How does a sense of truth develop?
One notion: To the conceptless vacuum of an infant’s mind, understanding is brought forth ex nihilo, as ideas are introduced one at a time, added one to the other, and a factual world is built up from simple, isolated observations to a systematic world view.
Another notion: The infant’s mind is a chaotic everything-at-once, and ideas are not added to the chaos, but are in fact articulated out of the chaos. A distinction is made within the chaos (the chaos is no longer only chaos but two related “jointed” parts within an order), and that distinction schematizes the infant’s world and gives it meaning. The distinction and that which is distinguished makes speaking about things possible. The world view is not built up from facts in intellectual empty space, rather, a conceptual schema divides the chaos into order. The ordered part of chaos is our world.
The remaining chaos is given many different names depending on its relationship to the order. Sometimes we don’t see it at all, sometimes we call it irrelevant, and sometimes we take a bit of the non-order as significant of the whole of the remaining chaos, and we call it mystery.
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Each articulation of the world influences subsequent articulations: it makes some orders possible and makes others impossible. Every articulation runs its course and can go no further unless it backs up through questioning, and re-articulates reality along a new path with a new potentiality of development.
Each time we back up, we must reencounter the truth of the underlying chaos, we realize this solid ground beneath our feet is essentially liquid, and we feel as if we are suspended over an abyss. This feeling is angst: the threat to one’s world-order, which seizes holistically. We instinctively recoil from this experience and retreat back into what we know. If we ignore angst, and press further, we lose the option to retreat altogether. Here, there be dragons. We fall over the horizon of the ordered world into perplexity, back into the infant’s chaos. This experience is what is known as perplexity.
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Thomas Kuhn was the popularizer of the word “paradigm” and the inventor of the concept of the “paradigm shift”, so grievously leveled-down by business consultants and politicians. Kuhn’s interest was the history of science. Paradigms are competing scientific articulations, expressed as metaphors or models, each with its own potentiality. “Normal science” is the disciplined development and playing-out of articulation systems. When a paradigm runs its course, when more and more anomalies appear (observations inexplicable in the terms of the paradigm), and these anomalies become harder and harder to dismiss as irrelevant or as experimental noise, a scientific crisis ensues. New paradigms are sought, articulated, tested and the ones that survive compete for dominance in the community, with many fascinating. Meanwhile many scientists remain faithful to the old paradigm and find new ways to apply it in order to explain the anomalies — often successfully. The conservatives are frequently right, and the boldly imaginative scientific iconoclasts are often crackpots.
In discovering and describing paradigm shifts, Kuhn triggered a philosophical paradigm shift. Science takes a peculiar attitude toward its objects. Practicing science a scientist immerses himself in a paradigm and interacts it as if the paradigm were reality itself. Scientists inhabit paradigms and think by and through them. Experiment and ordered observation of scientific phenomena requires submission to a paradigm. A paradigm does not serve the scientist who employs it; the paradigm employs the scientist, and works itself out through the efforts of scientists.
Kuhn robbed the world of the conceit that through science the world would finally arrive at the truth. Science only provides truthful relationships with reality. Scientific truth turned out to be one more metaphysical projection.
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The things in our contemporary world that bear scrutiny rarely add up to to anything whole. They remain a complicated system, unintuitive in part and whole. Only the expert is qualified to grasp any of it, and that part is necessarily a sliver of a still incomprehensible whole.
Those things that do add up to an intuitive whole — where the parts relate back to the whole as its articulations, and the whole provides an intuitive unity of all the parts — on closer examination tend to fall apart, so one must blur one’s eyes to an increasing number of anomalies and apply principles with increasing arbitrariness to maintain any feeling at all that it is true.
It seems we must make a choice between a world of infinitely small truths and zero overarching unity, or having an overarching unity made of mythical concepts masquerading as fact.
This, however is a false choice.
If people understood that there are in fact multiple valid ways to conceive truth and that both the meaningful whole and the integrity of the parts are variable, and we accepted the freedom implied in this variability we could hold ourselves to higher standards of truth. That is, we could require that we do not stop pursuing an understanding when the understanding simply feels right, nor do we stop when we have found ways to connect the facts into a cohesive comprehensive system. We ought to require both. And we should not hesitate to revisit our conception of the truth when if fails at the level of whole and part.
I’m always ready to talk about epistemology.
I guess the “tabula rasa” idea is what the ancients believed? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa
In my education classes, we were taught about mental frameworks, the idea being that you cannot learn something unless you have a place to store it: something to relate it to. I guess that’s more in line with the order/chaos theory.
