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Post 40

Thursday, February 16, 2012 - 8:56pmSanction this postReply
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Michael,
You were talking about people who assert primacy of existence without conforming to it without contradiction.
I'd classify that under the difference between explicit philosophical conviction vs habitual use of consciousness.

Okay, but I view man with more integration than that. If you have a real conviction, it will affect your habits -- unless you disintegrate and compartmentalize. That's what I meant when I said that pragmatists don't fully integrate. If I had to classify this phenomenon, I'd say that it is about an explicit philosophical conviction that is held without integrity. It's saying one thing, but doing another.
The story about the astronauts was a good concretization of principles. I'd like to see it appear in a larger work of yours when you get around to it.


Thanks for the expressed appreciation. I'll take your advice and plan on using the astronauts story in a larger work.

When you used "rationalism", I figured you were referring to "continental rationalism". That's fine on Oist forums but a non-O audience would need the qualifier "continental" to know what you're talking about. But I think you already know that. I'm glad we stopped to clarify.
Point taken. It is better, as you say, to refer to it as continental rationalism.

Locke and concepts:
I totally agree that Locke had problems with universals but I have not yet read Adler's piece on him. 

It's in his book: 10 Philosophical Mistakes. Here's a problematic quote from Locke:
Whatsoever immediate object, whasoever perception, be in the mind when it thinks, that I call idea; and the power to produce any idea in the mind, I call quality of the subject wherein that power is. Thus, whiteness, coldness, roundness, as they are sensations or perceptions in the understanding, I call ideas; as they are in a snow-ball, which has the power to produce those ideas in the understanding, I call them qualities.
http://www.philosophypages.com/locke/k365.htm

Locke says that things cause us to have ideas, but that isn't right. It takes the mind to be a passive, perceptual organ. Things may cause us to have perceptions (because of our automatic, perceptual apparatus), but concept-formation requires an active, integrating mind. We have a crucial role in the concepts (the ideas, in Locke's sense of the term) that we form.
I need you to elaborate more on the social metaphysics angle. You seem to be saying that if one starts out being skeptical about discovering principles, one ends up defaulting to some extent and letting prevailing cultural winds undermine credibility.
Take the randomized, controlled trial (often labelled "RCT" by scientists and doctors). Ask a doctor if something works as a medicine and he points to RCTs. RCTs, he will tell you, are the standard of the true and the false -- of the sham medicine, and the real. Then came the Canadians and the Brits with their new system of "Evidence-Based Medicine" [see next post for links]. These pragmatists said that we can no longer accept RCTs as the gold standard for truth. Instead, they say, we need to withhold opinion until the results of a systematic review of RCTs has been performed. This systematic review (e.g. a meta-analysis) is now taken to be the gold standard of truth -- but only because a bunch of people in lab coats said so. As it turns out, there are now conflicting systematic reviews -- one coming to the conclusion that the treatment in question works, and the other coming to the opposite conclusion. This is a mess precisely because it is what investigators got together and agreed upon.

On top of that, these reviews of RCTs miss critical steps in the epistemological process of getting all of the facts of the matter. There is a bottleneck factor behind performing RCTs, because they are so costly to perform, and you end up getting things studied that don't epistemologically deserve to be studied, and you also end up missing a whole bunch that epistemologically deserves to be studied. So we've got these scientists telling us what the gold standard for truth is -- and their very process of finding it is tainted! They are elevating process and methodology above even a general understanding of the matter! They are methodology junkies who ride the prevailing winds of new-fangled methods in science rather than going back to check key premises.

I know that that wasn't a very good elaboration, but I did offer a concrete example of pragmatists recklessly jumping into a bandwagon together.

:-)

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 2/16, 9:27pm)


Post 41

Thursday, February 16, 2012 - 9:39pmSanction this postReply
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Some literature links relevant to the medical "paradigm-shift" toward Evidence-Based Medicine, or EBM (and the epistemology of its practitioners and enthusiasts):

1)
Evidence-based medicine and epistemological imperialism: narrowing the divide between evidence and illness.

2)
How the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty can help us understand the gulf between clinical experience and the doctrine of evidence-based psychotherapy.

3)
Epistemology and ethics of evidence-based medicine: putting goal-setting in the right place.

4)
'We hold these truths to be self-evident': deconstructing 'evidence-based' medical practice.

