> if you want to bring up lakoff, by all means do, he sounds
> interesting, as does james. if they offer some other way of thinking
> the relation between form and content, or a not-so-cartesian way of
> presenting reason, then i'm all ears.
Okay, I promised yesterday, so here tis:
JAMES =====
James began as a nuerobiologist, heavily influenced by Darwin, who was brand spanking new at the time. He was in the first generation that felt no need to debate evolution, but felt eager to extend the evolutionary perspective into whatever field they entered. The difference between James and others of like mind -- such as, most notoriously, the social Darwinists -- was:
(1) His strong empiricist bent, reinforced by his keen powers of observation AND his lifelong embarrassment by his father's extravagent theorizing, which inclined him towards skepticism vis-a-vis ungrounded flights of fancy.
(2) His genuine open-mindedness, which took that particular credo of liberalism quite seriously, though it seemed less like a principle with him and more like a basic instinct he was born with.
(3) His sheer genius, which forbade him simply taking a cookie-cutter approach in applying evolutionary thinking.
James went on to become first a psychologist, then a philosopher, maintaining a tremendous degree of continuity in his work. Rather than reducing philosophy to nuerobiology, however, he was going the other way -- seeking answers in psychology to problems that haunted him as an evolutionary nuerobiologist, then seeking answers in philosophy to problems that haunted him as a psychologist.
He continued to draw on his earlier work, but in an inventive manner. In fact, his *Principles of Psychology* contains discussions of Locke and Kant, not simply in speculative terms, but in relation to actual empirical observations about the nature of human cognition. (By the time James was finishing the book, he had lost interest in psychology per se, and was consumed with his new passion for philosophy precisely because of this intersection, among others.)
In James's view, Kant was right to argue against the Lockean blank slate, but nonetheless James maintained that ALL knowledge comes from experience. Our very nervous system, which he began studying as a nuerobiologist, was, in his view, a product of evolution, which is to say, from the experience of countless organisms over vast stretches of time. Everything that might be taken to transcend empirical knowledge -- even our knowledge of mathematics and logic, the whole realm of "necessary truths" -- is actually derived from what he called "the back door of experience."
James's view exemplifies a view of embodied reason, which is also conditioned by the centrality of action. We know things for a reason, as part of goal-directed activity. Even our "disinterested" studies of science or philosophy fall into this pattern, however far abstracted from the basic biological needs that shaped our evolution.
>From this perspective, cognition appears as a tool (or tool set, if you
prefer) that works via interaction with the world. There is no
necessary reason to think that one way of thinking that works in pursuit
of one goal is also valid in pursuit of another. From a pluralisty of
possible purposes, a radical plurality may invade our epistemology. Of
course, it's perfectly permissible--perhaps even, in a sense, noble--to
pursue the goal of integration bringing about epistemological unity,
it's just that we shouldn't be too surprised if we ultimately fail.
Thus James does not deny the possibility of making objective scientific observations, but he does undercut the presumption that therefore everything else can be reduced to what science can tell us. In pursuit of other goals, other modes of thinking are appropriate to gaining success, and science can only assert its relevence in relation to those goals, not simply by proclaiming its superiority. This is what he then did in his *Varieties of Religious Experience* -- apply a scientific investigative method to religion in the one way that seemed eminently sensible, by looking at experience. (Naturally, this concedes nothing at all to religious claims of superior knowledge about the material world.)
Now, how does all this relate to form and content, and a non-cartestian way of presenting reason? Well:
(1) Form is very much a function of our evolved nervous system, derived via the backdoor of experience, while content is very much the result of experience in the normal sense. Of course this is a rough formulation, it's obvious that one can treat formal constructs as content for meta-level formal operations, for example, but in terms of where things get started, it makes good sense.
(2) Reason is not something transcendent, to be trusted above all. Rather, it's justified by the same means it evolved. It's an embodied capacity of biological entities -- ourselves. And it's to be justified by how well it works for us. The desire to go beyond this, to seek an outside, transcendent status, is part of what drives us, and this the desire, the motivation serve a rational purpose, though that does NOT make the object they seek into something with a rational foundation.
LAKOFF ======
Lakoff began as a Chomskian linguistic, but in the mid-70s he lost faith in the adequacy of formal systems to represent thought. His breakthrough book, co-authored with Philosopher Mark Johnson, was *Metaphors We Live By* (1980), a slim volume of short chapters with no footnotes that lays out the basic illustrated argument for regarding metaphor as a central aspect in the way we structure our linguistic understanding of the world.
To avoid going on endlessly, I'll skip forward to *Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About The Mind*. In it, Lakoff uses the work of Eleanor Rosch, who argues that the classical theory of categorization yields 2 obvious falsehoods:
(1) If categories are defined only by properties all members share, no member should be a better example of that category then any member, since all members of a category should equally share in that property that makes them a member. But this is obviously false. A robin is a much better example of a bird than a kiwi or penguin or a transitional fossil linking birds to their dinosaur ancestors.
(2) If categories are defined only by properties inherent in the members, they should be independent of the beings doing the categorizing. They shouldn't have anything to do with matters of human neurophysiology or specific human peceptual capacities. But then, for example, color can't be such a property, on account of color-blindness. Of course, one can go ahead and analyze light spectra as a way around this, but the categories existed long before we had such a capability.
In place of the classical approach, Lakoff develops an account of categorization based on empirical studies, primarily relying on languages. Categories are revealed to develop from prototypes--"best examples"--via various extensions. Reason plays a role, along with experience and imagination, both in selecting prototypes and in the process of extending them.
The process is lawful (like a game of chess), rather than rule-bound (like a decoder ring) -- there are certain ways it can go, and ways it cannot go (or at least very strongly tend to go and not go), but this leaves a tremendous range of freedom.
Clearly, Lakoff's view of categories doesn't invalidate the use of formal systems in particular contexts. It simply denies their usage as a general approach to understanding human cognition.
Thus, I think that Chomsky's approach in analyzing racist arguments about IQ is a useful deployment of formal analysis, but I think that Lakoff provides a much richer framework for understanding political discourse in general, which he develops in his book *Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't.* ("Liberals" in this schema specifically includes democratic leftists.)
Lakoff argues that both liberals and conservatives derive their politics from family values -- only from quite different versions, what he calls "Strict Father" vs. "Nurturant Parent." Lakoff argues that these models of family values, roles and dynamics serve as the source domains that are mapped onto the target domains of political issues in general.
The "Strict Father" model includes as a central aspect the existence of moral hierarchies. Racism and sexism are specific instances of that hierarchy, but either can be abandoned without undermining the logic of the whole, so long as there is SOME content to the hierarchy. (Lakoff does not insist on any particular degree of consistency in any particular instance. He is explaining general systemic regularities, not particulars.)
Lakoff makes sense of categories as social constructs that are contingent, but not arbitrary. This seems to me self-evident, once you've got the traditional notions rinsed out of your head. It obviously makes a good deal of sense to regard them as tools for making sense of the world.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"