Dustin Arand's Blog - Posts Tagged "philosophy"
Our Unmodern Minds
The manuscript of John Dewey's "Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy" had been lost for some sixty years until researchers discovered it in the Dewey archives at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. Though unfinished, the existing manuscript, at around 350 pages, conveys the gist of Dewey's thesis that modern philosophy is in fact shot through with pre-modern ideas.
Dewey argues that most of the dualisms that prevail in both philosophical and common sense thinking - body and mind, material and ideal, practical and theoretical, subjective and objective, things and persons - are false dichotomies. When western philosophy began in Ancient Greece 2500 years ago, the philosophers were of the aristocratic class, conservative and unburdened by the need to engage in manual labor.
Analogizing from the specific socioeconomic situation of Ancient Greece, the Greek philosophers saw the labor of the mind as fundamentally distinct - and better - than the labor of the hands. The objects of the mind were conceived as eternal, immutable, and possessed of greater dignity than the objects of the senses, which were degenerate and susceptible to corruption.
Medieval Church philosophers expounded upon this distinction. Whereas the Greeks had seen these dichotomies as part of Nature, a reflection of Nature's dual character, the Churchmen further separated them by declaring mind, idea, soul (the sine qua non of persons) and reason to be our inheritance from God.
Descartes, the father of rationalism, accepted this abrupt division when he declared that only humans were endowed with reason, all other animals being mere automata. Similarly Locke, the father of empiricism, believed that the human intellect was capable of discerning simple ideas - from which all other ideas could be built up - by virtue of the Reason given to it by God.
Dewey argues that modern philosophy has never been truly modern in that it has never fully shaken off the vestiges of Greek-Medieval thinking. A modern philosophy would recognize that what constitutes a "fact" cannot be divorced from the socio-cultural context in which it is acknowledged and acted upon as such; what constitutes a "mind" cannot be divorced from the environment that places particular demands on its attention and interaction.
The pre-modern view, with its false dichotomies, offers a take-it-or-leave-it ontology and a take-it-or-leave-it ethics. Because objects and their moral qualities are antecedently given, they are not analyzable nor are they justifiable. But this puts the cart before the horse. Actions are not moral in themselves, nor are beings in themselves entitled to moral consideration. Rather, "it is in and because of interplay among expectations, demands, fulfillments and evasions, with accompanying praise and blame, reward and penalty, approval and disapproval, that modes of behavior take on acknowledged social importance and become representative of social values; that is, of activities which are taken by the group to be important for group welfare and perpetuation. Human beings as the bearers of these representative functions, or offices, come into possession of the properties that describe a personal being."
By contrast, a modern view would see knowledge and ethics as the products of an ongoing evolutionary process, capable of improvement but never completion.
Dewey argues that most of the dualisms that prevail in both philosophical and common sense thinking - body and mind, material and ideal, practical and theoretical, subjective and objective, things and persons - are false dichotomies. When western philosophy began in Ancient Greece 2500 years ago, the philosophers were of the aristocratic class, conservative and unburdened by the need to engage in manual labor.
Analogizing from the specific socioeconomic situation of Ancient Greece, the Greek philosophers saw the labor of the mind as fundamentally distinct - and better - than the labor of the hands. The objects of the mind were conceived as eternal, immutable, and possessed of greater dignity than the objects of the senses, which were degenerate and susceptible to corruption.
Medieval Church philosophers expounded upon this distinction. Whereas the Greeks had seen these dichotomies as part of Nature, a reflection of Nature's dual character, the Churchmen further separated them by declaring mind, idea, soul (the sine qua non of persons) and reason to be our inheritance from God.
Descartes, the father of rationalism, accepted this abrupt division when he declared that only humans were endowed with reason, all other animals being mere automata. Similarly Locke, the father of empiricism, believed that the human intellect was capable of discerning simple ideas - from which all other ideas could be built up - by virtue of the Reason given to it by God.
Dewey argues that modern philosophy has never been truly modern in that it has never fully shaken off the vestiges of Greek-Medieval thinking. A modern philosophy would recognize that what constitutes a "fact" cannot be divorced from the socio-cultural context in which it is acknowledged and acted upon as such; what constitutes a "mind" cannot be divorced from the environment that places particular demands on its attention and interaction.
