You never see a Pragmatist’s philosophy more clearly than when he or she writes about other Pragmatists. What appears to be a survey is in fact original philosophizing if you pay attention to how the ideas are being connected (as well as the summary content).
All posts by anomalogue
Free, obligated
We are obligated to take evidence seriously when others make their case. We are free to experiment and produce new evidence. We are obligated to present evidence and make our case. They are free to experiment and produce new evidence.
Subjects
To learn a subject is to master a new kind of objectivity.
An academic discipline, a person and a culture are all subjects with their own objects.
All objects of all subjects overlap in reality.
Emergencies and thought
People averse to deliberation and reflection love emergencies. They find emergencies everywhere — and if an emergency is nowhere to be seen, they see it anyway. Failing that, they will create an emergency where there was none.
These are not unintelligent people — they are often very clever within their domain of expertise — and this might be the problem. Conveniently, emergencies require just the kind of cleverness they have mastered, and preclude everything else.
They say “There is no time to think!” Why? Because there is always clear and present danger? Because they have so many responsibilities? Because they are action-oriented and have no patience for people who just want to talk? No, I’ve watched what happens when things do calm down. They make an emergency of their entertainment. They schedule events to drive every peaceful minute out of their lives.
Fact is, they just don’t like thinking very much, especially when it involves the reconciliation of different perspectives. That is understandable. We have known for thousands of years that transcendence is dreadful and that the annoying babble of our neighbors is the primary vehicles of this dread. It is hard to acquire a taste for this sort of thing. They have not acquired this taste.
This does not make them bad people, but it is also not the sign of superior character they’d like it to be.
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My belief is that the uncontrolled acceleration our lives, the universal intensification of anxiety, the state of perpetual emergency in every domain of life is caused by our collective distaste for serious thought.
Pragmatism for business
The Jamesian “cash value” of an idea in business is how it will be operationalized. How will adoption of this idea concretely change behaviors of people, within and without the organization? This approach is most useful in brand strategy (which is, translated to pragmatist language, strategic pluralism) and is best condensed in Michael Porter’s beautiful admonition to compete, not to be best, but to be different.
Images of America
An embryonic hypothesis: Most Americans subscribe to one of three images of America, each with its own political hero, philosophical hero and philosophical movement.
Founding Fathers (Enlightenment America): Political hero: Thomas Jefferson. Philosophical hero: John Locke. Movement: The Enlightenment.
Pre-Founding Fathers (Evangelical America): Political hero: Jonathan Edwards. Philosophical hero: Martin Luther. Movement: The Great Awakening.
Re-founding Fathers (Progressive America): Political hero: Abraham Lincoln. Philosophical hero: John Dewey. Movement: Pragmatism.
Intellectual conscience
To be reasonable means one must take evidence seriously, especially evidence that contradicts our convictions. We must answer, but we can and often should answer with questions. But these questions must be real: “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” Our intellectual conscience tells us what we believe and do not believe in our hearts. It prevents us from clinging to dead beliefs, and it forbids us from abandoning our live beliefs, and it demands suffering without resolution when suffering is due.
Intuition
Intuition is a brilliant adviser but a violent judge.
Conviction and fanaticism
I’m feeling a little pessimistic today. If my sources are right, the world is setting itself up for solipsistic fanaticism from every side.
My impression: the best may be gradually gaining conviction, but not as fast as the worst are filling themselves with passionate intensity.
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Renewed commitment to scientific method, re-conceived more expansively, follows civil war.
See Leviathan and the Air-Pump and The Metaphysical Club.
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Scientific method alone is transcendent. Religious “enthusiasm” is entirely about egoistic reductionism. I’ve been there. It is fun. It is bad.
Aphorism mash
Complicating your question can reveal a simpler answer.
Or
Complicating your problem can simplify your solution.
Or
Complicating problems can be the simplest way to a simpler solution. (Eh.)
Or
Simple means, complex ends. Complex means, simple ends. (Spare formulation, but not as universal as stated.)
If simple means are producing a complex end, try complex means to produce a simple end. (Candidate Oblique Strategy?)
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(Expect more iterations. I’ve used a distillery metaphor to justify complexity as a means to simplicity: If you wish to distill simplicity, you must first mash up and stir together a mess of many particulars, then let it ferment, and only then can you produce something new to distill.)
What philosophy does
Philosophy does three things.
- Philosophy discovers as-yet-unposed problems.
- Philosophy develops ways to think as-yet-unthinkable thoughts.
- Philosophy integrates fragmentary knowledge into unified understandings.
It does not do these things in isolation from other activities. Rather, philosophy is present in ordinary thought and practices when routine methods fail and thinking has to think its way through blind newness.
Allegiances
In college I split the things I cared about into two categories:
- The things of which I approve.
- The things I love.
Being a young rationalist, I sided against my loves, for things of which I approved.
