Category Archives: Philosophy

Assertoric vortices

Philosophy

A pragmatic conception of truth views an assertion as the eye of a vortex of testable hypothetical consequences.

Tracing out these consequences and conceiving experiments capable of supporting or weakening belief in these assertions — that is what rational thought should dedicate itself to. And making persuasive arguments for investing in the most consequential experiments. And for conceiving new assertions with new vortices of hypothetical consequence.

Here is what my life of people-centered design has taught me: Never argue when you can experiment.

Again, Le Carre famously said: “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” It is important to remember that a conference table is just a big desk for a committee to sit behind. A philosopher’s armchair is another kind of desk. An academic journal is pretty much just a virtual conference table.

The natural sciences learned this lesson centuries ago. What divided modern science from ancient science was not drawing logical consequences from empirical observation! This is a common misunderstanding with catastrophic consequences. What brought science into the modern age (and us with it) was experiment: using observation to form hypotheses, using hypotheses to design experiments, conducting experiments to support or weaken hypotheses for a community of scientists, and to produce networks of confirmed theoretical assertions, each with a vortex of testable hypothetical consequences.

All questions can be treated scientifically, including social and existential ones, local and particular ones. We just have to pragmatically clarify exactly what our questions are about which helps us grasp our scientific object and the suitable experimental methods, which might not be predominantly physical, outwardly observable or quantifiable. Science, too, should observe “truth to materials.”

Neo-existentialism?

Philosophy

Is it time for an existentialist revival, yet? I hope it comes back in a pragmatist mode, one that pushes pragmatism to its Latourian limits. That is, a pragmatism that extends democratic procedure to things as well as people. Things have rights, too, and they assert those rights the way people do: resistance. Scientific experiment invites things to the table and allows them to negotiate with us. I enjoy wondering what an existentialism freed of idealist reductionism (both metaphysical & methodological) might look, sound, behave and feel like.

Beyond fundamentalism and mysticism

Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Fundamentalism is not religious extremism. It is not religion gone too far.

Fundamentalism is religion failing to happen. It is relationship to transcendent reality reduced to a set of defined things: facts, techniques, emblems, objects and social groups.

Of course, different denominations of Fundamentalism adhere to different things, but they all believe that religious “faith” consists of adherence to things, and they can’t see of what else a religion could possibly consist.

Religion begins when the limit of this vision is overcome, and then the limit of the consequent mystical vision is also overcome, and one plainly sees why love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable. And maybe it starts beyond that, too, and if that is true, neighbor, your vision penetrates further than mine, and we need to talk.

Predicament, perplexity

Philosophy

I am adopting Putnam’s term predicament for a problematic situation.

We could say a predicament is a situation that stimulates perplexity. Perplexity is failure of understanding due to nonavailability of adequate concepts. Because concepts produce both questions and answers, perplexity is inarticulate intellectual distress: one cannot say what the problem is, and this inability to state the problem compounds the distress.

The name of the feeling of distress (and even the intuitive anticipation of this distress) is anxiety.

The depth of a perplexity is a function of how many other concepts must be disrupted by the revision of concepts required to resolve the present perplexity. We can experience a shallow perplexity, which requires only the acquisition of a single concept where one is lacking. The deepest perplexities require unlearning and relearning our oldest and most basic concepts, from which others are derived.

Religious conversions are the outcome of deep perplexities, often stimulated by predicaments.

Understanding Peirce’s triad

Philosophy, Pragmatism

Let me see if I can paraphrase Peirce’s triad. 

The elements of the triad are distinguishable, but inseparable. They cannot be grasped in isolation, but articulated against the whole to which they belong. Peirce said they are to be prescinded, not isolated. 

Firstness is the immediate qualities of experience, including the entities experienced. It is monadic. It is experience experienced. 

Secondness is the brute reality of experience, most conspicuous in surprise. It is dyadic, composed of effort (of doing, or understanding) and resistance (to doing or to being understood). Secondness is encountered existence. 

Thirdness is — not sure about this — the concept — which is understood in terms of its full pragmatic consequence (a bundle of experienced beliefs each of which manifests with experience as firstness) of a meaningful entity. It posits, predicts, expects, establishes norms against which secondness will accord or discord. Thirdness is understanding that seeks to intelligibly integrate existence (universality) with encountered existence (pluralities).