The pre-modern view, with its false dichotomies, offers a take-it-or-leave-it ontology and a take-it-or-leave-it ethics. Because objects and their moral qualities are antecedently given, they are not analyzable nor are they justifiable. But this puts the cart before the horse. Actions are not moral in themselves, nor are beings in themselves entitled to moral consideration. Rather, "it is in and because of interplay among expectations, demands, fulfillments and evasions, with accompanying praise and blame, reward and penalty, approval and disapproval, that modes of behavior take on acknowledged social importance and become representative of social values; that is, of activities which are taken by the group to be important for group welfare and perpetuation. Human beings as the bearers of these representative functions, or offices, come into possession of the properties that describe a personal being."
By contrast, a modern view would see knowledge and ethics as the products of an ongoing evolutionary process, capable of improvement but never completion.
Justification, Theory, and Truth
We're all familiar with the Aristotelian syllogism, and its most famous exemplar:
MP: All men are mortal.
mp: Socrates is a man.
C: Socrates is mortal.
But notice that the major premise depends upon an inductive inference, based on the empirical observation that we have not yet met anyone who has survived beyond a certain age. It could be the case that Socrates will be the person who finally disconfirms this inference.
That is the vulnerability of all inductive knowledge. Consequently, the flaw in the syllogism is that it basically assumes that which it sets out to prove, since the claim that "all men are mortal" depends upon Socrates (among others) also being mortal.
Another way to put this criticism is to say that deductive syllogisms cannot produce information in their conclusions that is not already contained in their premises. But this seems to call into question Kant's distinction between "synthetic" and "analytic" statements, that is, between statements whose predicates explicate or illuminate the nature of their subjects, and those that merely state a definition (e.g. "A bachelor is an unmarried man.")
What difference is left between them if the supposedly synthetic statements are ultimately begging the question?
But this worry leads to another, for if all logical argument is analytic, what becomes of justification? Plato tells us that knowledge is justified true belief, but Wittgenstein retorts that, eventually, our spades will hit rock and be turned back.
All justifications must end somewhere, and if all justifications consist of analytic statements, then eventually they curl back on themselves, and knowledge is revealed to be a web of interconnected definitions, suspended in thin air. The only alternative is an infinite regress.
Is this good news for cynics, nominalists, and post-modernists?
Perhaps if there were only one possible web of interconnected definitions, the claim that knowledge was not ultimately justifiable would have some force.
But happily knowledge is a buyer's market. For any given set of empirical observations, there are an infinite number of theoretical explanations, some of which will clearly be better than others in the sense that they will fulfill more of needs, answer more of our questions, and suggest more avenues for further research.
We should think of knowledge not as a process of adding true statements to an ever increasing body, but as an endless series of creative re-imaginings of the entire web of definitions by which we divide up the world. It is therefore not statements per se that are true or false, but whole systems - theories - that are either already, or not yet, falsified. No system can be said to be true without reservations.
MP: All men are mortal.
mp: Socrates is a man.
C: Socrates is mortal.
But notice that the major premise depends upon an inductive inference, based on the empirical observation that we have not yet met anyone who has survived beyond a certain age. It could be the case that Socrates will be the person who finally disconfirms this inference.
That is the vulnerability of all inductive knowledge. Consequently, the flaw in the syllogism is that it basically assumes that which it sets out to prove, since the claim that "all men are mortal" depends upon Socrates (among others) also being mortal.
Another way to put this criticism is to say that deductive syllogisms cannot produce information in their conclusions that is not already contained in their premises. But this seems to call into question Kant's distinction between "synthetic" and "analytic" statements, that is, between statements whose predicates explicate or illuminate the nature of their subjects, and those that merely state a definition (e.g. "A bachelor is an unmarried man.")
What difference is left between them if the supposedly synthetic statements are ultimately begging the question?
But this worry leads to another, for if all logical argument is analytic, what becomes of justification? Plato tells us that knowledge is justified true belief, but Wittgenstein retorts that, eventually, our spades will hit rock and be turned back.
All justifications must end somewhere, and if all justifications consist of analytic statements, then eventually they curl back on themselves, and knowledge is revealed to be a web of interconnected definitions, suspended in thin air. The only alternative is an infinite regress.
Is this good news for cynics, nominalists, and post-modernists?
Perhaps if there were only one possible web of interconnected definitions, the claim that knowledge was not ultimately justifiable would have some force.
But happily knowledge is a buyer's market. For any given set of empirical observations, there are an infinite number of theoretical explanations, some of which will clearly be better than others in the sense that they will fulfill more of needs, answer more of our questions, and suggest more avenues for further research.
We should think of knowledge not as a process of adding true statements to an ever increasing body, but as an endless series of creative re-imaginings of the entire web of definitions by which we divide up the world. It is therefore not statements per se that are true or false, but whole systems - theories - that are either already, or not yet, falsified. No system can be said to be true without reservations.
