by the fact of their existence or non-existence." Bertrand Russell. "Truth must be conceived (in realist terms) as always potentially transcending the limits of present-best, communally warranted, or socially desirable belief." "[I: pragmatic justification] 'works' only in so far as it encourages an attitude of placid and unthinking acquiescence in taken-for-granted (hence reassuring) habits of thought and belief." "wishing cannot make it so"
This of course perks up my ears because it is relevant to my paper-where I talk about living as if we "know" there is moral truth, when we are offended when others violate our expectations, etcetera. Will keep it in mind.
known unknowns - things we do not know
At face value, says Norris, a realist, a defender of objective-truth values, would accept this. It seems to say "truth cannot ever in principle be reduced to the limits of present-best belief or officially authorized opinion." The WMDs exist or they don't-we know that we don't know whether or not they exist. Norris thinks Rumsfeld actually means we will never be able to know (even when the search is concluded without finding WMDs, even if there is evidence of a misinformation campaign)-which is a skeptical, not a realist, position.
unknown unknowns - things we don't know we don't know
At this point I am reminded of the Venn diagram of self-knowledge. There are things we know about ourselves that others don't know, there are things others know about us, that we don't know about ourselves, there are things that others know about us that we also know, and there are things about ourselves that we don't know and nobody else knows, either. The things we or others don't know could either be known unknowns, or unknown unknowns. They are known unknowns if we can conceive of the question, but don't know the answer. They are unknown unknowns if the question has never even occurred to us. Norris thinks Rumsfeld is not saying "There are perhaps objective answers that we haven't even asked questions about," - he thinks Rumsfeld is saying "you can't prove a negative, so remain epistemically humble" so as to avoid "accusations of fraudulence, mendacity, faked 'evidence' and so forth".
Brutal! Still no WMDs, though. Iraq is without a dictator, the U.S. is turning things over to the Iraqi people--steps in the right direction, methinks, unless it leaves Iraq vulnerable, of course, and a worse power than Hussein gains control over them.
*****
I am discussing my poll with RaspK over at Dawkins' forum, and it occurred to me that without minds, there is no morality, so without an eternal mind, there is no moral truth, so--moral truth is not independent of minds (and, yet, it is). That sounds like anti-realism (except not). Ack?
*****
Professor Norris' position:
Well, there is no 'eternal mind' (or nothing we can make any sense of under that name), so we'll have to make do with human minds (collectively) as the source of whatever ethical truths we can come up with. Those truths will have to do with human (and I think non-human animal or other sentient) life-forms, and had better be based on some version of the consequentialist argument, i.e., maximizing welfare/flourishing and minimizing pain/misery. You can be a realist about those things without going platonist about moral values or landing yourself with all the classic problems about our (somehow, inexplicably) having epistemic/intuitive access to recognition-transcendent, hence inherently unknowable truths. Anyway that's my best shot at an answer.
I was thinkin' about it and--of course we can't expect (moral) truth to "transcend" an omniscient mind. Sort of parallel to the idea that only an omniscient mind is capable of certainty, and all other knowledge is varying degrees of faith. But would you call that sort of truth (which does not transcend divine mind) mind-dependent? I don't really think so...it sounds an awful lot like divine voluntarism. God does not create good/truth--He "is" good/truth. He creates what passes away--but all things eternal are what He is. But I will keep Professor Norris' thoughts in mind.
*****
On the other hand, some of us know certainty is impossible for all but the omniscient and are satisfied with certitude. Also, if we know that we are attracted to some beliefs because we need a "feeling" of certitude, and if we value "truth" rather than that "feeling"--we can stop ourselves from believing on the basis of "feeling". I think that feeling is maybe the initial spark that attracts us to the truth (route reconnaissance, as they say in the military)--and that reason can take the wheel from there. The underlying feeling can either be one of fear (to avoid existential nightmare) or curiosity (to go where no man has gone before)--or both. The "Why?!" is in us like webs are in spiders and nests are in birds.
I've been so busy and haven't had time to progress through the book, but did review some epistemology/truth stuff out of Geisler and Feinberg's "Introduction to Philosophy: A Christian Perspective" while waiting for jury selection to start yesterday (had jury duty). Hope to get back into this soon, but right now life is just zippin' past.
*****
To me, (based on his reply about moral truth), Professor Norris sounds ontologically realist, epistemologically anti-realist--but I'll wait until I make up my mind about that.