5)
Iconoclast or creed? Objectivism, pragmatism, and the hierarchy of evidence.

6)
Epistemologic inquiries in evidence-based medicine.

7)
Why alternative medicine cannot be evidence-based.

8)
[Evidence-based medicine: reality and illusions. Extension of epistemological reflexions.]


Ed


Post 42

Thursday, February 16, 2012 - 10:02pmSanction this postReply
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Ed thanks for the rich brain food I would like to add to your comments on Canadian doctors. Some are good and many are terrible. People wax poetic about our great free health care. It is not so great. About 12 years ago a newborn had a congenital heart defect that our doctors were not capable of treating. So of course they went down to a U.S specialist and had the operation. The canadian government of course would do nothing to finance what should have been available in Canada, almost like a head in the sand attempt to ignore the inadequacy of the canadian system. Needless to say people donated more than enough to cover the costs. My main point in this is that whenever anything serious goes wrong canadians often travel to the states for treatment. Your model is superior.

Post 43

Friday, February 17, 2012 - 3:18pmSanction this postReply
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Jules,

Yeah, as a tangent, I used to be a Christian socialist and I once vigorously defended socialized Canadian health care.

My main argument back then was that Canadians spend half as much as we do on health care and, statistically, they keep people (e.g., cancer patients, heart disease patients) alive for just as long as we do. Like the education system, there appear to be approximately no benefit whatsoever to spending twice the money on something (results are no better than if you spent half). Keep in mind that this was in the 1990s. Recent research has been the other way. It doesn't appear like you guys spend half as much as us guys do anymore. Also, it doesn't appear that, statistically, you keep cancer- and heart disease patients alive as long as we do.

Caveat: I haven't critically appraised research on this matter in several years.

Ed


Post 44

Friday, February 17, 2012 - 3:37pmSanction this postReply
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Michael,

In post 41, I gave links to literature on the new scientific paradigm called: Evidence-based Medicine (EBM). Link numbers 4, 6, and 8 deserve quotation:

4)
EBM's strict distinction between admissible evidence (based on RCTs) and other supposedly inadmissible evidence is not itself based on evidence, but rather, on intuition. In other words, according to EBM's own logic, there can be no 'evidentiary' basis for its distinction between admissible and inadmissible evidence. Ultimately, to uphold this fundamental distinction, EBM must seek recourse in (bio)political ideology and an epistemology akin to faith.
This quote shows that the pragmatists utilizing EBM draw a line in the sand about what counts as evidence and what doesn't -- and that the criterion for determining where the line goes is political ideology and faith (i.e., prevailing cultural winds).

6)
They also contend that EBM presents itself as a radical restructuring of medical knowledge that discredits more traditional ways of knowing in medicine, largely in the interests of people with a particular investment in the enterprise of large-scale clinical trials.
This quote shows that the pragmatists' search for truth is tainted by the interests of people (i.e., by social metaphysics).

Our analysis indicates that EBM does not have a rigorous epistemological stance. ... we should consider EBM as a continuously evolving heuristic structure for optimizing clinical practice.
This quote shows that link between pragmatism and the paradigm of EBM.


8)
Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is a cultural and methodological approach to clinical practice ...
This quote shows that EBM -- and, by extension, the pragmatism that brought it on -- is based on social metaphysics and "methodology-worship."

Among internal bias, economic-based interest may influence the development and diffusion of research and its results.
This quote echoes the first quote above for link #6.

In addition "systemic review" may be incorrectly guided, the quality filters of the literature can be inappropriately applied, the choice criteria can be only based on the positive results of evidence, but according to modern epistemology, it will be helpful for clinicians to know when their uncertainty stems from gaps between positive and negative evidence.
This quote shows how there can be negative evidence for (against) something, as opposed to having a situation where there is a mere lack of positive evidence for something. In doing so, it implies that there might be a missed understanding of a matter -- if one only merely waits for positive evidence to trickle out of medical journals as if they were like a modern-day oracle releasing a ticker-tape of what is true of the world.

