Can experimentalism loosen the grasp of tradition?

[coberst]

Can experimentalism loosen the grasp of tradition?

I remember watching the movie Fiddler on the Roof[i]. In this movie there was much talk, and singing and dancing about [i]tradition. The story of the movie is, I think, about what happens when a people steeped in tradition are forced to deal with dramatic change.

The rock of tradition continually meets the winds of change to produce a new tradition. Tradition evolves and the rate of evolution marches ever faster as technology provides the metronomic beat of the march.

Cognitive science presently functions within the boundaries of two distinctly different paradigms. The traditional and first generation paradigm, Artificial Intelligence, is founded upon the theory of mechanical manipulation of symbols by computer, has in the last few decades been challenged by the SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) also known as Experimentalism.

Cognitive science seeks to comprehend via empirical techniques answers to such questions as: What is reason, how do we organize experience, what is a conceptual system, and others. These are not new questions but the answers derived via SGCS are new to science and a challenge to traditional philosophy.

Objectivism is considered to be the traditional philosophical view. “It has come out of two thousand years of philosophizing about the nature of reason. It is still widely believed despite overwhelming empirical evidence against it.” Objectivism is still widely held as valid because the empirical challenge to traditional knowledge, which is not within the domain of the natural sciences, takes generations to permeate the consciousness of the general pubic. The general public learns such matters primarily via social osmosis.

Cognitive science is in transition and categorization is the central issue defining the separation of the traditional view from the experimentalist view.

Cognitive science has introduced revolutionary theories that, if true, will change dramatically the views of Western philosophy. Advocates of the traditional view will, of course, “say that conceptual structure must have a neural realization in the brain, which just happens to reside in a body. But they deny that anything about the body is essential for characterizing what concepts are.”

The cognitive science claim is that ”the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world.”

The embodied-mind hypothesis therefore radically undercuts the perception/conception distinction. In an embodied mind, it is conceivable that the same neural system engaged in perception (or in bodily movements) plays a central role in conception. Indeed, in recent neural modeling research, models of perceptual mechanisms and motor schemas can actually do conception work in language learning and in reasoning.

A standard technique for checking out new ideas is to create computer models of the idea and subject that model to simulated conditions to determine if the model behaves as does the reality. Such modeling techniques are used constantly in projecting behavior of meteorological parameters.

Neural computer models have shown that the types of operations required to perceive and move in space require the very same type of capability associated with reasoning. That is, neural models capable of doing all of the things that a body must be able to do when perceiving and moving can also perform the same kinds of actions associated with reasoning, i.e. inferring, categorizing, and conceiving.

Our understanding of biology indicates that the body has a marvelous ability to do as any handyman does, i.e. make do with what is at hand. The body would, it seems logical to assume, take these abilities that exist in all creatures that move and survive in space and with such fundamental capabilities reshape it through evolution to become what we now know as our ability to reason. The first budding of the reasoning ability exists in all creatures that function as perceiving, moving, surviving, creatures.

Cognitive science has, it seems to me, connected our ability to reason with our bodies in such away as to make sense out of connecting reason with our biological evolution in ways that Western philosophy has not done, as far as I know.

It seems to me that Western philosophical tradition as always tried to separate mind from body and in so doing has never been able to show how mind, as was conceived by this tradition, could be part of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Cognitive science now provides us with a comprehensible model for grounding all that we are both bodily and mentally into a unified whole that makes sense without all of the attempts to make mind as some kind of transcendent, mystical, reality unassociated with biology.

Quotes from Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson

[blp]

By 'objectivism' do you mean the idea that ethical concepts have an objective quality, which is roughly what my dictionary of philosophy says?

[coberst]

My second son, Mike, was a blanket boy. He spent a good part of his first 24 months with a thumb in his mouth and a blanket in his arms. If we left the house with Mike we checked and doubled check that we did not leave his ‘blanky’ behind. After 24 months the blanky was nothing more than a scrap of shredded cloth. He would not accept a substitute.

Absolute truth is our blanky. DickandJane become very anxious when their security blanket, i.e. absolute truth, is not in hand.

Objectivism is a fundamentalist philosophy. It believes that reality is something external to the brain and that the task of the brain is to gain knowledge about this external reality.

Right/wrong and true/false are considered to be objective criteria rather than subjective criteria. Objectivism posits perfect knowledge and assumes such knowledge is obtainable. I think that such views have been discredited.

The myth of objectivism says that: the world is made up of objects that have properties completely independent of those who perceive them; we understand our world through our consciously constructed concepts and categories; “we can say things that are objectively, absolutely true, and unconditionally true and false about it…we cannot rely upon subjective judgments…science can ultimately give a correct, definitive, and general account of reality”; words have fixed meaning that can describe reality correctly. To be objective is to be rational.

The myth of subjectivism informs us that our senses and intuition is our best guide. Feelings are the most important elements of our lives. Aesthetic sensibilities and moral practices are all totally subjective. “Art and poetry transcend rationality and objectivity and put us in touch with more important reality of our feelings and intuitions. We gain this awareness through imagination rather than reason…Science is of no use when it comes to the most important things in our lives.”

The new paradigm of cognitive science rejects both objectivism and subjectivism. I believe in this new cognitive science, which theorizes that objectivity is a shared subjectivity.

Objectivity is shared subjectivity. Objective truth is a misnomer; there is only shared truth/false and there is only shared good/bad.

