Diagrams
Category Archives: Philosophy
Design of etiquette
Every human system is designed (whether intentionally or not).
Every design makes tradeoffs (whether intended or not). A design makes some things effortless, other things difficult and other things nearly impossible.
The best designs help us forget those things the design does not do.
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Etiquette is designed. It supports some kinds of human interactions and suppresses others.
If we want different kinds of interactions we must design them to make them possible. But if we do not wish to be rude we should not disregard etiquette. It is necessary to design new etiquette. And we should follow the rules of good design and respect our designands (a.k.a. “users”), at minimum by explaining the purpose of the etiquette, how it works and what to expect while participating in it — but ideally, beginning with the deepest possible understanding of the designands and their lifeworlds.
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Everything is design.
An original insight
Without my endlessly frustrating friends, family and neighbors (who sometimes feel more like enemies) I would complacently confuse life as I’ve known it for reality itself, and fail to engage it fully with my heart, mind, soul and strength in that way that keeps it perpetually new, distressing, valuable and interesting.
Pragmatically speaking, the otherness of other people and the otherness of unknown reality might as well be the same thing.
A requirement to know/respect/love one entails a requirement to know/respect/love the other. They are alike.
Goal
Goal: To invest speech-defying realities with the dignity of truth.
Some truths can be said, while other truths can only be felt or done.
Cries
Babies cry to communicate. They cry helplessly when they cannot communicate.
Agree
Issues of belief and non-belief are less common than we think.
A simple difference of opinion presupposes shared conceptualization (which at one point in my life I would have called “perspective”), that each differing opinion has been clarified in meaning and implications mapped, and, finally, that each opinion is actually about the same object (that is that it attempts to account for the same phenomena).
Perhaps a taxonomy of differences in thought might be helpful:
- Conclusional: have we arrived at the same belief? (Do we agree?)
- Logical: are our beliefs fully clarified, with all implications and doubts duly mapped out? (Are we clear?)
- Conceptual: are we conceptualizing the problem the same way and have we tried out alternative conceptualizations in order to compare them? (Are we aligned?)
- Phenomenal: are we working on the same problem, and are we responding to the same data? (Are we focused?)
The intrinsic conservatism of language
I starred the hell out of this footnote from Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:
Such unconscious sleight-of-hand, when practiced by men of Descartes’s boldness of imagination, is an occasion for gratitude rather than censure. No great philosopher has avoided it, and no intellectual revolution could succeed without it. In “Kuhnian” terminology, no revolution can succeed which employs a vocabulary commensurable with the old, and thus none can succeed by employing arguments which make unequivocal use of terms shared with the traditional wisdom. So bad arguments for brilliant hunches must necessarily precede the normalization of a new vocabulary which incorporates the hunch. Given that new vocabulary, better arguments become possible, although these will always be found question-begging by the revolution’s victims.
Let us not pretend
“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.” – C. S. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities Claimed For Man”
This applies at least as much to ethics as it does epistemology.
Can we really doubt the immorality of the worst atrocities, even if we are unable to explain or account for morality?
This is a real living question, a doubt in my heart about the dubitability of morality.
Damaged tissues
Richard Rorty, from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:
Presumably those who say that the phenomenal is nonphysical are not complaining that being told how the atoms of the bat’s brain are laid out will not help one feel like a bat. Understanding about the physiology of pain does not help us feel pain either, but why should we expect it to, any more than understanding aerodynamics will help us fly? How can we get from the undoubted fact that knowing how to use a physiological term (e.g., “stimulation of C-fibers”) will not necessarily help us use a phenomenological term (e.g., “pain”) to an ontological gap between the referents of the two terms? How can we get from the fact that knowing Martian physiology does not help us translate what the Martian says when we damage his tissues to the claim that he has got something immaterial we haven’t got?
Damaged tissues. I started worrying at this point about what kinds of tissues might constitute a person’s being, and what kinds of pain they produce when damaged. I kept thinking about an episode of On Being, featuring Jonathan Haidt where he discusses the more extensive sense of morality among conservative personalities. Are the tissues of a conservative’s being enmeshed in the customs of their community and the definitions of words?
Alterior expressions
A quick noting of a thought I had several weeks ago. It seems that the more an author writes in terms of present familiarities, alluding to fresh events of the moment that everyone understands and feels, the sooner the immediacy of the writing will expire. It is a tradeoff: the strategy of connecting ideas to the realities of present readers comes at a cost to connecting them to the realities of future readers, who will experience what was immediate as obscure allusions requiring footnotes and further study, or even as distracting errors if the allusions refer to beliefs requiring revisions (for instance, to discredited scientific notions or moral convictions). The most obscure writings of the present might become the most accessible writing to the future.
The reason this came to mind this morning is that it occurred to me that every form of immediacy might suffer from every kind of distance — temporal, temperamental, spacial, practical, etc..
Even our own immediate feelings can become incomprehensible over time as the fade into biography. This is a new way to see a thought I have been having now for over a decade. But it gives the idea a fresh new immediacy — today, anyway.
But also, our word-defying moods or insights — our sense of the poetic and religious — those might be the hardest immediacies to hold onto and remember, thus poems and prayers. We say them again, hear them again, beg them to return to us in their immediacy.
But thinking beyond the problems of our own private or communal recollections of past immediacies, and factoring in the problems of communication with other people, these immediate experiences are difficult to convey and share with our most alterious alter-egos. Compounding the problem is the fact that the dread of beyondness clings to such alterior expressions adds daunting barriers to bridgeless gaps.
It might be that the most immediate realities cannot be spoken of in their own terms, but, if they are to be shared, must be refracted through and reflected off the myriad things of our sharable world. To be known at all, our subjectivities must run a circuit through the world we all intuit as one world, and present themselves as alternative objectivities belonging to a pluralistic world. But of course, the immediate reality of the world is that it is simply reality, and to view reality in a pluralistic light is to deny the most basic reality of this experience, so pluralism is not the innocent neutrality it seems to be to itself in its own immediacy.
Pragmatists on pragmatists
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).
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.
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.