JISCMail - FRIENDSOFWISDOM-D Archives

Pragmatist ideas are useful and important. How to go about the study of experience seems central to the study of human nature, but clearly related to most, perhaps all, of knowledge. Ideas are great, but/and doing it, observing self and others, development, similarities and differences among people(s), cultures, should be coming up very soon upon the agenda toward wisdom.

I did read Dupre's, Human Nature and the Limits of Science, as you suggested - and agree with his critiques, but think (still) that we must return to the study of self in society and the world, kids, etc: what I've been calling "The Body Journals," and am trying to gather my thoughts and writings over several decades - when they have not had much interest or reception.

So: how to go about seeing ourselves seeing? How and what judgments do we make? Where do we derive our selves and ideas? Include the fact that we are in deep and enduring relationships with our m/others, and "emerge" from these social "transformative" relationships to become selves, the I that we are - lots of observations of the infants and kids that we all once were - meeting the new child (an amazing) experience - growing, becoming...

Thinking, rationality - from experience(s) - not from our prewired or born nature, but interactive.

I'll include a few of the beginning questions which have sustained my work: (Kinesics from R. Birdwhistell's attempts to describe the body-in-interaction)

KINESICS

1. How do you get (to learn) to appear honest? Dumb? Smart? Beautiful...

"Cultures" operate to define facial stereotypes. People "buy" these roles and one begins to "look a particular way" more and more as people react to her/him as if he looks like that.

These stereotypes are the major 'roles" which society breaks the world up into. It is a statement about how a society (the major statement?) analyzes its social world. There are so many classes (money...whatever), so many smarts/dumbs (you can't be taken to be smart if you don't have the right style--the one that's in. How much real thought behind the proper style?).

The external component of how to evaluate oneself: What does a "dumb-looking" kid see about himself in other people's eyes? Is s/he a mirror or a product? A beautiful person? Someone with facial “oddities.”...

2. Why do stories--apparently verbal, but also pictorial--seem to affect our bodies? The easiest, at least most universally accessible, such story is the sexual fantasy by which we are able to "turn ourselves on," much the same as if we were directly stimulated by touch (and sight).

It is as if we (i.e., those of us who engage in this sort of pastime) can conjure up for ourselves an imaginary stimulus which is effectively "outside" our bodies and which our bodies (us?) react to as effective stimuli. "Thinking" of the story, we can thereby alter our bodily states in some interesting ways.

But it remains unclear (I think) why we seem to need the story--why not go directly to the experience. Why is it that "self-stimulation" seems more effective if we can "pretend” that we are not ourselves, exactly; but outside of ourselves?

Is this what "language" does for us; i.e., allow us to act as if we are someone (some thing) else and thereby able to act as effective "external" stimuli for our own bodies? Is this a functlon of language which is purportedly not available to non-Humans?

4. Towards an Anthropology of the Handicapped...

On getting a front tooth capped: if one is really aware of his parts (e.g., tongue), part of learning to speak would be some form of suppression of this awareness.

If it is a suppression, is it like "putting away" a violin technique; i.e., once you can do (perform) it, you no longer find yourself thinking about it in any "problematic" way; it becomes unconscious, perhaps - out-of-awareness; memorized, surely, in some senses. How does one memorize a complicated dynamic?

If one is suppressing, I suppose that one has (is) at two senses of being: one which 1s busy remembering, analyzing, etc., and one which already knows (and remembers that it knows, knows that it knows, and is pretty confident that that knowledge will be accessible in the proper context).

Suppression is not forgetting--it's a way of deciding that one doesn't have to attend, at least not in the same sort of way that (I) used to (and what is forgetting? - on purpose, or not?)...

- - - - - -

I'm pretty sure that Dewey and Mead would join this observational inquiry.

Best,

Harvey

How to get "around" the dualistic thinking which Dewey's laments - one of our major tasks toward the pursuit of wisdom.

On Jun 17, 2007, at 3:40 PM, David M wrote:

Hi Terry

I'd just like to say that Dewey seems like an obvious fellow traveller to me.

Here is what it says in a book on 20c thinkers about Dewey:

"Faithful to the evidence of experience, he argued that nature's processes

generate precious values. The manifold properties of experience are neither

'in the subject' nor 'in the object'' as subject and object are conceived dualistically.

They are evntual functions of nature conceived inclusively. The traits of things we

cherish, esteem, love, admire, fear, detest, and so on are real traits of nature.

