Frank Kogan

Ha! In my head I'd been composing a post in response to meserach's claiming, "any position toward the philosophy of science which fails to give a good accounting of how science achieves 'better' practical results than other ways of thinking about the universe is ultimately bankrupt," where I say that the hard sciences so far have a very limited scope that leaves out vast hunks of the the universe. Turns out, according to Dave, that sitcom The Big Bang Theory beat me to the punch (click link to find out how).

So anyway, my reply to meserach is that t.A.T.u. and the Veronicas are in the universe, and as of yet physics, chemistry, biology, paleontology etc. have had nothing interesting to say about them or anything like them.* So it would seem that the hard sciences' ways of thinking about that part of the universe (the t.A.T.u.-Veronica's part) have no practical results whatsoever, in fact don't exist. It could be legitimate for meserach to claim that, e.g., physics does a better job of talking about electrons than music critics do of talking about t.A.T.u. and the Veronicas, but I don't know what to do with that information: I don't know if there would be any benefit if we could talk about t.A.T.u. and the Veronicas with the precision etc. that physicists talk about electrons, and even if there would be a benefit, I have no clue how to achieve that precision, or even what it would be.

This isn't a criticism of the sciences at all, but it accentuates the question I've been bringing up in my last couple of posts: just what is philosophy of science (or philosophy overall) for? What's it supposed to achieve?

*Well, I'm sure that the physical acoustics people could have something to say, but it probably couldn't be extended to most of the questions or ideas I'd have about t.A.T.u. or the Veronicas. And biological research into the brain may well have something to say about the appeal of music, at some point, but again I don't see where that would have an impact on anything I'd have to say about them, though of course I won't know until it happens.

I asked this of B. Michael over on Tumblr, so I thought I ought to ask it of you all as well:

What do philosophers talk about these days, post-Wittgenstein and post-Kuhn? I've not kept up. (Not that I ever kept up.) Kuhn's notion of "paradigms" gets rid of the need for super-deep universal foundations for the scientific enterprise, and Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" does the same for pretty much everything. So what's left for philosophy? Not that I think philosophy departments should disband, but if I were in one I'd transform it into the Department Of Roving Troubleshooters Who Have More Fun Than Sociologists Seem To Have, or something.

EDIT: Er, perhaps I should elaborate slightly, though that could end up in a tangle, since my elaborations will need elaborations. But, e.g., if you're saying as I do that people's musical tastes tend to cluster by their social class, you then (if you're me) have to explore what you mean by social class (and keep exploring). Now, one could ask a philosopher instead, "Dear philosopher, What do I mean, or what should I mean, by 'social class'?" But it seems to me that what the philosopher says is of no more import than what anyone else says, that if s/he has something to say it isn't because s/he's a philosopher but because s/he's just another person trying to figure out in certain instances what we mean or should mean by "social class" in those and related instances. And as with "social class," so with "meaning" and "language" and so forth.

Descartes inferred from his cogito argument that mind and body were separate in substance, which meant that the first could exist apart from the second. Bound up with this was the view that I am immediately aware of myself as a mind, but need to infer the existence of material things, which is in principle open to doubt. A great many philosophers have subscribed to this opinion, but Kant thought he could show it to be definitively false. In order to say that my inner experiences come one before another I need to observe them against a permanent background, and this can only be a background of external objects, for there is nothing permanent in the flow of inner experience. As Kant put it in the second edition [of Critique Of Pure Reason], in which he transposed the argument to the discussion of existence in connection with the postulates of empirical thought, "The mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me."
--W.H. Walsh, Kant, Immanuel, The Encyclopedia Of Philosophy (Collier-Macmillan)

I bolded what I think is the crucial passage. I'm not sure I understand either half of its argument, or why I should find the argument persuasive, though I don't have a clear objection to it either. Why does time need a background of permanence? And why can't inner experience contain anything permanent? And also, what's "external" and what's "internal"? While Descartes would say that initially (until we've gone through his own arguments) we can't know that the objects we observe are actually outside the mind (rather than being inventions or hallucinations or dreams etc.), Kant seems to be arguing that because the objects are permanent, they must be outside the mind; but that seems circular. Why can't you just say that some of what's "in" the mind can be "permanent"? And what does "permanent" mean here?

( Richard Rorty's The Invention Of The Mind )

In my pragmatism writeup last month I deliberately buried the following paragraph for reasons that the paragraph itself makes plain.

