> i wrote:
>
> >> "i've been distracted by sin, sometimes without a reason"
> >
>
> Paul wondered:
> >Mental space junk, perhaps.
>
> no, just a certain bruno s. has been distracting me lately. he thinks i'm
> absent-minded in any event.
No,
I wrote:
>"I saw my girl getting sloppy." -- DEVO
Kelly wrote
>
> oh you were maybe thinking of it in terms of sloppy seconds. heh.
>
> kelley
>
> "i've been distracted by sin, sometimes without a reason"
And I mused:
> Mental space junk, perhaps.
Conetext is everything!
--
> paul also asked:
>
> >Is that enough?
>
> ok, ok. stop already!
>
> >I dunno, Kelly, I just thought I'd try responding to you as a text for a
> >while, just to see how it goes. Not good, I take it?
>
> well i dunno Paul. what do you mean by responding to me as a text? as if
> you knew nothing about earlier exchanges? now that wouldn't be responding
> to me as a text i don't believe. so.
No, it wouldn't. I was just teasing. But... that's how an awful lot that flies under that flag actually operates. And it's how you just operated in the passage above.
> >Well, anyway, it seems pretty obvious to me that your "pragmatism" has
> >precious little to do with pragmatism as develioped by William James and
> >John Dewey. Mine has a lot to do with theirs -- and with their quarrels
> >against positivism.
>
> what are you talking about? of course, it does: paul, i studied under a
> direct intellectual heir to dewey fercryinoutloud! i think the problem
> is that you're talking philosophy of social science and i'm talking what
> actually goes on. two different things.
Well, Kelly, here I really *WAS* responding to you as a text. What you wrote is VERY far afield from how James would respond. Perhaps our difference is this: I'm responding from a philosophy-of-science perspective, and you're responding from a trench-warfare-in-the-social-sciences persepctive.
It's a sad fact that positivist philosophy is quite influential as an ideology, and leads to people claiming they are doing "positivist science". This is a form of mystification. What they are doing is science, period, to the extent that it works. A major use of the "positivist" label historically has been to discredit those who aren't doing what's labelled "positivist". This often involves a fetishization of "hard" results, as if being able to measure something was more important than how important it is. A pragmatist approach always asks "for what purpose?" kinds of questions.
Yes, hard data is nice. I'd just LOVE to have the kind of detailed LIS statistics we have today for the 19th Century to cram down the throats of all the Arianna Huffington "Effective Compassion" types. By the same logic, it would seem that a time-series like that going back to the 1300s would be utterly super. But then, of course, people didn't HAVE monetary incomes all the way back then. Pragmatism counsels us to keep the eye on the ball, not to get distracted by the bells and whistles.
> >I'm not being vague, I'm being mysterious.
>
> heh. and lazy. busy, ey?
Only women can be mysterious, ey?
> >Eons ago. He was best as a refutation to his ideological kin.
>
> exactly. weren't you the one who told me not too long ago, in a fatherly
> way (oh wait, you was a big brother! sorry!), that we should attend to
> what the positivists actually say amongst themselves?
Yes, mommy.
> >Language is NOT a system of representation.
>
> so explain this one....backed up by empirical evidence and a thorough
> exposition of your claims and a clear statement as to how you shall defend
> those claims.
Language is a system of communication. SOME of what is communicated is representational. Some is not. Language does not arise out of reflecting the world, it arises out of multiple purposes. We still know too little about primal origins, but I currently quite fancy the gossip hypothesis, that it first arose to augment the social cohesion/ordering functions of grooming behavior. Be that as it may, it has long since taken on a heterogeneity of purposive functions, and representation is but one of them. Furthermore, "representation" is a misleading way to speak of even these functions, since it is generally abstracted out of what is actually something quite different--purposive action in which representational bits can be found.
> >> 2 refers to 2 of something.
> >
> >No it doesn't. Not unless it explicitly does. That's the whole point
> >of abstraction.
>
> paul, when my son comes home with math homework, he often has to change
> word problems into an abstract re-representation of them. mathematical
> equations stand in for--are highly refined abstractions--of what could be
> said in words:
>
> miho buys two candy bars at the corner store each school day. candy bars
> cost 50 cents a piece. at the end of two weeks, how much will sally have
> spent?
