Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1998 03:03:09 +0200 (CEST)
From: janstr-AT-chan.nl (Jan Straathof)
Subject: Re: Meaning??


Jim,

thank you for interupting in this discussion and for the valid
points you made; it's only in open debate where free exchange
of  (contraticting) views is allowed and stimulated that knowlegde
can flourish and we can move forward.

But before turning to you post, i want to elaborate some more on
my conception of the social sciences and on the (critical realist)
philosophy of Roy Bhaskar, to which i am heavily commited.

Bhaskar views himself as an "underlaborer for the sciences," in
the sense that he strives to provide them with a philosophical
groundwork which recognizes that knowledge is socially
produced, but refuses to lapse into the notion that the world is
entirely socially or discursively constructed, maintaining instead
that for the most part the world (including the social world) is
independent of our thought.

Among Bhaskar's major points is the distinction between the
world as an object of thought, and our thought about it. Closely
following this is the idea of ontological stratification: critical
realism maintains that reality is *not* all on one level, that of
experience, consciousness, or discourse (language/meaning).

Instead, the world is highly stratified, and at its foundation are
numerous underlying structures and so called "generative
mechanisms" which possess various powers and susceptibilities.
(They range from physical ones such as atomic and chemical
structures, to biological ones like physiological and ecological
systems, to social structures such as the mode of production and
sex/gender relations.)

Powers and susceptibilities are causal properties, and in fact
Bhaskar argues that what defines something as "real" is not its
perceptibility (or knowledgeability), but its *causal efficacy*.
Such structures and mechanisms interact in various ways,
resulting in actual events; and some events become experiences.
So consciousness and its contents are the tip of the (ontological)
iceberg, the contingent products of a diversity of underlying
dynamics and conditions.

Bhaskar calls these ontological strata the Real, the Actual, and
the Empirical.  The upshot is that there really is a real world
outside our minds, we really do have access to it, but much of
the world cannot be perceived by the senses, and so knowledge
of it is often indirect and requires thought, skilled observation,
and *work*--which supports the position that knowledge is
socially produced, and incidentally also means that it's quite
possible for a theory to be wrong.

Knowledge, being the result of social practices, is necessarily
shaped by the history, society and social position from which it
emerges: Bhaskar calls this "epistemic relativism."  However, the
fact that theories are socially conditioned and transient does *not*
imply that there are no grounds for preferring one theory over
another.  Bhaskar rejects such "judgmental relativism" (viz. the
notion that all beliefs are equally valid): on the contrary, the
evidence drawn from the world remains, and we decide which
theory most adequately accounts for it, a position dubbed as
"judgmental rationalism".

To the distinction realisms generally make between things and
our thinking about them, critical realism adds the insistence:
"therefore we must be fallibilist".  No dogmatism follows from a
commitment to the *truth of things*.  Because we have recourse
to the truth of things, we can resolve differences between us
by appeal to them, rather than to adhere to violence.

Andrew Sayer (another critical realist) observed that a truely
ontological realist science must be critical of its object and
from this is concluded, since science is a social practice and
therefore a proper object of study, it must be critical of itself.
In other words, critical realism is not only fallibilist, but
necessarily self critical.

Anyone of us approaches any question, no matter what the
level of expertise or genius, from a very limited perspective.
We need the insights of others.  If we stop with epistemic
relativism, then there, in the face of our inevitable differences,
force decides.

At least the commitment that "how things are does not depend
on our views of them" opens the possibility of judgmental
rationalism: we can appeal to the truth of things.  We can
put litmus paper in liquid to resolve our dispute.

[sigh. ..]

You wrote: (snipped)

>First off, the suggestion that there are "findings in modern cognitive
>science" is excessively misleading. There are no "findings" in the sense
>that, eg, the natural sciences have findings. All such 'findings' are various
>consequences of the ASSUMPTION that 'mental states' are certain
>kinds of computational routines that must be completely syntactically
>definable, as the semantics for the mental cannot be assumed (on pain
>of circularity), at least in some lights. However, without a wild
>innateness hypothesis (eg, Fodor's Language of Thought), this
>'methodologically solipsistic' proposal cannot explain how it can be that
>'mental states' have semantic contents which vary with respect to
>natural, social, and linguistic environments (as Burge's, Putnam's,
>Kripke's, Kaplan's, and Perry's arguments convincingly demonstrate
>(Fodor himself has recently suggested that this might be the case)).
>Indeed, given what we might call a Heideggerian treatment of 'the
>mental', variation of 'the mental' given variation in the natural, social, and
>linguistic, is precisely what one would expect! Also, Dennett's
>instrumentalism leaves little room for speaking about consciousness or
>mental states as genuine, sui generis phenomena (Dennettian and
>Fodorian positions are not bed-fellows -- I'm ignorant of Marcel's
>views).