I haven't yet mentioned philosophy, since I think that philosophy is a dead end, and pragmatism is better off liberated from philosophy. Of course the word "pragmatism" is associated with certain philosophers (Peirce, James, Dewey, Rorty, maybe Wittgenstein, some aspects of Quine). In any event, my pragmatism when applied to philosophy isn't a way of doing philosophy but just a critique of philosophy, one that attacks philosophy's sense of its own relevance. One form of attack is the sentence, paraphrased from my book, "As a philosopher I can say 'Nothing exists in isolation' and a minute later say 'I grew up in an isolated village' without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences." And as with isolation, so it is with "autonomy," "independence," "essence," "necessity," "reality," and so forth. Which is to say that philosophy concerns itself with extremes that are rarely in effect but fools itself into thinking that in discussing these extremes it's dealing with the village - i.e., the world - as well. Note that this critique doesn't merely knock down philosophy: it also knocks down deconstructive and pragmatic attacks upon philosophy.

And I refer back to my Rorty post from last year (which I quite like and recommend you read in its entirety), a particularly relevant portion of it being:

( What's going on when villagers make philosophy-like noises with their mouths? )

I'm posting several passages from Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations today not only because they are immediately relevant to Kuhn's idea of "paradigm" (in the sense of "exemplar") but because Kuhn himself cites them in The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions when he talks about scientists using paradigms rather than rules. And I'll say it's a pleasure to read these Wittgenstein passages again, compared to the vagueness and babble that makes up most philosophy. Not only is Wittgenstein a great writer, he's probably the author of the clearest, easiest, sanest prose ever written by a philosopher. (Not that all of his writings are easy, since you often have to have a sense of what ideas he's reacting against to understand why he makes the points he does; but these passages are clear on that count as well.)

I've added some commentary of my own, some of which - the stuff about "essentialism" not being a force in the world much beyond philosophy, so deconstruction and philosophical anti-essentialism miss the mark, are aimed at men of straw - wanders away from today's topic, but eventually we'll make our way to those other topics as well, and I simply felt like adding my thoughts on them here. And I've included what Kuhn wrote about the Wittgenstein passages, and I added a bit more of my own commentary.

( To repeat: don't think, but look! )

( Philosophy keeps trying to change the conversation back to what it knows how to talk about rather than what really is at issue )

( Scientists work from models, and because they do so, they need no full set of rules )

I keep telling myself I'm going to write a series of lj posts called "Relativism: So What?" but I keep putting off beginning this. I think a major reason for my block is that, though I can lay out the "intellectual" issues surrounding "relativism," my true goal is to get at "what are people's underlying reasons for thinking there's an issue here?" or to put it better, "people wouldn't bring up the issue of 'relativism' if they didn't think they were taking care of something by doing so, so how do I get them to think and talk about what it is that they think they need to take care of?" A subsidiary question might be, "Frank Kogan thinks he's taking care of something when he tries to get people to think and talk about what they think they're trying to take care of when they raise the issue of 'relativism,' so what is it that Frank Kogan thinks he's trying to take care of when he does this?"

Anyhow, four questions:
(1) What do you mean by "relativism," when you use the word (assuming you use the word)?
(2) Does the issue of relativism matter to you? If so, why does it matter?
(3) What do you think other people mean when they use the word "relativism"?
(4) What do you think they think is at stake?

Don't let your answers by overconstrained by the questions. I want to hear your ideas before giving mine.

By the way, someone on my flist (though I'm not on his) used the term the other day, clearly believed that "relativism" was a potent force in the world.

Here are some excerpts from my book:

From chapter 18, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life:

Among other things, I'm arguing that (i) presentation of self - creating, maintaining, or modifying one's hairstyle, as it were - is a way of thinking, but (ii) given a choice between maintaining one's hairstyle and thinking about it, my profession as a whole will choose hairstyle over thought. And the reader/editor/colleague will crack down on my thought, too, if it threatens his hairstyle (at least, he'll crack down collectively, institutionally, on behalf of the collective/institutional hairstyle, even if he'd rather not). In effect, to freeze one's hairstyle is to freeze a part of one's brain.

[By "my profession" I mean academia as well as journalism, even though I've never had a job in academia.]

Later in the same chapter:

( the drive towards academic diversity tends to run aground )