>>> <digloria at mindspring.com> 03/25/99 02:17PM >>>
well chaz, i was going to send this tomorrow but....
so i won't post the rest of the week.
chaz wrote:
>Thanks for this concise summary of your thinking on these issues, Kelley.
>
>I think I agree with you on the unity of ontology and epistemology. I
would add to that unity , ethics, or what we do, practice.
>
>I am trying to figure out whether you consider the below a Marxist
position or different than a Marxist position. I'd say a lot of the unity
of epistemology, ontology and ethics is argued for in Marx's Theses on
Feuerbach: Practice is the test of the truth of theory; Philosophers have
interpreted the world in a number of ways , the thing is to change it.
actually i like horkheimer's metaphor: the truth of the pudding is in the eating. that is, it's not whether we can *make* the pudding with the application of some theory but in the eating and enjoyment of it --a kind of use, of course, but the metaphor is richer i think. so for ex, you can often actually make a pudding and it might look just fine, but it tastes awful. actually, this happens when i bake bread; don't make pudding altogether that much ;-). it usually tastes good, but there are just some days when it's much better than it is other days. (though i wouldn't want to suggest that it's all arbitrary; i mean that things like the kind of flour used, the yeast, the temp and humidity that day make a difference)
CB: I'm thinking the metaphor is older than Horkheimer, but no matter, I think the "making" part of the other way of saying it means to include the notion of satisfactory use or "taste". "Practice" includes the sensual feedback check to see if what you make is actually what you think it is, if it DOES what it is intended to do. Also, the taste of the pudding may be addressed by the concept of things-in-themselves into things-FOR-US, discussed below.
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>Another rarely mentioned and somewhat counter intuitive angle is that the
SOCIAL >is the objective. This is true in natural as well as social
science, because natural >scientists demand repeatability of results, i.e.
a social confirmation of objectivity. >This comports with the basic
principle of materialism that there is an objective reality >outside of our
individual thought. We confirm its objectivity by communication with
>others or socially.
well actually, no, this is used quite a bit. there are a few problems with it though: people also agree on ideology so agreement doesn't necessarily bring us closer to objectivity. also what kind of 'community context' supports this confirmation: within the institutions we have today, that sort of utopian dream has degenerated into dystopia--surely. LBO can be a place where the same antics take place.
CB: Sociality is a necessary but not sufficient test of objectivity. The problem that people can lie or a group can have the same distorting bias among its members is another aspect of this complex, if I understand you correctly. ((((((((((((((((((((((
an interesting discussion of this problem is in Sandra Harding's _Whose Science, Whose Knowledge" Harding points out that it's important to ensure that the community of scholars is diverse because this affects the production of knowledge. However, Harding is careful to point out that the historically oppressed have no access to the truth simply by virtue of their social location. yes, i know you object to this, and draw on a dialectical conception of knowledge and political practice. however, it's not clear that this is persuasive--at least not what i see happen in actual practice, to wit: we need look no further than this list.
CB: I'm thinking it needs to be a community of practical-critical activists, although most actual activists do need to do more scholarship. But these epistemological problems are usually formulated by scholars, who tend to need to integrate more practical activity with their scholarship. In your metaphor, the activists need to build up their library of pudding recipes; the scholars need to make and taste more actual puddings, rather than reading recipes so much and exclusively.
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another point re a 'community of scholars': to what extent does the fact
that i'm even reiterating the above claims point to the possibility that a community of scholars as a form of validating the objectivity of scientific claims an operable one? that is, i've explained my position on these issues at least three times in this space, to you specifically. what does it tell us that we don't remember, perhaps don't listen, and so forth?
so, i've decided to just save them from now on and post and repost. HAH!
ahhh well, chaz, just fallible human beings i guess....
CB: Yes, I have not understood everything you have said on this list. That's why I commented that I felt some glimpses of clarity on this latest post. I imagine other scientists have to do a lot of repeating themselves in seeking repeatability of their results. One thing I am still not clear on is whether you consider you are repeating or differing from the classical Marxist answers on these questions. It is not so much that I am trying say that I have a bigger hardon for Marx, as you once put it. I'm still trying to figure whether your theses are the same as Marx's , but using different language, or whether you consider your theses to be different than Marx's. I rilly am , in the end, trying to see if those of us who keep talking to each other on this list have epistemological/ontological agreement and can form an organization for changing the world, based on that agreeement.