Objectivity is shared subjectivity. We create reality in our brain. If you and I create the same reality then we have a shared subjectivity. We cannot know the thing-in-itself, as Kant informs us and is easily recognized if we focus upon it.

I would say that reality comes in two forms; the thing-in-itself is the reality that Kant informs us that we cannot know and then we have the reality that our brain creates. This reality we create is aided by the senses and is congruent with how our body interacts with the thing-in-itself. If the interaction between the thing-in-itself and the creature’s embodied mind is too far off--the creature quickly becomes toast.

Most people are objectivist in many ways; do you still comfort yourself with blanky?

Quotes from Moral Imagination Mark Johnson (coauthor of Philosophy in the Flesh)

[blp]

Objectivism is a fundamentalist philosophy. It believes that reality is something external to the brain and that the task of the brain is to gain knowledge about this external reality.

I had a feeling that's what you meant. I'm surprised that you say this is the traditional philosophical view because there seems to me to have been doubt, at best, about this from the very beginning of both the eastern and western philosophical traditions. What about Plato's cave, for starters? But I see what you're saying a little more clearly now.

I wonder if you need to draw more of a distinction between objectivism as regards material substances and objectivism regarding ethics. I'm not sure the link is one that can be taken for granted. I'm pretty sure Kant didn't take it for granted, though I couldn't say for sure how he ended up delineating the link. It seems obvious that most people do take a materially objectivist view of the world. However, an ethically objectivist view of things is a harder sell for many of us atheists (if there is an objective ethics, where'd it come from?)

Interestingly, I'm pretty sure that, at one point, Kant argued against objectivism and for absolute truth simultaneously. The essays called The Dignity of Moral Will and the idea, as I remember it, is a bit like Chomsky's idea of the innateness of grammar: innate morality. We're all going around mentally creating the material and ethical world in the same way as each other, therefore the absolute truth of morality is in all of us, therefore we are free, or should be. It's very French enlightenment and very 'shared subjectivity' as you put it.

But where would you put the golden rule (do unto other as they would have them do to you)? There's an obvious practical logic about this that seems to me to transcend the opposition you set up. Or it has a subjective angle - it's what suits most of us best; but it also does achieve the quality of objective truth almost in the way that a simple maths equation does: 3 + 1 = 2 + 2 and I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine, sort of thing. And, crucially, that logic works whether perceived material reality is illusory or not. Doesn't it?

[blp]

By the way, rather as an aside, but in a weird way relevantly, you might like to look up what the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott has to say about what he called 'transitional objects'. Mike's blanket fits the category. Winnicott thought these objects were crucial in helping the infant mature from a state of subjective omnipotence to a state of being able to engage with objective reality. The book is Playing and Reality and it is, in my view, absolutely brilliant.

I guess I partly mention this because the objective reality Winnicott is talking about is still, by your standards outlined above, subjective. Or, you might say, the child moves from subjective omnipotence to your state of 'shared subjectivity'. Still, it seems to me subjectivity is would have to be seen, in this schema, as a matter of degree. An infant or a schizophrenic is still a heck of a lot more subjective than the rest of us.

Also, just to muck around with this a tiny bit more, did you know that Russle rather casually dismisses Kant's arguments for his aesthetic and, hence, things in themselves, in his History of Western Philosophy? I don't know for sure whether his arguments stand up (and, sorry, but I can't call them to mind now and don't have the book here), but Kant's idea is so madly difficult to assimilate (time and space have no objective reality at all) that I felt waves of tension falling off me as I read the Russle, almost as if I was being freed from some crazy religious doctrine.

[coberst]

blb

A person can walk the corridors of any big city hospital and observe the effectiveness of human rationality in action. One can also visit the UN building in NYC or read the morning papers and observe just how ineffective, frustrating and disappointing human rationality can be. Why does human reason perform so well in some matters and so poorly in others?

We live in two very different worlds; a world of technical and technological order and clarity, and a world of personal and social disorder and confusion. We are increasingly able to solve problems in one domain and increasingly endangered by our inability to solve problems in the other.

Normal science is successful primarily because it is a domain of knowledge controlled by paradigms. The paradigm defines the standards, principles and methods of the discipline. It is not apparent to the laity but science moves forward in small incremental steps. Science seldom seeks and almost never produces major novelties.

Science solves puzzles. The logic of the paradigm insulates the professional group from problems that are unsolvable by that paradigm. One reason that science progresses so rapidly and with such assurance is because the logic of that paradigm allows the practitioners to work on problems that only their lack of ingenuity will keep them from solving.

Science uses instrumental rationality to solve puzzles. Instrumental rationality is a systematic process for reflecting upon the best action to take to reach an established end. The obvious question becomes ‘what mode of rationality is available for determining ends?’ Instrumental rationality appears to be of little use in determining such matters as “good” and “right”.

There is a striking difference between the logic of technical problems and that of dialectical problems. The principles, methods and standards for dealing with technical problems and problems of “real life” are as different as night and day. Real life problems cannot be solved only using deductive and inductive reasoning.

Dialectical reasoning methods require the ability to slip quickly between contradictory lines of reasoning. One needs skill to develop a synthesis of one point of view with another. Where technical matters are generally confined to only one well understood frame of reference real life problems become multi-dimensional totalities.

When we think dialectically we are guided by principles not by procedures. Real life problems span multiple categories and academic disciplines. We need point-counter-point argumentation; we need emancipatory reasoning to resolve dialectical problems. We need critical thinking skills and attitudes to resolve real life problems.