Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida 34-36
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 01:27
?Rorty took pragmatism as the ultimate form of postmodernism, an end to philosophy's search for Truth. A number of philosophers from different background all converged to pragmatism. They found in pragmatism and its attendant naturalism a means of justifying a chastened pragmatic realism, a realism which holds that our knowledge is perspectival and dependent on human activity, yet nevertheless grasps realities that obtain independent of the mind, achieving these all without foundationalism:
Hilary Putnam: analytic philosophy of language and mind
Jurgen Habermas: European social philosophy
Joseph Margolis: analytic aesthetics and philosophy of culture
Donald Campbell: biology and psychology
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 02:40
?Jurgen Habermas b. 1929
He thought that Frankfurt thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer had adopted a sufficiently cramped notion of reason or rationality (they view reason as both a value neutral inferential power and instrumental) that led them into a blind alley.
Habermas turned to supplement Weber's account of instrumental rationality.
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 05:11
?George Herber Mead 1863-1931
Rationality was understood as based in communication, which in turn based in the ability to take the perspective of the other people. Consequently rational has ethical implications.
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 05:40
Based on Mead's point, Habermas introduced communicative rationality, the rationality oriented to achieving agreement among speakers (embody and presuppose moral norms, sincerity, belief in the Truth of what we are saying, belief in the validity of the reasons we offer and in the moral appropriateness of what we say), as opposed to instrumental or strategic communication (to get something without caring about what people say).
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 07:02
?We take moral stances not just about the subject we are discussing but the discussing?itself is moralized. Like Dewey and Mill, this statement is also true of democracy and science.
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 07:49
?instrumental system of money and power: in which actions are coordinated by action outcomes.
communicative lifeworld: in which our actions and statements are coordinated by communicative rationality.
The political task, as Habermas claimed, is to expand control of the system by lifeworld. democracy is lifeworld controlling the system.
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 08:57
?Hilary Putnam b. 1926
Functionalism (in philosophy of mind): mental processes are like functioning programs in a computer
Externalism (in philosophy of language): the view that the meanings of our terms are not ideas in our head but are dependent on things external to the mind of the speaker
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 09:49
?In his theory of knowledge, Putnam thought there can be no God's Eye View and we cannot aspire to it.
God's Eye View: the one true view of reality independent of our thoughts, hopes, cultures, fears, and projections.
Putnam also claimed there is no "view form nowhere".
"view form nowhere": a perspective devoid of background assumptions, perspectives, biases, and presuppositions.
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 10:44
?There is no ontology in the world that is uniquely right. Dependence on a conceptual scheme is compatible with what he called an "internal" or "pragmatic" realism (common sense/natural realism). Even within a conceptual scheme, reality still imposes constraints on us. There is realist Truth conceptual scheme. Reality is not compatible with just one. It does not destroy the possibility of cognitive progress or render our knowledge unuseful. There are real cognitive rational reasons for preferring one conceptual scheme over another.
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 13:55
?Joseph Margolis b. 1924
Our cognitive media (theories, ideas) are adverbial ?(part of a dependent on an action) modes of constructive handling of real objects.
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 16:45
?Cognition and world are symbiotic, tied together; interwoven. We have a "worlded language" and "languaged world", and we cannot get beyond that.
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 17:58
?bivalence: every well-formed proposition must be either true or false
Margolis held the view that in some subject matter areas, cognitive values (other than science and mathematics) may not be bivalent, but apt, reasonable, valid or weakened Truth-like values.
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 19:01
?Our judgements are not detachable from evidence and relative to evidence. The norms that I use to judge if a statement is true or false don't fit the old bivalent model.
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 19:19
?Incongruent valid claims in different subject matters
Truth is relative to fields of evidence, not relative to my culture, what's in my head or anything about me, resulting in "robust relativism", in contrast to any relativism that defines Truth as identical to true in-some-language or true-for-this-culture.
Margolis is keenly aware natural scientific knowledge is different from our knowledge of the human domain.
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 23:08
?"en bloc" correspondence to the world
Human's knowledge is true because it is justified pragmatically.
"We an only remain realists, but the only defense possible pretty well requires that we turn to pragmatist or biological grounds," hence "that human inquiry is continuous with, and develops out of, the biological and precognitive interaction between organism and environment."