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>There is some difference between the social and natural sciences, but in
some ways their similarity and overlap is more important than their
difference. For example, natural scientists should make more of a link than
they have historically between the social and political impacts of their
discoveries and abstract scholarship and experimentation. Science for
science sake is no better than art for art's sake. So, ironically ( I use
that term advisedly) the main thing we have out of the natural science
iconic genius Einstein is nuclear weapons :>(. He need a little more unity
of ontology, epistemology and ethics from the natural scientists.
>
>As Engels puts it, knowledge is a process by which we make
things-in-themselves into things-for-us.
yes, and nuclear weapons are certainly 'things-for-us' now aren't they? so the above has to be fleshed out more. that's why i like the pudding metaphor. ethical debate, as you say, comes into play. i want to agree with you charles, but i think it's a bit more difficult than you seem to suggest.
CB: I would say nuclear weapons are things-AGAINST-us, the opposite of things-for-us. Does that flesh it out ? In other words, Einstein was so focussed on things-in-themselves that he discovered something that was more readily used against-us than for-us. Maybe it would not have made any difference if he was more concerned about the social consequences of his research, but I am hypothesizing that it would have and would make a difference in general in natural science.
Please do not "agree" with me if you do not. This may be repetitious, but these lists have a aspect of allowing a longer struggle of social deliberation than other media. It has potential for more cogent communication in this community of knowledge seekers as compared with other such communities.
What I sense we have some agreement on (but correct me if I am wrong) is that the natural scientists have an obligation to test their puddings by eating them. They tend too much to value making "pudding" that they know how to induce , say, a nuclear chain reaction in (or something else having nothing to do with eating it) and feel they have accomplished something great by that. In other words, they most often have a goal of understanding things-IN-THEMSELVES, and even toute it as a virtue of "objectivity". But you and Harding and others are not only correct to say they have a theory and an angle, but even more they need more attention to the edibility of their puddings, edible for us, the vast majority , the working class. The role of the historically oppressed (which you mention above) is not only in objectivity, but in determining whether what is made is for-us, ALL of us, the People AS A WHOLE, that whole difficult problem.
So, in other words, in the whole Butler/Sokal etc. thing, physicists discovering pure things-in-themselves is not the safe haven from politics that they think it is.
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so, from the pragmatist tradtionm, engaged fallibilistic pluralism:
1. requires responsibility for taking our fallibility seriously. we must be committed to our reasoned argument, but willing to listen to others. and we must be willing to listen without denying the otherness of those others.
2. respecting and listening to others would require that we avoid relentlessly translating what they say into our own all too familiar vocabularies
3. it would demand that we don't condemn their voices as too obscure or trivial (butler thread ring a bell hear?)
4. embracing the fact that there is no firm foundational ground to stand on. there are no safe, rationalized procedures to fall back on in order to adjudicate disagreements.
5. i think you recognize that any appeal to a community of scholars is an ethical appeal, a normative ideal.
6. the 'we' of that community is an *achievement* and there is no need for dialogical engagement that requires or demands agreement. we might need to recognize that understanding doesn't preclude disagreement
7. the assumption, then, is that we all have something to contribute and, as such, our duty is to try to understand the other's position in the strongest possible way, rather than searching out their weaknesses, the gaps and fissures in their reasoned positions.
okay, waxing too idealistic today. back to snitgrrRl later maybe.
CB: Again , I appreciate your discussion here. I'm going to deliberate on it a little more. For whatever reason, these last several posts seem to have allowed me to understand your epistemology more clearly than in the past.
On engaged faillibilisitic pluralistic pragmatism. engaged may be empirical/active. pluralistic is both social and allows views from several different angles or more observations because of more people looking BUT ALSO it fullfills the necessity that for-us must be for-ALL of-us and we are a diversity. Fallibility seems to mean critical, falsifiable. Pragmatic is practical, both action and for-us.
Yea, I'll put this list and the last post together as a glimpse of Kelley's theoretical model.
Charles Brown