🚀 go-pugleaf

Eric Raymond (eric@snark) writes:
| in order to believe that science is anything but futile you must at some
| level be an empiricist and/or operationalist. Yes, there are scientists
| who profess to have other philosophies in connection with their religious
| beliefs or whatever -- but *in the lab* they must function as operationalists
| or give up.

Who knows how the terms "empiricist" and "operationalist" are being used
above. But under normal readings of these terms, it seems to me that
empiricism is just as religious as realism, yet far less satisfying and
far less plausible. It insists upon a principled metaphysical and semantic
distinction between the nontheoretical (which we can directly observe)
and the theoretical (the unobservable, which we can only infer), in which
the former of these is taken as somehow primary, and the latter as defined.
What is this but an unsavory religion that places humans and their 
evolutionarily produced idiosyncracies at the center of what there is?

Raymond quotes Carnes (I think):
| >                                    Your view of knowledge is, in
| > broad terms, an empiricist one, which is orthodoxy in the hard
| > sciences because it explains them well.  But the philosophical
| > question you and others are begging is whether an empiricist
| > epistemology is adequate for the kind of understanding we can have of
| > the specifically human world studied by the social sciences.

Hey, dont give the empiricist too much! What ever happened to the unity
of the sciences? I dont see that empiricism for the "hard sciences" is
any better off than it is for the "social sciences".

| Knowledge is instrumental. Humans gather knowledge in order to *predict*
| things and *do* things. Humans form beliefs (including philosophical
| beliefs) in order to organize knowledge so they can *do* things and
| *predict* things.

What knowledge *is* and what people gather knowledge in order to *do* are
two different things. People gather knowledge for many different purposes.
The question dividing various kinds of anti-realism and realism is: can
a scientifically sensible story be told in which the instrumental utility of
knowledge is accounted for without appealing to notions of correspondence
truth? Common sense folk psychology suggests the answer is no: generally,
the reason that knowledge is "useful" in predicting and doing "things" is
that it is true. Attempts to escape this result by appealing to its
"usefulness" in satisfying desires run aground on the embarrassing problem
that satisfaction conditions for desires are the same kind of thing as
truth conditions for beliefs. A desire, after all, is for a certain
proposition to be rendered true.

| Empiricism, verificationism, and operationalism *work*.
| Repeatably. Consistently. Powerfully. After 300 years of this, the arrogance
| displayed by the likes of Charles Taylor and implicitly defended by Mr.
| Carnes would be laughable if such people didn't retain a disproportionate
| amount of influence on the culture.

As science, empiricism/verificationism/operationalism seems to fail for
the reasons outlined above. As methodology, it fails because no one could
seriously do any work if she thought the theoretical terms in her theory
were defined operationally or in terms of the ways of verifying sentences
containing them. The reason is simple: as soon as a theoretical term
was introduced ("electron here!" means "the dial moved in such and such
a way"), there would be no motivation for discovering other ways to detect
instances of the items referred to by that term. But scientists are
forced to do this all the time: it is a fundemental aspect of their 
nonempiricist methodology. 

I dont defend Charles Taylor; I have to admit that he seems hopelessly mired 
in the hermeneutic circle. But what makes you think he is any more arrogant
than, for example, yourself?

| >                                                 What the ontology of
| >   mainstream social science lacks is the notion of meaning as not
| >   simply for an individual subject; of a subject who can be a `we' as
| >   well as an `I'.
| This is nonsense. There is nothing in general empiricism or the empiricist
| program for the social sciences that excludes discussion of intersubjectivity.

Far from being nonsense, this seems to be quite plausible to me. The simplest
and most consistent version of empiricism leads logically to solipsism. When
theoretical entities are fictions, or defined in terms of sense data, as 
different versions of empiricism would have it, there is little ground on which
to build an intersubjective meeting place.

| Linguists, for example, deal with intersubjectivity all the time. What is the
| 'meaning' of a word but an intersubjective reality? 

Sure, linguists in the Chomskian tradition deal with intersubjectivity, but 
where did you get the idea that they are empiricists? Chomsky considers himself
to be a Cartesian rationalist. On the other hand, philosophers of language
who are empiricist end up being behaviorists and repudiating the notion of 
meaning as incoherent because they have nothing real to ground it in. 
This is the main thrust, for example, of Quine's philosophy of language
based upon "stimulus meaning".

| >                   The exclusion of this possibility, of the communal,
| >   comes once again from the baleful influence of the epistemological
| >   tradition for which all knowledge has to be reconstructed from the
| >   impressions imprinted on the individual subject.
| 
| Mr. Taylor is not only historically wrong but actually incoherent here.
| The ontological status of individual impressions versus intersubjective
| reality has nothing to do with the empiricist versus anti-empiricist
| distinction. 

Careful there! I am not a scholar of the history of philosophy, but to me
this seems roughly correct (certainly it is not incoherent, thats probably just
arrogance on your part). The original British empiricists were, I think,
either forced to a skepticism that their heart was not into (Hume), or
to an idealism where intersubjectivity was only maintained by the
invocation of a supreme Diety (Berkely).   Neither of these views seem
to "work" very well to me.

		Calvin Bruce Ostrum (cbo@ai.toronto.edu)
		Department of Computer Science
		University of Toronto

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"It may be true that the unexamined life is not worth living, but the 
overexamined life is nothing to write home about, either".
	Daniel Dennett.
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