I almost feel like I’m being pandered to with the stuff about Kuhn and paradigm shifts. I remember the very day I first heard about it in my Biology class at Baylor: I was electrified. I guess that was my first brush with the philosophy of science. Some people get so irritated with Kuhn and Popper, if they are inclined to Scientism. I had one discussion with an agnostic technical writer in which he declared a belief that science could, one day solve *any* problem. I was shocked. How can science tell us what is ethical or who to marry? It’s a very mid-century idea, I think. “Every day, in every way, we are getting better and better.” Not too postmodern. Philosophy of science is one of my hobby horses, which shouldn’t be a surprise, because you may remember how I feel about materialist philosophy.
I have to ask myself what I do when I have some kind of cognitive dissonance. I think I choose to believe that one of the ideas must be wrong, or else I simply do not understand the situation fully. I like the fact that you conclude that in such instances, we do not assume that there is no truth, but that there are multiple ways of looking at the same things. Oddly enough, being an evangelical fundie, I’m actually like a classical skeptic, in many ways. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeptics#Philosophical_skepticism I don’t think that the old skeptics were nihilistic, they just didn’t believe that truth was proveable, and that’s what I believe. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” –St. Exupery
When confronted with the fact that not everything in existence is logical (the negation of an assumption of any logical proof) what does a philosopher do? They mostly ignore it and change the subject. That is the reaction to this tidbit from Scientific American that I’ve brought up in many arguments: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=schroedingers-cation
If a beryllium ion can be in two places at once, then the law of noncontradiction is in danger. I haven’t noticed anyone abandoning logic over it, though.
Maybe this is what I’ve been working at for the last several years:
There is definitely something hideous about materialist scientism, but over the course of modernity (up to Kuhn?) it was extremely difficult to attack it on its own terms. One was forced to go very deep — into an antithetical idealism — to escape its grip. You’d say basically: Yeah, that’s great that you’re observing the physical world and “discovering” patterns to help you explain and predict it, but as the Buddhists say, “all phenomena of the world have mind as their precursor and of mind are they made.” Basically, one asserts that the objective/material is in fact a subset of the subjective/ideal. You end up with two antithetical positions, each build upon a different metaphysic.
The problem is that the antitheses are so inter-alienated genuine dialogue is virtually impossible. And each appears so complete and right from their own position that the positions themselves offer no further questions regarding their own total validity. (This is called “horizon” by many thinkers… that sense of unbroken completeness of the edges of the world from wherever one stands. Every belief system forms a nice, self-enclosed disk around a believer.)
The only thing that will open out the horizon is taking very seriously the objections of your neighbor, that somehow your own horizon doesn’t do his sense of things justice. As long as we think the obvious, self-evident, no-brainer truth we see justifies invalidation of the points others make to us, we will fail to share truth. And when we reign over our own little isolated kindoms of The Truth, walled with our untested horizons, we never experience the sorts of transfiguration of the entire world-as-a-whole that transpire when we truly converse with our neighbors and suddenly see a point we’d never have suspected existed… suddenly exist to us. That’s when we realize the possibility among us when we gather in the spirit of dialogue. dia- (across) -Logos.
Too often when we talk with people we disagree with, we are only negotiating pieces and parts, instead of trying to really understand what they need, how they see, what they love, hope for. We need to look for opportunities for helping one another have all these things, while also realizing our own needs, hopes, visions and loves.
Regarding the current impasse between so-called science, and so-called religion:
The difference between science and scientism: the former is phenomenological and realizes science only organizes observations using human models, leaving open the validity of other modes of knowing; the latter believes science deals with ultimate reality and fails to recognize the limits of what science can accomplish and wishes to see all knowledge outside of science as somehow more provisional than scientific explanation. Too many scientists are still stuck in scientism.
The difference between a religion and a cult: the former understands that the neighbor and the enemy are to be loved, to love means to love an other (not an image of what we wish them to be), that to love an other means one must really listen and really try to understand them as a soul who sees the world in a distinctive way, and that we do not in fact possess the Truth, that Truth is something we give ourselves to when we approach another to learn in the hope of sharing truth, learned and taught. The latter wants to possess the Truth like an object, like a piece of fruit, and that one’s neighbor is one who also possesses the same Truth, and everyone else is obligated to either accept this Truth or to succumb to lies. Too many religious people are cult loyalists, and haven’t learned how loving one’s neighbor is inseparable from loving God.
If we can all work together to overcome scientistic and religious cult mindsets and try to trust one another, and do our best to extend goodwill to everyone, even when the other will not reciprocate, eventually trust will build and eventually we will be able to see the world together in a new and better way. To do that, though, we’re going to have to loosen up the specificity of our beliefs and penetrate deeper into the principles on which they hang. It’s not that beliefs are useless or dispensable (which is something some postmodernists seem unable to accept) — it’s that the beliefs exist to be fulfilled with ever-deeper and increasingly practical understandings.