Ed


Post 45

Saturday, February 18, 2012 - 3:11pmSanction this postReply
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Regarding Mill's methods:

1) Method of Agreement
2) Method of Difference
3) Joint Method of Agreement and Difference
4) Method of Concomitant Variations
5) Method of Residues

... I'm re-reading Harriman's The Logical Leap and he gave me some insight. Harriman collapses (4) into (2) with the argument that the method of difference is just an extreme example of the method of variation -- an extreme case where the dose of variation is brought all the way down to "zero" or up to 100% (depending on how you look at it). He says that there are really only two methods that count: agreement and difference, and that you can arrive at causation via the method of difference with just a single, carefully-contrived study. Philosophers call that a "crucial experiment." Alternatively, he says that if you want to determine causation with the method of agreement, then you need to witness two instances of A --> B type causal sequences.

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 2/18, 8:42pm)


Post 46

Thursday, February 23, 2012 - 9:20pmSanction this postReply
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Is it really system-building they hate? I know they believe it difficult if not impossible to find absolute principles. William James is worse about that than Mill or Peirce though
Did Mill believe his rules for causal reasoning were absolute guides?

"The truth is that pragmaticism is closely allied to the Hegelian absolute idealism"

CS Peirce contends that Hegel had realist tendencies as opposed to the others whom Peirce contends are nominalists. At this point, I am not convinced that Peirce is a nominalist.
(Edited by Michael Philip on 2/23, 9:21pm)


Post 47

Thursday, February 23, 2012 - 9:22pmSanction this postReply
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Look at Peirce's stages of conception, which are somewhat borrowed from Hegel. First "conception" as thing existing independent of other things. Second "conception" as thing in relation to something else. Third "conception" as relation between the first two. Note the departure from the "entity-identity-unit" arc. Peirce had his own notions of firstness secondness and thirdness

It seems like Hegel confused integration for identity. If this is true, it constitutes a rectification of a mental process which is consistent with the idealist arc of German philosophy. But such consistency does not prove this to be true and I am not a Hegel scholar so can't say

Post 48

Friday, February 24, 2012 - 7:44pmSanction this postReply
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Michael,
Is it really system-building they hate? I know they believe it difficult if not impossible to find absolute principles ...
Again, I think you are right. It is not so much that they disdain the enterprise of system-building per se -- as long as the system is heuristic and loosely-tied to its foundation (so that the whole thing can be uprooted, tomorrow, if needed). What they don't like, as you intimate, is absolutes.
Did Mill believe his rules for causal reasoning were absolute guides?
How could he? If Mill was anything, he was a (British) empiricist -- and if there is one thing that cannot be integrated with such staunch empiricism, it is an absolute guide.

At this point, I am not convinced that Peirce is a nominalist. 
But think about when Peirce said (post 29 above) that after 500 years of undulating ascent, nominalism finally "gained a complete victory." But what does it mean for something to have gained a complete victory (as opposed to a mere temporary or partial one)? Now, if you think about how Peirce himself viewed truth, as that which -- after much investigative blood, sweat, and tears -- as that which gains a complete victory, then it is easy to go ahead and infer that that means that Peirce thinks nominalism is true. Because Peirce thinks that truth is the product of a collection of experts using their faculties to the fullest, then Peirce should think that nominalism is true.
 
If pressed over why he thinks nominalism is true, then Peirce would point to the hundreds of years of thought and experiment that led to that 'victorious' view of the matter.

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 2/24, 7:47pm)


Post 49

Friday, February 24, 2012 - 7:48pmSanction this postReply
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Michael,

Answering post 47 fairly will require research on my part. I'll get back to you on it soon ...

Ed


Post 50

Monday, February 27, 2012 - 6:17pmSanction this postReply
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Michael,
Look at Peirce's stages of conception, which are somewhat borrowed from Hegel. First "conception" as thing existing independent of other things. ...

I checked out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for CS Peirce online. This appears to be a relevant section ["..." stands for an introduced break]:
... it must be kept in mind that Peirce was always a realist of the Kantian“empirical” sort and not a Kantian “transcendental realist.” His realism is similar to what Hilary Putnam has called “internal realism.” (As was said, Peirce was also a realist in quite another sense of he word: he was a realist or an anti-nominalist in the medieval sense.)