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 24:37
?evolutionary epistemology (naturalistic)
Instead of using philosophical, non-scientific justification of the knowledge that is used in science, we now use science to provide a description of how human beings come to know things.
34_實用主義實在論 P10 - 25:45
?Karl Popper (1902-1994)
Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989)
Donald T. Campbell (1916-1996)
all contributed to naturalistic/evolutionary epistemology
"Kant's Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology" (1941) by Lorenz
Kant's synthetic a priori is true in the light of Darwinian biology. The human perceptual cognitive apparatus does construct its environment but it has evolved to match the reality to which humans have to adapt to the course of evolution.
35_涌現(xiàn)的回歸 P11 - 01:56
?The First Three Minutes (1977) Steven Weinberg
"the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."
35_涌現(xiàn)的回歸 P11 - 02:52
?The form and method of metaphysics can be clarified. Metaphysics doesn't have to claim certainty, finality or necessity. It can just claim to be the best hypothesis about what everything is and how it all fits together, which is indeed the view of Whitehead and Peirce (metaphysics is a hypothetical, fallible, party empirical contingent discipline).
35_涌現(xiàn)的回歸 P11 - 03:37
?What is inside, or what is based on what? Mind or Nature?
Most philosophers ended up putting one or the other, mind or nature, first, so they don't actually escape the dichotomy.
A different approach would be to accept, as modern scientist tells us, that Nature comes before and is the basis for mind or experience; yet, make Nature pluralistic, not identical to the physical or the material. Doing this would mean dropping the dominant bipolar disorder of modern metaphysics.
35_涌現(xiàn)的回歸 P11 - 06:58
?Most philosophers who consider themselves naturalists are actually physicalists. Both ontological and explanatory reduction were common in the mid-20th century. This physical reductivist attitude was pervasive.
35_涌現(xiàn)的回歸 P11 - 08:29
?Since the 70s, philosophy of biology became more and more prominent. Many practitioners denied that biology could be reduced to physics or chemistry.
35_涌現(xiàn)的回歸 P11 - 09:38
?complexity
Ilya Prigogine 1917-2003
In chemistry, solid state physics, and biology, there is far more to be learned about unexpected phenomena that count deduced from the laws of physics.
chaos
nonlinear systems
self-organizing systems
critical-point phenomena
complexities in turning genes on and off
35_涌現(xiàn)的回歸 P11 - 10:17
?Philip Anderson
"More is Different" (1972)
Processes above atomic or subatomic level often don't follow the same rules as their subatomic components.
As a result, today many philosophers reject explanatory or theoretical reductionism. But they still accept ontological reductionism, meaning that everything being is in fact nothing but the smallest components of matter that compose it, quarks and leptons.
?35_涌現(xiàn)的回歸 P11 - 12:45
?William C. Wimsatt b. 1941
Three type of explanations in science
reductive: explains a system's properties or behavior through the properties of its components and the interaction rules that govern them
phenomenological: explains a system's behavior or properties by reference to another system at approximately the same scale (which has nothing to do with Husserl's Phenomenology)
functional: finds the explanation of the system's properties or performances in a more encompassing system, which selects the system in question or some state of it. (a higher level of scale)
Wimsatt shows that reductive explanation is complex. It is dependent on decompositions of the system that it is reducing. It has to determine what the parts of a system are. (the system can be decomposed into different categories.)This is especially true when it comes to biology.
35_涌現(xiàn)的回歸 P11 - 17:30
?emergence (for Wimsatt) non-aggregativity
An emergent property is the property of the systems that can't be explained reductively as an aggregation of component parts and their interaction rules.
35_涌現(xiàn)的回歸 P11 - 18:39
?Philip Clayton and Paul Davies
The Re-Emergence of Emergence (2006)
"tropical rainforest ontology": there are innumerable metaphysical kinds of entities and properties; not all entities and properties are physical. Nor are they either physical or mental. There are levels of scale in the universe (metaphysical novelty). Cosmic, chemical and biological evolution have been such as to produce entities at particular scales or sizes, constituting layers of causal interaction or peaks of regularity and entification. What these levels are is a matter of disagreement, but we can at least distinguish the physical, the chemical, the biological, the mental and even the cultural.