I view the cognitive sciences as respectable sciences, but it
wasn't my intention to give the impression that it's all peace
between the various camps. On the contrary, i certainly agree
that the 'computational' paradigma is only one of the theories
at debate.

But i believe that few cognitive scientist would doubt the
'existence of an external reality independent of (human)
cognition'. [Wasn't it Mario Bunge who once said that the
only creatures that could possibly doubt the existence of an
external reality would be either long dead (having died from
the ravages of the reality they denied) or have become
philosophers.] :-)

When i wrote "findings in modern cognitive science", i literally
meant "findings" and not "true theories" and my point is that
some of these empirical findings are quite disturbing; and thus
undermining common notions like:
   - the unity of consciousness;
   - the internal relation between language and consciousness;
   - the immediacy of perception and conscious meaning;
   - the transparancy of mental behaviour via introspection.

I mentioned Fodor because i like his idea of the modularity of
mind (as a fragmentated totality) ,challenging the "unity of
consciousness" thesis; and i mentioned Dennett because of
his reconceptualisation of Phi-phenomenon challenging the
"immediacy" thesis.

But i agree with you that Fodor's "innateness hypothesis" is a
weakness and could better be replaced by the concept of
"consciousness as an emergent structure" as put forward by
Bunge (viz. the idea that mental processes incl. consciousness
are emergent properties of brain processes and -structures.)

Regarding Dennett, i'm afraid he is currently slipping towards
some kind of idealism. In a review on his book _Other Minds_
i read that he explicitly concedes that "without language there
could be no consciousness" (another example of the linguistic
fallacy i presume ;-)

(Btw. I recently got hold on a book by Andy Clark: _Being There,
putting brain, body, and world together again_. Haven't read
it yet, but it looks quite promissing, especially because it seems
to propose a new synthesis the field of cognitive sciences and
robotica, in an attempt to integrate various competing theories
and inter alia mixing enough Heidegger & Merleau-Ponty in the
brew to set their adherents at ease.

>Our 'inner' is actually as
>outer as the so-called 'outer world' is outer -- thus, DA-sein, as
>Heidegger would insist!

hmm. i don't know if H. would insist such ?

>On the other hand, since it was claimed that
>>i see language
>>-use/giving meaning as a conscious act
>is it thought possible to specify a 'conscious act' independently of the
>semantic content which we typically invoke to specify it? Ie, without
>circularity, if we can speak of 'conscious acts' independently of semantic
>meaning, then isn't there a committment  here to Fodorian Innateness?

As i said in an earlier post: "Intentions are personal, meanings are
social". Meanings are a social products which exist independently
but are emergent of the intentions of persons.

>Finally, although I have no definitive 'theory' of metaphor, given the
>failure of the necessary-sufficient conditions model of analysis, it seems
>that at least in most 'referring expressions', there is some element of
>metaphor. After all, what is the "purely literal" meaning of "chair,"
>"mountain," "dream"; and what about something as mathematically
>precise as "computer" (including the Turing variety)? Eg, do the
>definitions of Turing machines as certain kinds of mappings from
>2-space to 3-space have 'literal' meanings? Imo, if that aint poetry,
>Dylan Thomas isn't. Maybe poetic but not metaphorical?

I agree wholeheartedly with this.

>Bhakar is misunderstanding Godel if he is suggesting that Godel's results
>in Non-provability and First-order arithmetic Incompletability 'show'
>that we can never prove our presuppositions. His results 'show' no such
>thing. Consider "Assume p; therefore p" is a logically valid argument.

I don't know if Bhaskar is mishandling Godel here, i'll look into
it and come back later. But the formula "assume p;  therefore p"
won't hold anymore after Brouwer; Brouwer would suggest:
"assume p -> try to construct p -> succesfull construction of p ->
therefore p".

>>>Wittgenstein's wasn't an explicit ontology.
>Which W? The earlier? If so, didn't the Tractatus provide us with as an
>explicit ontology as we're gonna get, except for a nonsense list like the
>kind GE Moore offered. W did explicitly postulate such things as facts,
>not things, states of affairs, objects, truth-values?

This wasn't my argument, it was Eric's (but imo Wittgenstein
seems commited to some kind of positivistic ontology).

>Imo, sledge hammers are being used where greater delicacy is
>necessary, especially when talking about "meaning", WHATEVER
>THAT MEANS.

i sometimes feel the need to hammer some on the gates of
the heideggerian castle, but i don't want to slegde heads :-)

>Kindest regards,
>jim

yours,
jan




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