>
> 2(10) x .50
This is a problem in applied math. It's very important re how we learn to use math in the world. But it doesn't respond to my point. 1 + 1 = 2, even if 1 cloud plus 1 cloud equals 1 (bigger) cloud or no cloud at all (the bigger cloud rains itself away).
> >Are you SURE you're Kelly?
>
> are you demanding some sort of coherent identity from me Paul?
And spoil all the fun?
> >And what do transfinite numbers refer to?
> >
> >More to the point (passing from mathematical objects to statements [the
> >closest thing to language you can find in math]): What does Goedel's
> >Theorem refer to?
>
> why does this matter?
Why does "2 refers to 2 of something" matter?
> anyway, meaningful mathematical statements exist that can't be proved or
> disproved--ever! it's a logic problem, not a problem with human knowledge.
Why does THIS matter?
> well paul, if you like that, then why don't you like pomo? because so much
> of pomo seems to me to rest on exploiting these so called logic problems.
Here's an anology: I LOVE math. But that doesn't mean I love econometrics. In fact, one of the reasons I so loathe it is the desecration angle. Ditto with PoMo.
> >There IS no such thing as "positivist research". That's the whole point
> >of the pragmatist critique -- that positivism is FALSE theory of how
> >science operates.
>
> anyone who conducts research which refers, ultimately, to the experimental
> method--very, very much a part of cog sci, btw--is using a positivist model
> of research.
BULLSHIT!
William James used the experimental method as much as he could in his work. This didn't make him a positivist. What he objected to -- what WAS a manifestation of positivism -- was the tendency to mistake this approach for the TOTALITY of science, and to value knowledge solely in terms of how well it conformed to a single ideal of how it was gotten.
> they can't do pure pos in practice (hence all that stuff
> about probabilities previously), but all the tests re the
> validity and reliability of their findings are based on the
> probability that they've discovered a quasi-causal rather
> than acccidental relationship. *this* is neo-positivism in
> practice paul and that approach dominates the social sciences
> --especially psychology.
There's nothing in all this AS SCIENTIFIC PRACTICE that supports a positivist account of science rather than a pragmatist one.
> >Research and statistics depend on common practice in the various
> >fields. Positivism doesn't play ANY role in them whatsoever. It simply
> >mis-represents the process.
>
> you'll have to explain this one a bit more.
Positivism is a philosophy that purports to explain and justify scientific knowledge, but which in fact is entirely mistaken. This is entirely distinct from what scientists actually do that works, though of course, it influences what they think about what they do, and thereby degrades their work -- for instance, by causing them to over-value what they feel they can prove, rather than what's important. This is something that scientists actually do, but it's not something they actually do that works. Science functions IN SPITE OF such delusions, not because of them.
"actual science is more faithfully described by the multiplicity of styles and approaches that constitute its practice than by its dominant rhetoric or ideology"
-- Evelyn Fox Keller, _Reflections on Gender and Science_, p 125.
> >Pragmatism is NOT simply a probabilistic rehash of positivism.
>
> i didn't say it was. i wasn't explicating a pragmatist approach to the
> practice of social research. i was, rather, laying out the model against
> which much actual social research is measured. i don't like it either, but
> this is why the fetish for statistical methods.
>
> >James grounded science in common sense. Which is not to say that common
> >sense is sacrosanct. One of the notorious things that science does is
> >confound common sense. Yet, what gives it power is that it does this by
> >beginning with common sense.
>
> ok. i was, again, speaking to both you and sam trying to show how neo-pos
> research operates, how it is actually conducts, what assumptions it makes,
> and the standards that are used to judge good/bad research, etc.
>
> so, all this abstract philosophical speculation about pragmatists approach
> to social research is great, but i think you also have to make a case for
> how to actually conduct such research.
There are lots of ways to do it, and they're determined by lots of factors. The ability to quantify should not be predominant. The tail shouldn't wag the dog.
The case for how to conduct research should be made primarily in terms of what you want to learn about. Pragmatism supports a bottom-up approach. Start with the problems, and determine the methods accordingly, not according to a master list of acceptable methods, and then try to fit your problems to them.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"