Firstness is experience.

Secondness is encounter.

Thirdness is meaning.

Without firstness, secondness and thirdness have no material by which encounter or understanding can occur. No monads = nil.

Without secondness, firstness lacks resistant entities to stand out against the experiential flux, and without such entities thirdness is deprived of anything to understand. (No “intentional object” can emerge for thought.)

Without thirdness, firstness and secondness are indistinguishable. Thirdness supplies meaning; meaning animates effort, which invites resistance, and constitutes secondness. The distinction between what is experienced and what is encountered cannot be made.

What I am missing, and what makes me question the completeness of my understanding is this: isn’t firstness possible without secondness and thirdness? Second and thirdness seem interdependent in a way firstness does not. It might be a psychological fact that firstness is always accompanied by the other two elements, but it strikes me as philosophically unnecessary unless we impose a tautological definition that says that experience is only such in the context of the full triad.

So the thirdness that is my understanding of Peirce’s triad is encountering some resistance (thwarting some of what I would expect him to say) that leads me to wonder if Peirce’s idea (its stubbornly real secondness) is other than what I have made of it (thirdness), and in the context of this secondness and its disruption of my own expectations (firstness produced by thirdness?) it is leading me to experience the firstness of his words and his philosophy as a whole (also firstness) with some anxiety.

Some design research aphorisms

Philosophy
  • A designer’s best muse is reality.
  • The purpose of generative design research is to produce precision inspiration.
  • Le Carre famously said: “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” It is important to remember that a conference table is just a big desk for a committee to sit behind. (A philosopher’s armchair is another kind of desk, and an academic journal is pretty much just a virtual conference table.)
  • Design thrives on concreteness and specificity.

 

Idea dump: intimacy, design/engineering/philosophy, social science-technologies

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

The following is more of a diary entry than an article. I have put too little effort into editing, and it might make sense only to me. I just wanted to get a snapshot of these ideas as they exist today, before they change or disappear.

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The start of an idea: it seems that many “linguistic turn” philosophers become anxious encountering any concept that fails to promise eventual public accessibility and acceptance. I have a hunch I cannot yet support but this all seems rooted in a binary either-or of private and public: EITHER we speak precisely, logically and empirically in the least ambiguous language possible, OR we speak a muddledly, and self-sentence ourselves to imprisonment within our own private language cells.

I do love the private-public distinction and find it useful, but I think the most fascinating varieties of philosophy are between these extremes, in a region that could be called intimate, or what Martin Buber called the interhuman. This is where Nietzsche works, and I may read him with this theme in mind on my next tour of his corpus.

The intimate is where poetry happens. When poetry goes public it is lost to prosaicism. When poetry goes private it is lost to insanity. Poetry is intimacy suspended between insanity and prosaicism.

It is not true (or at least not right) that all language aims to be explicit. Sorting out the purpose of a particular vocabulary and determining its degree of explicit monosemic and pregnant polysemic content is an interesting problem — and less a philosophical problem than a design problem.

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Speaking of various kinds of problems, I’ve done much reflection in the last couple of years on what distinguishes engineering problems and design problems (my most recent formulation: an engineering problem concerns systemization of rule-bound entities, where a design problem concerns hybrid rule-bound and choice-making entities), but I have also been thinking quite a bit about the relationship between design and philosophy. It might be my most radical idea that philosophy is best understood as a species of design, and how it is designed determines what it can do. (I see a philosophy as a mind-reality interface analogous to a computer user interface to support intelligibility of unmanageable truths and semi-obscure phenomena. Philosophy-as-design strikes me as the furthest consequence of Jamesian Pragmatism.)

It might be interesting to converge these two themes, philosophy-as-design and design-vs-engineering. It might go like this: maybe we have been accidentally designing philosophies optimized for solving engineering problems, and further, when we think about philosophy in these engineering terms we successively engineer the possibility of design out of of our philosophies. We trust only logical rules that compel reason to accept a single conclusion, or the problem does not compute and returns a syntax error. We engineer philosophies good only for engineering, and this has distorted our understanding of what a science is and can be, including the social sciences. This is why 20th Century social sciences and social engineering are linked: social engineering was all that could be done with the philosophy that thought the social sciences.