Peirce's Hegelianism, to which he increasingly admitted as he approached his most mature philosophy, is more difficult to understand than his Kantianism, partly because it is everywhere intimately tied to his entire late theory of signs (semeiotic) and sign use (semeiosis), as well as to his evolutionism and to his rather puzzling doctrine of mind. There are at least four major components of his Hegelian idealism.
...
First, for Peirce the world of appearances, which he calls “the phaneron,” is a world consisting entirely of signs. Signs are qualities, relations, features, items, events, states, regularities, habits, laws, and so on that have meanings, significances, or interpretations.
...
Second, a sign is one term in a threesome of terms that are indissolubly connected with each other by a crucial triadic relation that Peirce calls “the sign relation.” The sign itself (also called the representamen) is the term in the sign relation that is ordinarily said to represent or mean something. The other two terms in this relation are called the object and the interpretant. The object is what would ordinarily would be said to be the “thing” meant or signified or represented by the sign, what the sign is a signof. The interpretant of a sign is said by Peirce to be thatto which the sign represents the object. What exactly Peirce means by the interpretant is difficult to pin down. It is something like a mind, a mental act, a mental state, or a feature or quality of mind; at all events the interpretant is something ineliminably mental.
...
Third, the interpretant of a sign, by virtue of the very definition Peirce gives of the sign-relation, must itself be a sign, and a sign moreover of the very same object that is (or: was) represented by the (original) sign. In effect, then, the interpretant is a second signifier of the object, only one that now has an overtly mental status. But, merely in being a sign of the original object, this second sign must itself have (Peirce uses the word“determine”) an interpretant, which then in turn is a new, third sign of the object, and again is one with an overtly mental status. And so on. Thus, if there is any sign at all of any object, then there is an infinite sequence of signs of that same object. So, everything in the phaneron, because it is a sign, begins an infinite sequence of mental interpretants of an object.

But now, there is a fourth component of Peirce's idealism: Peirce makes everything in the phaneron evolutionary. The whole system evolves. Three figures from the history of culture loomed exceedingly large in the intellectual development of Peirce and in the cultural atmosphere of the period in which Peirce was most active: Hegel in philosophy, Lyell in geology, and Darwin (along with Alfred Russel Wallace) in biology. These thinkers, of course, all have a single theme in common: evolution. Hegel described an evolution of ideas, Lyell an evolution of geological structures, and Darwin an evolution of biological species and varieties. Peirce absorbed it all. Peirce's entire thinking, early on and later, is permeated with the evolutionary idea, which he extended generally, that is to say, beyond the confines of any particular subject matter. For Peirce, the entire universe and everything in it is an evolutionary product.
...
Indeed, he conceived that even the most firmly entrenched of nature's habits (for example, even those habits that are typically called “natural laws”) have themselves evolved, and accordingly can and should be subjects of philosophical and scientific inquiry.
According to this Stanford entry, Peirce was not a nominalist. And yet, if pressed on the issue of "natural kinds" (something nominalists disavow), he would say that natural kinds are evolutionarily "nominalistic" (that they are not absolutes, but vary and change with the winds of time). So, it seems his evolutionary overview collapses onto his "internal realism" and defeats it.


For illustration of this effect, think of a snow globe. When you shake up a snow globe, it appears as if it is snowing on the inside. You might even say that, in the sense of snow globes, it really and truly is "snowing" on the inside. But alas, you cannot make it snow in the literal sense, simply by shaking up a snow globe. What you can do is arrive at a truth or an event that is limited by the boundaries of the globe and -- outside of that globe -- you really have no truth of snow, or power to initiate snowing as a process (even if it is true on the inside).

When Peirce claims that he is an epistemological realist in the medieval sense (or when an entry like this claims that of him), then it must be brought to attention that that is not true in a holistic or global context, but only in a narrow and limited one (like the inside of a small snow globe). In spite of this entry, I will still claim that thinkers such as Peirce -- indeed, all pragmatists -- are 'mitigated nominalists.' Peirce's epistemological realism is no more real or true than the fake snow inside of a self-contained snow globe.

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 2/27, 6:26pm)


Post 51

Sunday, July 8, 2012 - 2:53pmSanction this postReply
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Michael,

Belatedly, I eventually found that earlier reference of Mill denouncing Hegel (to go along with the denunciation by Peirce on which I was originally able to elaborate):
I have been toiling through Stirling's Secret of Hegel. It is right to learn what Hegel is and one learns it only too well from Stirling's book. I say too well because I found by actual experience of Hegel that conversancy with him tends to deprave one's intellect. ... For some time after I had finished the book all such words as reflection, development, evolution, etc., gave me a sort of sickening feeling which I have not yet entirely got rid of.
--Letter to Alexander Bain, Collected Works, XVI, p. 132

Ed


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Post 52

Sunday, November 18, 2012 - 4:30pmSanction this postReply
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Ed

I decided to comeback to this topic because on one hand it is very exciting and because of the DIM hypothesis.