This lasted into my mid-30s. Starting on my 34th birthday, under the influence of Nietzsche I switched allegiances to what I loved.
Now I am back again, though in a less severely dichotomous form.
I still love Nietzsche, but my allegiance is with John Dewey.
Hermeneutical/rhetorical bow
This is a redrawing of a diagram I played with in 2009. It is meant to show the relationship of making and understanding and how it weaves between thinking top-down in wholes, and then bottom-up in terms of parts. It was originally inspired by learning (from Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism) that the hermeneutical circle was based on a model from rhetoric theory.
Design and engineering (yet again)
Design systematizes both inter-subjective and objective components, where engineering systematizes non-subjective components.
(This is the latest version of an iterating thought.)
Brand and pluralism
The free market is at least partially redeemed by the emergence and development of brand positioning. Brand positioning is strategic pluralism.
Morality and experiment
What is the pragmatic “cash value” of a person’s moral vision? I propose this: Where is that person motivated or resistant to experiment, at what cost and at what risk?
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Where: What possibilities of reality does the experimenter wish to investigate and bring to light? These possibilities can range from definite hypotheses or questions to indefinite intuitions of potential.
Cost: How much does the experimenter propose to invest or save, and who pays for doing the experiment and who pays for not doing it?
Risk: What level of unpredictability is the experimenter ready to tolerate?
No use for useless
“Having no use” for something has less to do with that thing’s uselessness than the quality of one’s own understanding and hopes. To the extent one understands, everything may be relevant, and to the degree one hopes everything may be problematic.
As we realize that everything, every thing and everyone is potentially relevant and problematic we lose the capacity for violence — and for this reason understanding and hope should be tempered by humility. We are all living things, after all, and we must eat, defend ourselves, and fight for what matters to us. To deny this fact completely is hubris, but to surrender to this fact is base.
To aspire to humanity is to live suspended.
Special thanks to my good friend, caffeine
This ought to be useful: Special thanks to my good friend, caffeine.
From the classic animated short Ah, L’Amour.
Innovation
One of my all-time favorite quotes comes from Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’ ” I love it for two reasons. First, it shows how philosophy is not an archaic style of theoretical speculation that has been supplanted by science. Philosophy is a perpetual discovery of new scientific turf. Philosophy pioneers what science settles and builds up.
But the other thing I love about the quote is it shows where philosophy can fit into the practical activities of everyday life. If you can’t intellectually move about in a problem space, you can’t work consciously and methodically. But what is innovation than looking for these areas? To extend my pioneering metaphor, in any exploration of innovative possibilities, philosophers ought to be brought along as guides to help navigate and map the territory.
Design thinking thoughts
What could be more passe than to define Design Thinking now — now that it has been over-hyped, described in a million ways, implemented very glamorously and expensively, found to not live up to the hype and finally publicly declared dead?
Nonetheless, Design Thinking ought to be defined, as crisply as possible, because it is a real thing with a precise meaning, and knowing its precise meaning is required to approach it in the right way and get those promised results. Without this precision, Design Thinking is really little more than an appearance of systematic creative activity, a style of carrying on, and unwarranted hopes.
So here’s my definition. Design Thinking is an approach to solving problems that involve hybrid systems composed of both objective and subjective elements. By objective elements I mean entities that exist “out there”, as physical objects, virtual objects, environments, services, and anything else a person can encounter in the world. And by subjective elements I mean ideas, thoughts, emotions, decisions, perceptions — all those things a person experiences “in here”.
In its inclusion of subjective elements in its problem definitions, design distinguishes itself from engineering, which treats only systems composed of objective elements.
The 20th Century was obsessed with the creative possibilities of cleansing problems of subjective elements. And in many areas, especially in the physical sciences and the technologies based on the physical sciences, this was the key to progress. However, this systematic elimination of subjectivity was misunderstood by many to be one of the key principles of scientific method. A scientific approach to anything involving human beings meant treating human beings strictly as objective entities (behaving objects) and removing the messier and more arbitrary elements of human experience — subjectivity.
In fact, the scientific method does not necessitate the objectification of problems except in instances where the phenomenon to be understood is itself purely objective. What scientific method requires is clarification of the problem, inclusion of all relevant factors in exploring the problem. So to understand a social problem scientifically, it is necessary to include not only the objective factors at play but also the subjective ones. This, of course is what the social sciences do in a variety of different ways.
So, another way to grasp what Design Thinking is is to make an analogy between engineering and the physical sciences. To some extent, you can engineer by instinct referring explicitly to theories from physics or drawing on science to test the adequacy of your engineering solution. Or you can harness scientific knowledge, use your instincts to come up with crazy possible approaches to try out, and then test them to make sure they actually work. The exact same thing goes for design, except where engineering uses the physical sciences, design thinking uses the knowledge and methods of the social sciences.
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Some analogies:
Design thinking is to the social sciences what engineering is to the physical sciences.
Design thinking is to agency “creative” as engineering is to tinkering.