We find numberless occassions of great value, and, thereis no need to justify

them at large by reference to absolutes. The need is to discriminate the conditions

of their occurrence so that they can be deliberately secured and enriched."

Dr. James S. Gouinlock
Department of Philosophy
Emory University

regards

David Morey

----- Original Message -----

From: [log in to unmask]>Terry Bristol

To: [log in to unmask]>[log in to unmask]

Sent: Friday, June 15, 2007 12:09 AM

Subject: Nick Maxwell and Pragmatism

Dear Nick –

OK. Here is one more attempt to show you the link(s) between AOE and pragmatism.

First of all I think that if you read Dewey’s ‘Reconstruction of Philosophy’ you will see much of the theme of ‘Is Science Neurotic?’
As I have understood ISN it is easily separated from any formal link to any particular psychology.
It is about the disconnect between what we (viz scientists being one example) are really doing and what we think, say or represent ourselves as doing.

Clearly, Nick, this is accurate and important in characterizing the scientific community (viz with many rebellious exceptions of course).
Dewey distinguishes between the ‘Spectator’ approach to ‘knowledge’ of ‘timeless truths’ (viz often referred to as ‘the detached observer model’ by others) and the ‘Participant’ approach. If you are really a Participant, but think, say and represent yourself to others as a Spectator, then you are – in the relevant sense – displaying the symptoms of neurosis. Another version is people with freewill (viz the capacity to perform work; understood in terms of engineering thermodynamics) who will tell you straight to your face that everything (including what they are saying to you now) is determined. Similarly current neurological research expects to reduce (not unify) mind to purely material (mechanical) interactions. (Penrose makes a nice but inadequate attempt to unmask these neurotics.) ((Footnote: How about ‘The Neurotic Neurologists’ as a title for a review in the Neurology Journal.))

Personally, I like to talk about pragmatic psychology (a simplified version of James’s seminal work ‘Psychology’ – which you should also read to get you past the psychoanalytic framework). I also like working with consonant Southwest Indian (Navaho/Hopi) Image: There are seven ‘perspectives’ and we each enter the world as observers through one of these – known as our Beginning Gift (viz this is how we first make contact with the adult world (viz the jokester, aggressor, meek one, etc,; like personality types – associated with different animals for the SWI) making sense of some aspects but not others (viz. We enter as sort of mini-ideologues in Popper’s sense within our one perspective)). We expand our understanding (wisdom) through learning to make sense of things through other’s perspectives. This requires listening to others sympathetically and having them guide us through their way of seeing, correcting us along the way – until we get it (viz recognize its value). Otherwise, stuck in one perspective, I just keep thinking/saying that things like ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you’ (viz meaning that I see that world, what is important and valuable, differently than you). ((Footnote: Notice that what we disagree about is ultimately to be unpacked in terms of values not objective, universal facts.)) The enlightened are those who have incorporated and integrated all seven perspectives – to reach a self-referentially consistent understanding of themselves and the universe. ((Footnote: Curiously, I have recently come to suspect that this is ‘roughly’ Hegel’s framework; sometimes called perspectivism. Whewell’s ‘consilience’ is similar in that it involves fitting together diverse types of ‘evidence’ to reveal a picture different from any of the pieces.))

The key point about pragmatic psychology is that you see and accept (sympathetically) that people tend to one, or another, or several different, perspectives – ways of making sense of the world – depending on their situation, history, etc. This easily extends into science and engineering in that electrical engineers see the world (ontologically made up of different sorts of things) differently from mechanical engineers (cf. Bucciarelli’s quasi-Wittensteinian ‘Designing Engineers’ or better, his ‘Engineering Philosophy’).

Back to your ISN theme, how we – we who understand, we the enlightened – should understand these misguided, ‘neurotic’, souls is a crucial and, in my opinion, open question that doesn’t benefit greatly from the psychoanalytic tradition. Descriptively accurate in terms of symptoms but not explanatory in a useful or credible way. ((Footnaote: The general problem for each of us is how to understand how others can disagree with us. And, ala Descartes, how we can disagree with ourselves.))

The Seven Arrows theme suggests that all individual perspectives are limited, idealizations of legitimate/valid aspects of reality.
My only problem with calling people neurotic is that it is not sympathetic and seems to presuppose that you have the right perspective.

