Just *asking*,
Ian
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What was I thinking of? I've kind of forgotten, now. I think it had to do with the problem of Intention. It's a philosophical and cognitive science problem. Searle is working on it. So, I was thinking of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, then Dreyfus. I was looking for something, hopefully a discussion between Searle and Dreyfus, so I could get a handle on the subject and its relation to a theory of mind.
Here is an extended interview that I think outlines some of Searl's objections to `postmodernism'
http://reason.com/archives/2000/02/01/reality-principles-an-intervie
``Reason: How did you characterize these arguments, and what do you think is wrong with them?
Searle: There are a number of arguments. The one that most affects people today is what I call "perspectivalism." That's the idea that we never have unmediated access to reality, that it's always mediated by our perspectives. We have a certain perspective on the world, we have a certain position in society that we occupy, we have a certain set of interests that we articulate, and it's only in relation to these perspectives that we can have knowledge of reality. So the argument goes, because all knowledge is perspectival there is no such thing as objective knowledge--you can't really know things about the real world or about things as they are in themselves.
Now that's just a bad argument. I grant you the tautology: All knowledge is our knowledge. All knowledge is possessed by human beings who operate in a certain context and from a certain perspective. Those seem to me to be trivial truths. But the conclusion that therefore you can never have objectively valid knowledge of how things really are just doesn't follow. It's a bad argument. And that's typical of a whole lot of these arguments...''
Yes it's a bad argument if you make it in a science lab, since that's what people are doing, trying their best to tease out something that's true in their field of study.
On the other hand, if a perspectivist argument is made within cultural studies, then things get a whole lot more interesting and possibly useful.
Searle is going to run smack into this problem between a rational approach and much more nuanced one when he tangles with theories of language and theories of mind. I don't know how to illustrate this with a vivid example. I asked myself, where are the causal chains within the structure of languages? Are there any such relationships?
In my view language is not a rational system at all. Of course it can be formalized into a rational tool. But it can also be made a art in say poetry. In this realm of metaphorical flows there are no causal chains. There are free associations, there are striking correspondences between sounds and concepts. So in effect you have to become something like a perspectivist thinker in order to think about language. So for the cognitive sciences, I don't know what to say. The little I've read, they seem all over the philosophical map and I think the reason is because they are too focused on language.
They need to study some form of thought that isn't like language. This is why discovering that Husserl started his studies with mathematics was such a nice note. For one thing mathematics is international and seems to be a pretty universal cultural production with a lot of cross-cultural equivalences.
My opinion is to not try to find the similarities through a study of different number systems and counting methods, but change over to space concepts. You can find these in the construction designs. People build what works, so their buildings are essentially the way they understand how the world of space and physical forces work. This accounts for why Mayan architecture of pyramids might resemble Egyptian pyramids without any cultural contact. Another example is the geometry solution of the roof where the dome is the answer for the igloo and the bigger architecture of later western antiquity. The importance of the resemblance isn't the style similarity, but the building principles used of stacking bricks, interlocking the courses, off-setting joints and problems building roofs. What unites the Inuit and the ancient western builders in dome design is the physics of the physical world.
There are also as cross temporal features. We can figure out what other periods were doing in their mathematics. My own view as to why this is so, has to do with a theory of space and motion. There is a logic of space, as it is experienced and I think that's because most of the lower and older parts of the brain are devoted to dealing with physical problems and navigation of the body in space.
Anyway, that's were I would start with both a philosophy of mind and a scientific study in the cognitive and neurosciences. Moving over to study the mind and mathematics through the knowledge base provided in the lower centers also completely skips the problem of objective reality. If there is some noumena beyond physics, it doesn't matter, because you are still killed in a car crash. Most of our physical evolution has been devoted to Not getting killed by the forces of nature.
Navigation is the direct and immediate contact with the physical world. The answer to the objection, is that really contact with the in-itself, is answered immediately by noticing that evolution has built us to survive through the obvious dangers of making mistakes about how the physics of the world works.
You get into all this objective v. subjective business when you try to discover the structures of language and their relationship with the world, and consciousness.
I agree with Searle at this level. Bishop Berkeley break a leg. My criticism of Searle is he has a tendency to deal with the more reified products of the mind, like language, rather than the more simple to understand and material productions like space and physical forces.