I suppose the postmoderns and their descendants don't even have the dignity of a worldview. Albert Camus, a French existentialist, wrote passionately about defying immoral men.Though he was a disillusioned communist, he had some remnants of a philosophy D1 maybe? But if so then a different sort of D1 than Pierce.

What I think would be interesting is seeing whether all four schools are alive in the U.S., culturally. A lot of business majors are pragmatists. Science and engineering majors tend to be metaphysical realists. The counter-culture is a mixture of existentialism and marxism. A lot of mathematicians and computer science majors strike me as idealists in the sense of alleging that universals have ontological primacy. Many IT professionals insist that you can't do computer science without dealing with abstractions apart from concretes.They don't seem to understand that you arrive at the "basics" from a huge context of knowledge about methods and systems. They act like the "basics" are less abstract then applying the abstractions to particular implementations


A cultural analysis in terms of clearly distinguishable worldviews would be a fascinating read
(Edited by Michael Philip on 11/18, 5:57pm)


Post 53

Thursday, November 22, 2012 - 12:41amSanction this postReply
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Michael,

Good insights. I'd like to address your points, but to keep my thoughts straight and to provide background for 3rd-party viewers, I'll use this first post only to briefly outline Peikoff's DIM Hypothesis and briefly contrast it with my RIPE system, or RIPE fruit, if you will.

:-)

Peikoff acknowledges 5 worldviews instead of just 4 of them. Interestingly, we both independently concluded that Thomism is a contradiction (an internal contradiction!), not a worldview -- so we both did not list it as something that one could actually have adopted (other than superficially claiming to have adopted it as a worldview). Another difference is that I have now come around to treat Kant as a 'dangerously-mistaken' idealist, while Peikoff treats him as something ever-so-slightly worse than that.

:-)

Some of Kant's mistakes might actually have been intentional. For instance, he might have said to himself, perhaps in a quite moment:
I am going to do great damage to Reason, man's tool of survival, in order to make room for Faith.
... but he more than likely was just responding to felt fears, such as the fear that Hume's philosophy -- if not refuted -- would eventually destroy all of mankind. Acting from a standpoint of fear can be dangerous and harmful, and that is what we got from Kant: a dangerous, harmful philosophy meant as medicine, but worse than the original disease.

Peikoff's 5 Worldviews

A table of Peikoff's 5 worldviews is on page 70 in the book. In the margin, I wrote down the key philosophers Peikoff mentions for each worldview. Here they are:

Integrator (I) - Aristotle
Misintegrator (M2) - Plato
Worldly Supernaturalist (M1) - Descartes
Disintegrator (D2) - Kant
Knowing Skeptic (D1) - Comte

And here's where these 5 guys fit in my (RIPE) scheme:

Realist - Aristotle
Idealist - Plato, Descartes, Kant
Pragmatist - Comte
Existentialist - Comte

The reason Comte shows up twice is because pragmatism is merely "managed" existentialism (skeptical subjectivism), just like utilitarianism is merely "managed" hedonism.

If you ask a pragmatist what he's doing then he will confidently tell you that what he is doing is merely the practical thing to do. In reality, he's doing what he wants to do, and then fortifying his position with illegitimate, though sometimes elaborate, "justification." Barack Obama accomplished this feat when he said this. He quieted all concerns that he might be acting in a partisan (liberal) manner, then proceeded to implement his uber-partisan politics. An example is ObamaCare. If you ask Obama about socialized medicine, then he will tell you that forcing people into a system where they pay for each other is not a partisan issue, it's just the practical thing to do. It's the way that you keep costs down. It's the way that you get everyone "coverage." You have to assume that everyone has an inalienable right to "coverage." You have to get on board the ship of social metaphysics.

All of his arguments will be couched in the following kind of 'cautious utilitarianism/concerned pragmatism':
We have to do what's best for everybody, we have to try out the experiments that I, personally and subjectively, want to try out (in order to see if they "work").
Ugh! This argument appeals simultaneously to our personal yearning for rationality, but also to our fear of not being altruistic (read: moral) enough. The part about it boiling down to one man's subjective whim (or his own personal gain) is always unspoken, and it's a terrible double-whammy in the hands of an elegant rhetorician.