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I’ve been groping with a vague new thought. Generally we define sciences ontologically, by their object of study. What if we defined sciences pragmatically, by the types of technologies they produce? The pragmatic definition of Actor-Network Theory then might be: the science that produces design. 20th Century sociology might be: the science that produces social engineering.

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For the past few years I’ve been enamored with (or maybe dominated by) Bruno Latour’s account of science and technology, and particularly his refusal to separate the domains of science and technology. Sciences use technologies at least as much as technologies use science. There is no pure scientific learning followed by pure technological application.

My intuition harasses me with the question of whether there is (or ought to be!) a similar dynamic at work in the social sciences. Currently the social sciences seem (I am not as well-informed as I would like to be) to place enormous emphasis on the front-end observational hypothesis-formation segment of the scientific method. Where is the interactive experimental moment of the scientific method, where technologies are employed to generate more knowledge? And what exactly is a social science technology, anyway? Have we asked that question enough? I am leaning toward a belief that a social science technology is a design, and in an experimental setting it is a design prototype introduced into a social situation. The social sciences merge with human-centered design practices. Not as the pure understanding that precedes a pure application, but as a profoundly mingled reciprocity.

Individuality

Ethics, Politics

My liberalism insists (that is, posits passionately) that every human being ought to be taken as an individual, as opposed to an example of a category of person.

With respect to policy I consider this ideal a binding law worthy of coercive action. Publicly, all individuals are obligated to observe the legal right of individuality — at the least within one’s own spheres of citizenship.

With respect to individual attitudes I consider this ideal something worth advocating persuasively, but always respecting the individual’s right to decide. Privately, individuals may regard other individuals as mere examples of categories of person, and liberals must never resort to coercion to change this.

Quotes and notes

Philosophy

Truth is even more about potential actualities than it is about realities.

“Truthfulness. — I favor any skepticism to which I may reply: “Let us try it!” But I no longer wish to hear anything of all those things and questions that do not permit any experiment. This is the limit of my “truthfulness”: for there courage has lost its right.”

“The thing itself” does not only refer to a present thing, but more, its reservoir of possible surprises for the future.

“We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt… Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.“

Anticipation is always present.

Peirce on “what pragamtism is”

Pragmatism

Some gems from C. S. Peirce’s “What Pragmatism Is”.

First, probably the most famous bit from this essay, one of the funnier lines in the history of philosophy:

…the writer, finding his bantling “pragmatism” so promoted, feels that it is time to kiss his child good-by and relinquish it to its higher destiny; while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word “pragmaticism,” which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.

Another, which I think is highly relevant to the Design Thinking debate, largely conducted by non-practitioners:

The writer of this article has been led by much experience to believe that every physicist, and every chemist, and, in short, every master in any department of experimental science, has had his mind molded by his life in the laboratory to a degree that is little suspected. The experimentalist himself can hardly be fully aware of it, for the reason that the men whose intellects he really knows about are much like himself in this respect. With intellects of widely different training from his own, whose education has largely been a thing learned out of books, he will never become inwardly intimate, be he on ever so familiar terms with them; for he and they are as oil and water, and though they be shaken up together, it is remarkable how quickly they will go their several mental ways, without having gained more than a faint flavor from the association. Were those other men only to take skillful soundings of the experimentalist’s mind — which is just what they are unqualified to do, for the most part — they would soon discover that, excepting perhaps upon topics where his mind is trammeled by personal feeling or by his bringing up, his disposition is to think of everything just as everything is thought of in the laboratory, that is, as a question of experimentation. … when you have found, or ideally constructed upon a basis of observation, the typical experimentalist, you will find that whatever assertion you may make to him, he will either understand as meaning that if a given prescription for an experiment ever can be and ever is carried out in act, an experience of a given description will result, or else he will see no sense at all in what you say.