35_涌現(xiàn)的回歸 P11 - 24:20
The physical, chemical, biological, mental, and cultural orders do exhibit a hierarchy of interesting complexity.
Nature has forced us to construct different sciences for these orders.
The levels of complexity in nature in fact match what science tells us is the actual development of the universe.
36_哲學(xué)已死？ P12 - 01:15
?method of inquiry: the method of saying what we think is true and giving reasons and evidence for and against John Herman Randall, Jr. 1899-1980
36_哲學(xué)已死？ P12 - 04:10
We cannot find human judgements or perceptions that give us incorrigible information about what exists independent of our judgement or perception. Our judgements are always fallible.
?36_哲學(xué)已死？ P12 - 05:10
?Our contact with the objects of knowledge is always mediated by our means of knowing, which is biological, historical, and cultural.
36_哲學(xué)已死？ P12 - 06:30
?Furthermore, we cannot provide a logical inventory of assumptions and perspectives that can fix the most fundamental features of the way we know.
We cannot know that any theory of the world we have, even if it is true, is the one Truth theory.
We cannot give a noncircular argument to prove that we hav knowledge at all.
36_哲學(xué)已死？ P12 - 09:25
?It means the foundationalist approach to philosophy that was enshrined by Descartes; but also used in a different form, an empiricist form by Locke; used in another kind of rationalist form by Descartes; and informed much of the development of modern philosophy, even among philosophers that objected to Descartes.
36_哲學(xué)已死？ P12 - 10:49
?The foundationalism since Descartes is dead, but realism is not dead.
Realism: our knowledge is true of its objects as they are, independent of our judgment.
Relativism holds the idea that our true knowledge is made true not by objects independent of us, but by our experience, ideas, perspectives, theories, and cultures.
Postmodernists rejected realism.
36_哲學(xué)已死？ P12 - 13:21
What is known only needs partly determinate, not wholly determinate from the perspective of realism. The pragmatic and aesthetic recognition that cognition is active does not amount to constructivism. Our knowing doesn't struct the world, it selects, modifies, strains, construes, alway with constraints imposed by the environment it tries to know, like the hoof.
36_哲學(xué)已死？ P12 - 16:26
Our knowledge and cognition has parameters dictated by the perceptual, affective, cognitive and motor capacities liberally distributed among modern Homo sapiens, or in another word, biological stuff that we've gotten from evolution adding language, culture, history together.
36_哲學(xué)已死？ P12 - 18:12
?Our cognitive funding (biology, language, culture, history)is adverbial: they are the meaning of doing something; they are the manners of accessing the world, which is how a human as opposed to non-humans grasps the world. They are not intermediary between us and the world.
There might be other ways to understand the world, and it would only undermine the notion of realism if those other ways and ours are incommensurable.
36_哲學(xué)已死？ P12 - 21:05
True representations in different representative media must have a systematic, lawful and linear relation. The more advanced notion can understand the earlier understanding, and see how it is better. We can have a rational notion of what cognitive progress means.
36_哲學(xué)已死？ P12 - 24:38
?Realism is compatible with:
adverbial media of knowing and cognitive funding (that is, the judgment, concepts, languages and cultures we bring to experience)
denial of presence, privilege, immediacy, certainty
objective indeterminateness
36_哲學(xué)已死？ P12 - 25:53
?We are on a spiral, progressing by overlapping cycles. We recycled and collected previous notions and reused them to understand more, not strictly returning to the same position.
?36_哲學(xué)已死？ P12 - 26:39
?Noam Chomsky b. 1928
The famous linguistic recycled the notion of innate ideas into his innate linguistic competence.
Antonio Damasio b.1944
This neuroscientist has recently revived Spinoza's view of the relation of mind to body parallel processes.
Popper: there is progress in falsification.
36_哲學(xué)已死？ P12 - 28:34
The job of integrating the knowledge of those fields that have split from philosophy(natural science, social science) and of other fields of everyday life and seeing them in a common context is greater than ever. The attempt to know the world and ourselves, to know what is true, good, and beautiful ?remains a philosophical job.