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 11/22, 12:51am)


Post 54

Thursday, November 22, 2012 - 8:02amSanction this postReply
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I've got to get one more quote out of the way. It's on page 262 and it supports my view [brackets mine]:
A creator may consider causality as a principle of Nature learned through observation, and look for causes accordingly [this is my Realist (R)]; or as a product of God's will learned a priori [this is my Idealist (I)]; or as a product of human consciousness learned subjectively [this is my Existentialist (E)]; or as a baseless but convenient hypothesis [this is my Pragmatist (P)].
Ed


Post 55

Thursday, November 22, 2012 - 9:51amSanction this postReply
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Michael,

I suppose the postmoderns and their descendants don't even have the dignity of a worldview.
On the contrary, I would categorize them as unrepentant existentialists. It's a skeptical, even solipsist, worldview -- but it's a worldview. Also, I believe they would reject the concept of dignity other than the purely self-congratulatory kind, where they congratulate themselves for acting on their base, short-term, narrow-minded desires and whims ... :
I did what I felt like doing at that moment!
... they may proclaim to themselves. Never mind that the next moment is a new moment with new challenges (i.e., something to fear). At every next moment, they wrestle against the world, each victory over the world (each "will to power") fading in their memory, and the only thing left is to press on like a ship sailing in darkness, fighting against each wave -- never trying to even understand how waves are made and how you might go about responding to them in a principled fashion.

Albert Camus, a French existentialist, wrote passionately about defying immoral men. ... he had some remnants of a philosophy D1 maybe ... But if so then a different sort of D1 than Pierce.
I think the reason why you struggle with categorizing Camus (existentialist) with Peirce (pragmatist) is for the reason I mention above: Pragmatism, if pressed hard enough, devolves into Existentialism.

Peirce the Pragmatist was perhaps the best at keeping the subjective skepticism to a minimum. In this sense, he "managed" his existentialism better than any other pragmatist. What a pragmatist tells you is you can't know things for certain but you can follow heuristic (useful, but otherwise unjustified) methods and make some undulating (or fleeting!) progress in dealing with the world. What an existentialist tells you is that you can't. You might say that an existentialist is being more honest or practicing more integrity: She is admitting she doesn't know things, and then acting purely from her deep soul of desire. On the contrary, a pragmatist is claiming to know some things, but in the process he is denigrating the concept of knowledge itself. Knowledge is viewed as mere probability.

Nietzsche practiced more integrity when he said there were no facts, only interpretations and that every word that every person ever uses is a prejudice. It sucks as a philosophy for living on earth, but it is more consistent or honest (more integrative) regarding one's basic assumptions.

A lot of business majors are pragmatists. Science and engineering majors tend to be metaphysical realists. The counter-culture is a mixture of existentialism and marxism. A lot of mathematicians and computer science majors strike me as idealists in the sense of alleging that universals have ontological primacy. Many IT professionals insist that you can't do computer science without dealing with abstractions apart from concretes.
I'm in general agreement here. Those IT professionals should read ITOE, specifically the Scientific Methodology section starting on page 301. In it, the subject of imaginary numbers -- a number that, when squared, equals -1 -- is brought up. Rand classified them as concepts of method rather than concepts of entities. There is actually no such thing as an imaginary number, but they are -- may I glibly say -- useful fictions.

:-)

Ed


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Post 56

Saturday, November 24, 2012 - 9:20amSanction this postReply
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Tales from the Observatory

The Realist, the Idealist, the Pragmatist, and the Existentialist were all sitting around the public observatory drinking beers. Each one had his own telescope. The Realist said to the others: "Hey, Others, come and see!"

Realizing that every moment was to be gained or lost via the abrupt and powerful exercise of personal will, the Existentialist budded in front of the others in order to look through the Realist's telescope first. The Existentialist pulled back immediately, turned white, did not say a word, and then promptly left the observatory to begin a life of living-in-the-moment crime.

The Pragmatist then looked through the Realist's telescope and saw what the Existentialist had seen, a blazing comet. The Pragmatist pulled back in amazement, and congratulated the Realist by saying: "What a neat thing you found while looking through this particular device with the particular adjustments that you had made! I wonder if others could get the same discovery by looking through a different, though similar, device adjusted in roughly the same manner." The Realist just smiled at the poor Pragmatist, and he motioned for the Idealist to come take a look.