Norris' "Epistemology" Intro. IV
Book Discussion of Christopher Norris' "Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy"
Introduction, section IV.
So, to recap, Norris is going to make the case for realism as ontological commitment and as an "accounting for the growth of scientific knowledge by way of inference to the best (most rational) explanation." He is going to present opposing views as well, like response-dependence. Though it cannot provide objectivity while meeting the challenges of the anti-realist or sceptic, Norris is going to "emphasize the range, ingenuity and resourcefulness of various arguments advanced in this vein, especially by Crispin Wright." Response-dependence was touched on in section I of the Introduction, and will be discussed in chapter 4.
Internalist theories of knowledge - "first-person oriented modes of epistemological enquiry." Externalist - (semantic: "meanings just ain't in the head!" "advanced on modal-logical grounds by…Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke" Kripke/Putnam and the causal theory of reference-fixing was mentioned in section II of the Introduction. "Likewise highly promising are the kinds of naturalized epistemology-chiefly that developed by Alvin Goldman-which seek to conjoin a causal account of knowledge-acquisition with an adequately normative, reason-based rather than reductively physicalist (e.g., Quinean) approach."
Chapter 2 will concentrate on the debates between realism and anti-realism, starting with "Kripke's arguments for the existence of a posteriori necessary truths, or those that have to be discovered through some process of scientific enquiry but which nonetheless hold as a matter of necessity in any world physically congruent with our own." Norris backs it up with Putnam's "Twin-Earth" thought experiments, making the case for modal realism-the reference-fixing touched on in section II of the Introduction-"conserving fixity of reference across large (even radical) episodes of scientific theory-change." The explanation given is mildly confusing. I'm not sure how you can consider a reference (like subatomic structure, or molecular constitution) fixed that was inconceivable to (could not be referred to by) previous knowers, but I'm betting I'll find out. This is in opposition to a 'descriptivist' account, but I'm not exactly sure what that means, either. I think a descriptivist account says that features are not essential, that they fail to refer, that imputed properties before discovery (about some object), and imputed properties after discovery (about that object), will not be referring to the same object (if so-then how do you know what object you made a discovery about?).
Norris addresses concepts as they come up in the natural process of thinking through questions "that bear directly on matters of ethical and social (as well as more 'narrowly' epistemological) concern." "Thus the book proceeds mainly through a series of interlinked debates-realism versus anti-realism, alethic versus epistemic conceptions of truth, externalism versus internalism, objectivist versus response-dispositional or otherwise specified middle-ground positions."
*****
I'm confused right now as to why realism isn't synonymous to, say, alethicism, externalism and objectivism; anti-realism to, say, epistemicism, internalism and response-dependence...but I'm pretty sure it'll all be fleshed out as I read on.
Introduction, section IV.
So, to recap, Norris is going to make the case for realism as ontological commitment and as an "accounting for the growth of scientific knowledge by way of inference to the best (most rational) explanation." He is going to present opposing views as well, like response-dependence. Though it cannot provide objectivity while meeting the challenges of the anti-realist or sceptic, Norris is going to "emphasize the range, ingenuity and resourcefulness of various arguments advanced in this vein, especially by Crispin Wright." Response-dependence was touched on in section I of the Introduction, and will be discussed in chapter 4.
Internalist theories of knowledge - "first-person oriented modes of epistemological enquiry." Externalist - (semantic: "meanings just ain't in the head!" "advanced on modal-logical grounds by…Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke" Kripke/Putnam and the causal theory of reference-fixing was mentioned in section II of the Introduction. "Likewise highly promising are the kinds of naturalized epistemology-chiefly that developed by Alvin Goldman-which seek to conjoin a causal account of knowledge-acquisition with an adequately normative, reason-based rather than reductively physicalist (e.g., Quinean) approach."
Chapter 2 will concentrate on the debates between realism and anti-realism, starting with "Kripke's arguments for the existence of a posteriori necessary truths, or those that have to be discovered through some process of scientific enquiry but which nonetheless hold as a matter of necessity in any world physically congruent with our own." Norris backs it up with Putnam's "Twin-Earth" thought experiments, making the case for modal realism-the reference-fixing touched on in section II of the Introduction-"conserving fixity of reference across large (even radical) episodes of scientific theory-change." The explanation given is mildly confusing. I'm not sure how you can consider a reference (like subatomic structure, or molecular constitution) fixed that was inconceivable to (could not be referred to by) previous knowers, but I'm betting I'll find out. This is in opposition to a 'descriptivist' account, but I'm not exactly sure what that means, either. I think a descriptivist account says that features are not essential, that they fail to refer, that imputed properties before discovery (about some object), and imputed properties after discovery (about that object), will not be referring to the same object (if so-then how do you know what object you made a discovery about?).