SECOND
Nick, I am sympathetic to your response to Dewey’s often confusing use of ‘knowledge’. This is a core point, and as we all know a notoriously tricky area. Obviously the pragmatists want to distinguish between ‘truth’ in some universalist (mechanistic, positivist) sense from ‘important truth’. This I take to be one of the most fundamental links that you ignore. You might want to modify or be critical or improve upon it, but for you to have ignored this blatantly obvious common agenda is unfortunate.

Their approach to distinguishing ‘truth’ from ‘important truth’ is to say that ‘important truth’ has value – by its very nature. The classical, rather crass expression is that real knowledge (what we really look for and discover) always has ‘cash value’. I think it best to clarify that the specific ‘cash value’ is not necessarily foreseen or perhaps even foreseeable at any given moment. It is like potential. It is like a solution that one expects to be helpful in the solution to some problem (or most generally to bringing new good things (value) into the world). The simple and perhaps misleading characterization is then to think of knowledge as a tool – an instrument. It is a Kuhnian paradigm – a puzzle solving technique or approach – based on a certain way of looking at and understanding reality. Broadly speaking the electrical engineers way of looking at the world is a paradigm. He sees the world in terms of capacitors and conductors and generators, etc. (viz ontological, factual correspondence) The mistake here is to think that because knowledge (important truth) has instrumental value that it is ‘merely’ instrumental. It does corresponds to reality. ONE test, so to speak, of whether it corresponds to reality is that it has potential value. Think of it this way: on any given day we each live in a world of many potential observations or actions. These facts are in this sense potentials. It is not that ‘they’ have capacity or that ‘we’ have capacity. It is one system. To know the facts is to know the potentials. The ‘facts’ (the world and how it works) are both actual and potential value. Potential is potential to bring forth value.

The best (and I think correct) way to characterize ‘potential value’ is in terms of existentialism. One has potential (incarnation) to act in the world (‘capacity to perform work’ in the engineering thermodynamic sense) but no script. The more you learn the more potential you realize/create. The process emerges as much as converges. ((Footnote: It is fun to pursue the idea of engineering inquiry as seeking ignorance. By this I mean that an advance in knowledge is an advance in my ability to ask new questions, new types of questions; to explore the possibility space in new ways (Cf. Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic, “An advance in science is an advance in method.’) This corresponds to the experience of most if not all real researchers that when they learn something, although they feel closer to the truth in some sense, they also realize that they have now opened up a whole new arena of potential inquiry (R&D). They have achieved a state wherein they have more new questions than before – and so in this sense are more ignorant.))

THIRD
Josiah Royce (pragmatist and colleague of Peirce, James and Dewey) makes the following argument:
Given that we are trying to understand the universe (how it works, etc.), then whatever theory one comes up with it must have within it someone – people like ourselves (viz yourself, the person proposing the model) – who didn’t know and yet was able to figure out (learn) that this was the correct model of the universe. I have come to refer to this as Royce’s Criterion of Self-Referential Consistency. It has several implications. Royce refers to ‘the problem of problems’: whatever model of the universe you come up with it must incorporate the process of problem solving – such as you coming up with the correct theory. (I think that Whitehead makes a similar argument, calling the self-referentially inconsistent models (viz all mechanical models) incoherent, and something like the pragmatic/Participant model uniquely coherent.)

But if I am a problem-solver and you are as well and other organisms are as well – plausibly, then it is no great extension to suggest that the entire enterprise is a sort of ubiquitous, distributed problem-solving enterprise. Since problem-solving, general considered is the attempt to move from a given state to a preferred state, such a universe necessarily seeks the good (or at least has the opportunity to do so). This is notable the core theme of Plato Timaeus, where the universal soul, of which we are all a part, is the Master Architect/Engineer. The key point in Plato and Pragmatism is that to find the truth you must realize it – in the sense of actualize it. It is what the physicists are calling a bootstrap model. And perhaps this is an open-ended process.

The development in pragmatism to a post-positivist understanding of real inquiry often moves something like this. There are two mechanical models – classical mechanics and statistical mechanics, each built on commitment to a symmetry principle. Peirce refers to these as Necessity (Firstness) and Chance (Secondness). They are both special case, idealized models (viz and not self-referentially consistent by themselves or just added together (as in QM)). The resolution requires a More General Framework – the Participant model – which Peirce calls Agapism (Thirdness). Agapism is all about wisdom and building a better world. (I have a paper I gave to the Metanexus crowd in 2006 outlining this if you want to read my version – in more modern terms.) Nick, I think that if you would look at Peirce’s attempts to articulate agapism you would find that it is very much in keeping with your enterprise to develop a society designed to pursue and embody what you mean by wisdom.