The Idealist at first refused to look through the telescope, lest some of his basic premises be challenged. But after being mocked and cajoled by the Realist and the Pragmatist, he felt that other people must know more than him, that he should not trust his own mind, and so he, at that moment, gave in to the will and demand of others -- and he reluctantly took a look. "Oh my Lord", he proclaimed, "someone must have angered God, because he is so very obviously hurling a flaming ball toward Earth!" The Realist retorted: "Relax, it's not going to hit the earth, it's a comet, and it comes around every 76.1 years."

The Idealist was dumbfounded. How could the Realist know about something which had never come around in his lifetime? How could he see something for the very first time, and already know about what it is, and especially about what kinds of behavior to expect from it? To the Idealist, the only way to arrive at that kind of certainty was to know and understand the Will of God.

The Pragmatist was also taken aback. It seemed awful presumptious for the Realist to be able to so reliably predict the behavior of something that had never been personally seen before by any of them! The Pragmatist asked the Realist: "How do you know that? What exact steps or methods did you perform in order to arrive at the conclusion that this thing -- this thing that we've never seen before -- that it is what you say it is, and that it will do what you say it will do?" The Realist described the steps in detail but the Pragmatist still didn't get it.

"I don't see how you can arrive at your conclusion by following those steps. It seems to me that the historical descriptions you archived -- dating back to 240 BC -- could each and all have been descriptions of a different celestial body each time. There is no way to tell if each description of this comet was a description of the same comet at a different time -- or of a different comet at a different time. And even if we assume it was the same comet each time, there is no way to know that it will exert the very same behavior this time. Perhaps, for instance, it will turn toward Earth at the last minute and destroy all of us. We will have to calculate the probability of that. Let me see, how many times has this comet been described as coming around and then leaving without hitting the earth?"

"29 times.", said the Realist.

"Okay, now if something performs a certain behavior 29 times in a row, what is the probability that, on the next attempt, that it will continue to perform the same behavior ..."

"You're missing the point. I'm not just counting up the relative frequency of occurrences of things, I'm interpreting the behavior of specific entities inside of an illuminatingly-explained prism of regularity."

The Pragmatist's eyes draw wide open and he looks dumbfounded: "I have to have another drink. Pass me my beer." Then, nervously, he proclaims: "Hey, let's look through the Idealist's telescope!"

The Realist accepts the offer and peers through the telescope.

"It's all black, it's just darkness. Does this thing even work?"

"You have to use your imagination," retorted the Idealist, "You have to see with your 'heart' what cannot be seen with the eyes."

"Okay, now I need another beer." says the Realist jokingly. "Let's look through the Pragmatist's telescope."

The Idealist looks first. "Interesting. A lot of detail in there. Must be the work of a supernatural, intelligent designer."

"Let me see!" says the Realist, pulling the Idealist away from his precarious vantage point. "It's the Orion constellation, best identified by the proximate, linear arrangement of the 3 stars: Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka."

The Pragmatist tells the Realist "Just hold on there a minute. I found this grouping of stars by looking up into the night sky with a particular device set with particular adjustments. Are you telling me that -- without performing the epistemological work that I performed -- without looking for empirical evidence in the very same manner as I did ... are telling me that you already knew about this particular arrangement of heavenly bodies?"

"Well, sure. I know a lot things.", responded the Realist.

"Would you teach me how to know things like you ... like you know things ... without the specific, precise, and incessantly-individualized, concrete-bound, personal experimention interpretted inside the trappings of an arbitrary, social metaphysics -- which plagues me and every other like-minded observer?" asked the Pragmatist.

"Let's have a few more beers first", the Realist answers "because I would like to be able to rely on relaxing your inhibitions against what I am about to teach you."

The Pragmatist agrees, gets drunk, gets taught how to know things, passes out, and then wakes up as a Realist (only one with a hangover!).

The End

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 11/24, 9:28am)


Post 57

Wednesday, December 26, 2012 - 12:58amSanction this postReply
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How is your work on Worldviews coming along?

Post 58

Wednesday, December 26, 2012 - 6:45pmSanction this postReply
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Michael,

My latest installment was just posted in the thread of one of my other essays about the 4 main ways that humans think or feel. You can see from that installment that I modeled utilitarianism as pragmatism (or vice versa, depending on vantage point).

Ed


Post 59

Saturday, August 31, 2013 - 11:35pmSanction this postReply
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time to develop this further Ed

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