Norris addresses concepts as they come up in the natural process of thinking through questions "that bear directly on matters of ethical and social (as well as more 'narrowly' epistemological) concern." "Thus the book proceeds mainly through a series of interlinked debates-realism versus anti-realism, alethic versus epistemic conceptions of truth, externalism versus internalism, objectivist versus response-dispositional or otherwise specified middle-ground positions."
*****
I'm confused right now as to why realism isn't synonymous to, say, alethicism, externalism and objectivism; anti-realism to, say, epistemicism, internalism and response-dependence...but I'm pretty sure it'll all be fleshed out as I read on.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Norris' "Epistemology" Intro. III
Book Discussion of Christopher Norris' "Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy"
Introduction, section III.
This section discusses the Anglophone (or "analytic"-maybe Frege?, maybe Quine?) versus "continental" (mainland-European--the only example I recognized was Husserl) traditions. Husserl is grouped with Frege, Duhem with Quine, Kuhn with Bachelard. "Indeed it can be argued that in many ways Bachelard's approach to these issues is one that confounds the received idea of 'continental' philosophy as deplorably prone to excesses of cultural relativism while 'analytic' philosophy cleaves to the virtues of disciplined truth-seeking rigour." Norris is going to explain their various points of convergence and divergence, and use the continental perspective to provide a different slant on typically analytic themes and concerns (pretty much stole his words and moved 'em around).
Norris admits the philosophical 'case' he is advancing is toward a realist standpoint, and "(more specifically) toward a form of critical realism that rests on the following principal theses. (1) There exists a 'real-world', objective, mind-independent physical domain wherein various items on every scale-from electrons, atoms and molecules to chairs, continents and galaxies-exhibit certain likewise objective structures, properties and causal powers which they possess or exert quite apart from our present-best or even our future-best-attainable knowledge of them. This is basically an ontological thesis, that is to say, one having to do with matters that by very definition (as skeptics are always quick to remark) cannot be known in the sense 'established beyond any possible doubt by our powers of cognitive or epistemic grasp'. Hence (2) the epistemological claim that we can nonetheless acquire increased knowledge of those objects, properties and powers through our various kinds of physical interaction with them, ranging all the way from everyday experience to the most refined and sophisticated methods of applied scientific research. Hence also (3) what critical realists describe as the complexly 'stratified' nature of that interaction, some of it transpiring at a level where objectivity is at a premium and where the knower (e.g., the observer or experimental scientist) has least involvement in setting things up with a view to finding things out, while some transpires through a far more active interventionist mode of enquiry. Even so (4), in the latter sorts of case, what is actually discovered through those various investigative methods and techniques is a range of (maybe hitherto latent or physically uninstantiated) properties and powers that are nonetheless real-there to be discovered-by just such newly devised or technologically enhanced means. Thus, for instance, there are certain kinds of entity-such as synthetic DNA proteins or transuranic elements produced in particle supercolliders-which are products of human scientific know-how but whose potential existence is now and always was a matter of real (objectively valid) microstructural attributes, capacities and laws of nature."
Are synthetic DNA proteins, proteins not normally (naturally) (without the aid/interference of humans) produced by DNA?-or are they proteins normally "synthesized" by DNA? If the former, is this going to be how the case is made for realist ethics, even though it would be voluntarism? If the latter-good observation.
"This approach also has the great advantage of extending to the social-science disciplines where it makes allowance for the highest degree of practical, reflective and self-critical involvement on the part of human agents while explaining how the scope of that agency is both enabled and constrained bythe various physical and social realities with which it has to deal. Not least, it helps to show where cultural relativists and 'strong' sociologists go wrong by exaggerating the extent to which scientific knowledge (and the objects of such knowledge) should be thought of as socially or culturally 'constructed', while failing to take due account of just those crucial factors. At the same time it offers a useful corrective to the kinds of sharply polarized debate-as described above-in which objectivist (alethic) realists about truth are ranged against anyone who takes the view that truth must be subject to certain forms of epistemic or cognitive constraint. What critical realism chiefly brings out is the frequent confusion here between matters metaphysical and issues epistemological."