And last, a restatement of a simple but profoundly consequential idea from “Four Incapacities” (“Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”) which hit me from a pleasantly fresh angle:

Philosophers of very diverse stripes propose that philosophy shall take its start from one or another state of mind in which no man, least of all a beginner in philosophy, actually is. One proposes that you shall begin by doubting everything, and says that there is only one thing that you cannot doubt, as if doubting were “as easy as lying.” … Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubt has nothing to do with any serious business. But do not make believe; if pedantry has not eaten all the reality out of you, recognize, as you must, that there is much that you do not doubt, in the least. Now that which you do not at all doubt, you must and do regard as infallible, absolute truth. Here breaks in Mr. Make Believe: “What! Do you mean to say that one is to believe what is not true, or that what a man does not doubt is ipso facto true?” No, but unless he can make a thing white and black at once, he has to regard what he does not doubt as absolutely true. Now you, per hypothesiu, are that man, “But you tell me there are scores of things I do not doubt. I really cannot persuade myself that there is not some one of them about which I am mistaken.” You are adducing one of your make-believe facts, which, even if it were established, would only go to show that doubt has a limen, that is, is only called into being by a certain finite stimulus. You only puzzle yourself by talking of this metaphysical “truth” and metaphysical “falsity,” that you know nothing about. All you have any dealings with are your doubts and beliefs, with the course of life that forces new beliefs upon you and gives you power to doubt old beliefs. If your terms “truth” and “falsity” are taken in such senses as to be definable in terms of doubt and belief and the course of experience (as for example they would be, if you were to define the “truth” as that to a belief in which belief would tend if it were to tend indefinitely toward absolute fixity), well and good: in that case, you are only talking about doubt and belief. But if by truth and falsity you mean something not definable in terms of doubt and belief in any way, then you are talking of entities of whose existence you can know nothing, and which Ockham’s razor would clean shave off. Your problems would he greatly simplified, if, instead of saying that you want to know the “Truth,” you were simply to say that you want to attain a state of belief unassailable by doubt.

Design

Philosophy

(Another pass at my design vs engineering concept. It remains un-nailed. It’s important, though, so I will continue to spiraling into the gravitational center of this perspective until I find the standpoint from which it is best said.)

Social engineering failed and will always fail, not because it is hubristic for humanity to try to shape and regulate its own existence, but because it conceives of society in engineering terms — as an engine, functioning mechanically, with well-understood technical requirements.

Social design, however, could very well succeed, at least in certain contexts. Design pays attention to more than function and form. It pays attention to what happens when systems are partially composed of free-willed beings who should not be compelled to behave  mechanically.

In order for social engineering to work, human beings must be compelled to behave mechanically — that is, forced to comply with roles and adhere to rules — that allow the system to function efficiently and predictably, like a well-oiled machine.

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I am coming to believe the word “design” is most useful as an antithesis to “engineering” — an antithesis defined within the broad category of  “intentional efforts to make changes to the world”.

 

Masters

Philosophy

Sometimes I worry that graduate school is a form of aversion therapy cure students of all enthusiasm for a subject of study.

Other times I think graduate school is a test of a person’s passion for a subject of study. It is less a process of mastering the subject itself than a way to discover once and for all whether one has the love and will required to eventually master it.

From Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees

Philosophy

This last story shows that the people of Ombrosa, who before had been teeming with gossip about my brother’s love life, now, faced with this passion exploding as it were above their heads, maintained a dignified reserve, as if toward something bigger than themselves. Not that they did not criticize the Marchesa’s conduct; but more for its exterior aspects, such as that breakneck galloping of hers (“Where can she be going, at such a pace?”) and that continual hoisting of furniture on to treetops. There was already an air among them of considering it all just as one of the nobles’ ways, one of their many idiosyncrasies. (“All up trees, nowadays; women, men. What’ll they think of next?”) In fact, times were coming that were to be more tolerant, but also more hypocritical.

Continue reading From Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees →

Chesterton’s yachtsman

Philosophy

Excerpt from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English
yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England
under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.
I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to
write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes
of philosophical illustration.  There will probably be a general
impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking
by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which
turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool.
I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool.  But if you
imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly
was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied
with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero
of this tale.  His mistake was really a most enviable mistake;
and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for.

…But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in
a yacht, who discovered England.  For I am that man in a yacht.
I discovered England. … When I fancied that I stood alone I was really
in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom.
It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original;
but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy
of the existing traditions of civilized religion.  The man from
the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was
the first to find Europe.  I did try to found a heresy of my own;
and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it
was orthodoxy.