FOURTH
And this really kills me, Nick, about you not making he link to pragmatism.
Dewey, following Peirce’s lead to Thirdness, explicitly says that all inquiry is (really) value inquiry.
Let me give you another approach to the same theme.
Dewey, following Hegel, reasons from this Third framework.

((Footnote: Notably (what I first found to be really ‘curious’) all the self-reference paradoxes disappear in the More General Third. It seems there is one paradox with many versions. This corresponds to making a general inference from Goedel: all closed systems are self-inconsistent. The success of idealize closed systems can only be made sense of in an open system (Participant) framework, where the close systems are idealized special cases.))

The key point in the Participant framework is that we are involved in the course of events in the universe – in a meaningful way – having the ability to alter the course of events – and the actual design of the universe. This is the core defining theme of engineering. For science the core is discovery – of fixed, timeless truths (per hypothesis).

Socrates was astute at playing off one universal thesis about how the universe works to lead the proponent to the opposite or complement.
Then when asked: OK smart ass, if we are all wrong, then what is the answer. Socrates said that he didn’t know. The answer is in some sense that there is no answer – of the mechanical, objective type.
If there is no one (timeless, mechanical) way in which the universe works, then this is the most fundamental point about how the universe works and our relation to it.
If there is no universal order/rationality governing everything then, Socrates suggests, a new question, a new TYPE of question (suddenly) becomes meaningful, namely: How should we live? ((Footnote: The wisdom question??))
Great. But the catch is that for this to be a meaningful question it must be problematic. We don’t know. AND we don’t know how to find out.
So how do we figure that out? The process is inherently open since there can’t, per hypothesis, be a final correct (closed) answer.
We don’t start by knowing what is valuable. We have to figure that out as part of – if not the essence of – the process.
The enterprise requires that we explore the potential space. Try things out. Reflect on our experiences.

‘Experience’ is a key concept for Dewey and the best way to get at what he means by ‘knowledge’. He never quite gets it right – I think because he is not entirely clear on how experience in this Participant framework differs from experience (neurotically) conceived as occurring in the Spectator’s universal, mechanical framework. (Theory-ladenness of perspectives.)

The Socratic question, ‘How should we live?’, is the foundational question of engineering. How should we design the irrigation our fields, how should we design our houses, how should we design our cities, how should we design our economy, how should we design our political system – so as to preserve our economic system and so forth. And how should we treat (understand) each other? The Socratic question defines and opens up the moral context. Moral question (wisdom questions) only make sense in a model that embodies problem-solving in a self-referentially consistent manner. The American Constitution then is a design document; balance of powers, rights and responsibilities, etc.

It is important to understand that the problem of design is existential (i.e. Self-referentially problematic) and open ended. It is about improving the design of the universe – what Whitehead calls improving ‘the form of the process’.

It is crucial when talking about engineering (or instrumentalism) to distinguish between the technician (who can work from a script and make a copy) and the engineer/architect who is seeking to creatively problem-solve. Our real context is necessarily the latter. ((Footnote: An earlier version and similar distinctions are found in Plato’s Timaeus.)) ((Footnote: Along these lines the Existentialists make a big deal about people who are authentic and those who are not. It appears to me that this corresponds to your distinction, Nick, between the normal/enlighten and the neurotic. The existential neurotic pretends/believes/insists that he doesn’t have creative freewill and the responsibility that goes with it. Could this be the positivists??))

It is because the process is ‘relatively blind’, although potentially (not deterministically) progressive, that the owl of minerva only spreads its wings at dusk.

TWO NEW MANTRAS:
Nothing in science makes sense except in the context of engineering (viz defined by the Socratic problem of design).
(Notice that parody on ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the context of evolution’.)

Don’t think of engineering as applied science, but of science as engineering research.

I could go on, but I think you should respond to these points first.

Best,

Terry

Terry Bristol, President <http://www.isepp.org>
Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy
3941 SE Hawthorne Blvd
Portland OR 97214
503-531-8730, cell 503-819-8365

“Science would be ruined if it were to withdraw entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are wanderers-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.” Benoit Mandelbrot