Critical-realist terms: maintain distinction betweenontology - the "intransitive" domain of objects, structures, properties, causal dispositions, etc., and epistemology - "transitive" domain where human agency plays a more-or-less decisive interventionist role. (mostly quoting).
Shifting away from the physicalist reductionism of early logical positivists and logical-empiricist successors, allowing social sciences fair claim, but not to the point of considering all knowledge to be 'constructed'.
Pretty much the whole section is quoted, lol-not feeling well.
Introduction, section III.
This section discusses the Anglophone (or "analytic"-maybe Frege?, maybe Quine?) versus "continental" (mainland-European--the only example I recognized was Husserl) traditions. Husserl is grouped with Frege, Duhem with Quine, Kuhn with Bachelard. "Indeed it can be argued that in many ways Bachelard's approach to these issues is one that confounds the received idea of 'continental' philosophy as deplorably prone to excesses of cultural relativism while 'analytic' philosophy cleaves to the virtues of disciplined truth-seeking rigour." Norris is going to explain their various points of convergence and divergence, and use the continental perspective to provide a different slant on typically analytic themes and concerns (pretty much stole his words and moved 'em around).
Norris admits the philosophical 'case' he is advancing is toward a realist standpoint, and "(more specifically) toward a form of critical realism that rests on the following principal theses. (1) There exists a 'real-world', objective, mind-independent physical domain wherein various items on every scale-from electrons, atoms and molecules to chairs, continents and galaxies-exhibit certain likewise objective structures, properties and causal powers which they possess or exert quite apart from our present-best or even our future-best-attainable knowledge of them. This is basically an ontological thesis, that is to say, one having to do with matters that by very definition (as skeptics are always quick to remark) cannot be known in the sense 'established beyond any possible doubt by our powers of cognitive or epistemic grasp'. Hence (2) the epistemological claim that we can nonetheless acquire increased knowledge of those objects, properties and powers through our various kinds of physical interaction with them, ranging all the way from everyday experience to the most refined and sophisticated methods of applied scientific research. Hence also (3) what critical realists describe as the complexly 'stratified' nature of that interaction, some of it transpiring at a level where objectivity is at a premium and where the knower (e.g., the observer or experimental scientist) has least involvement in setting things up with a view to finding things out, while some transpires through a far more active interventionist mode of enquiry. Even so (4), in the latter sorts of case, what is actually discovered through those various investigative methods and techniques is a range of (maybe hitherto latent or physically uninstantiated) properties and powers that are nonetheless real-there to be discovered-by just such newly devised or technologically enhanced means. Thus, for instance, there are certain kinds of entity-such as synthetic DNA proteins or transuranic elements produced in particle supercolliders-which are products of human scientific know-how but whose potential existence is now and always was a matter of real (objectively valid) microstructural attributes, capacities and laws of nature."
Are synthetic DNA proteins, proteins not normally (naturally) (without the aid/interference of humans) produced by DNA?-or are they proteins normally "synthesized" by DNA? If the former, is this going to be how the case is made for realist ethics, even though it would be voluntarism? If the latter-good observation.
"This approach also has the great advantage of extending to the social-science disciplines where it makes allowance for the highest degree of practical, reflective and self-critical involvement on the part of human agents while explaining how the scope of that agency is both enabled and constrained bythe various physical and social realities with which it has to deal. Not least, it helps to show where cultural relativists and 'strong' sociologists go wrong by exaggerating the extent to which scientific knowledge (and the objects of such knowledge) should be thought of as socially or culturally 'constructed', while failing to take due account of just those crucial factors. At the same time it offers a useful corrective to the kinds of sharply polarized debate-as described above-in which objectivist (alethic) realists about truth are ranged against anyone who takes the view that truth must be subject to certain forms of epistemic or cognitive constraint. What critical realism chiefly brings out is the frequent confusion here between matters metaphysical and issues epistemological."
Critical-realist terms: maintain distinction betweenontology - the "intransitive" domain of objects, structures, properties, causal dispositions, etc., and epistemology - "transitive" domain where human agency plays a more-or-less decisive interventionist role. (mostly quoting).
Shifting away from the physicalist reductionism of early logical positivists and logical-empiricist successors, allowing social sciences fair claim, but not to the point of considering all knowledge to be 'constructed'.
Pretty much the whole section is quoted, lol-not feeling well.
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