Dear Klaus,

Thanks for your reply. I'd argue that this is exactly where we start 
to slide down that slippery metaphorical slope. There are three ways 
to answer this.

In the post to which I replied, you wrote:

--snip--

If fiction is what is created by an act of invention -- as my 
dictionary suggest,  i'd argue more generally

THE WORLD WE KNOW IS FICTION

--snip--

The first answer is a version of Medieval logic-chopping. The world 
we know is effectively the world there "is" so you can see how I 
translated that into the claim that "everything is fiction." If _all_ 
you can ever claim to know is fictive, then the idea that everything 
is fiction isn't that far a leap. If "every known thing is fiction" 
how could we _know_ whether any one thing is fiction or not? This is 
logic-chopping, so I'll stop here. Except for an irresistible touch 
of Aristotelian cosmology: perhaps the world we know is fiction while 
the heavens are not.

The first answer makes no sense.

The second answer is pragmatic. I'll agree that we create the world 
through our understanding and our use of language and other symbols. 
This is classic symbolic interactionism going back to the Mead-Blumer 
tradition. But we do not create the world alone. We co-create it, and 
we share it with others. We are not homunculi trapped within the 
fallible frame of a nervous system watching the world by remote 
control through the eyes of a giant whom we steer, a giant body whose 
sensory apparatus is separate from ourselves, transmitting signals 
that we sense. I'll agree that it is difficult to know the world, and 
that we are often mistaken in our interpretations and understandings. 
This situation is exacerbated precisely because we share the world 
with other human beings, building our symbolic universe with them. We 
understand and experience the world through the nomos of common 
cultures. But this very fact also means that however imperfectly, we 
create a world of common understandings based on some kind of reality 
outside the private world of self and personal speech. Much as we 
speak of intersubjectivity in scientific analysis, there are forms of 
intersubjectivity that function in understanding common, shared 
worlds.

No one is ever fully connected to a reality outside the interpretive 
mechanism of our nervous system, but neither are we some sort of 
radical creatures that a sixteenth-century philosopher might 
describe. Saying reasonably that our experience of the world creates 
the world for us, and saying reasonably enough that we have no true 
access to the world except through our nervous system does not lead 
to the radical claim that no world exists outside our nervous or the 
equally radical claim that any world we can know is effectively 
fiction simply because there is no form of absolute, knowable truth 
or objectivity. To say we can never really know the world outside 
except through the workings of our nervous system verges on the 
"brain in a vat" argument. In fact, if the claims you make are so, 
one might well argue that you have no real way to know whether what 
you believe is so or not. You could be entirely mistaken without 
knowing that you are mistaken. The epistemological problem here is 
that your argument seems to rest on a double standard: you seem to 
claim that the rest of us suffer from an epistemological problem 
because we speak of things as if we believe that they are so -- and 
then you argue as though what you believe is so.

I'll argue that even though there is a real world that we cannot 
genuinely know in any comprehensive sense, we do know the real world 
reasonably well. This is not a fictive world. Even though we 
co-create our interpretation, experience, and understand of the world 
through mechanisms that fit constructivist perspectives or symbolic 
interactionist perspectives or pragmatist perspectives, these 
descriptions explain how we interpret the world without any need to 
claim that the world is a fiction.

The second answer seems reasonable enough to me. But there is a third answer.

The third answer is that we have evolved from earlier creatures 
selected by the process of evolution. This process means that our 
ancestors got here and stayed here because our nervous systems were 
suited to understanding and interpreting the world in which they 
found survivable niches. Those who were incapable of gaining 
effective access to reality went extinct. The descendents of those 
ancestors -- us -- can access the world through reasonably effective 
nervous systems. We often interpret that real world badly, but the 
world as many of us know it is not fiction simply because some of us 
do badly.

If evolution is merely a fairy tale or one plausible scientific 
account among others, this may not be so. If George Bush and his 
creation science friends say that men started out as dust and women 
started out as a rib. If that's true, I suppose we may not have 
access to reality outside our nervous systems after all. This would 
certainly explain a great deal about what has happened in the world 
during the past eight years. Whatever the Lord has been blowing into 
the president's nostrils, I'd argue that evolution accounts for the 
rest of us.

If this is the case, it accounts for the properties of most designed 
artifacts and the nature of the creatures we design them for. That, 
in turn, rests on the real properties of the world and the fact that 
we can access them reasonably through a nervous system that allows us 
to do so. The properties of human being in human cultures shape our 
interpretations of the world. In this sense, we create the world 
through culture and through language. Our nervous systems give access 
to a real world. I'd hesitate to say that our nervous systems 
"create" the world in the same way that language "creates" the world. 
The process of evolution suggests quite the contrary: the world 
created the nervous systems, and these systems link us effectively to 
the world except for people suffering from the kinds of neurological 
or psychological problems of the kind we meet in Oliver Sacks's books.

There is an exception. Evolution apparently fails to explain some 
politicians and those fundamentalists who stand four-square on the 
literal Bible. Other than the elect and the elected, however, 
evolution explains how most of us got here, and it explains some 
aspects of how designers work.

Critical realism in several flavors, symbolic interactionism, 
pragmatism, and constructivism in several flavors suggests that there 
is a real world that we can access reasonably well without arguing 
that "every known thing is fiction." Biology, evolutionary biology, 
and evolutionary psychology would reach the same conclusion.

It seems to me that there is no epistemological problem here. In 
contrast, I see serious epistemological problems in the radical claim 
that "the world we know is fiction."

Yours,

Ken



>dear ken,
>
>your statement "(if) everyTHING is fiction ..." is not the same as "every
>known thing is fiction." if you confuse the two you get into epistemological
>troubles.
>
>how could you assume that the acknowledgement that the known world is
>fiction prevents you from deciding which one is better, more reasonable, or
>responsible?  sure, some fictions are better than others.  the point is that
>you can't talk about a world without talking about it.  you don't have
>access to a reality outside of your nervous system that creates it.
>
>klaus


-- 

Ken Friedman
Professor

Dean, Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia