Lecture Notes - PART 1, 11 November 2004
My comments and thoughts are marked by the double slashes (//) and are italicized - Timothy
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// Taylor began the lecture explaining what the title, "mediational epistemology' means. 'Epistemology' is a word that even I have trouble with, not because I don't understand it, but because it is only ever used among philosophers and I forget its definition, until I re-visit the dictionary. Epistemology is the technical word for the study of knowledge. 'What is it we know, how do we know it, how can we know it'? In essence, this is question is at the heart of philosophy, since the various answers to those questions have produced the various schools and methods. The epistemology of science, for example, is based on empiricism - what we can know through our senses - which we can summarize as "we believe what we see". Skepticism questions even this, asking, "how can we believe what we see? What if you hallucinate?" But this is essentially what Decartes introduced with his work. Empiricism and skepticism were new ways of approaching our experience of life and the subjectivity of our minds, because until then it had all been 'you are an embodied soul which has to be nice otherwise you will burn in hell forever after you die'.
- embedded Cartesianism in the culture, despite all post-modernist, structuralist rhetoric
- Rorty would be considered foundationalist
- mediational
- our knowledge is through representation in the mind of the world (via our senses)
- Decartes to Locke (mediational ='only through')
What's going on?
- views: display the structure although elements have changed
- linguistic turn in philosophy
- Decartes "ideals" are inner representations (petit peintures)
- whereas today we have a study of the linguistics of the human mind
- from les petits peintures [small paintings] to sentence structures
sentences 'hold true' via something inner
// that is, our use of sentences is dependent on our internal understanding of the language
materialist shift
- which is supposed to be anti-Decartes
but even this materialism reveals a materialist bias, by using language, borrowed from digitization of 'input' to be 'processed'
- where the mind is considered to be a 'syntactic engine'
Wittgenstein
- "a picture held us captive"
- we take these views for granted as common sense
- Now, what is involved in this structure?
- motivation for the structure in Decartes
- necessity for a method to permit certainty
- the tradition he inherits is invalidated
- Decartes asks, what do I really know? Could I doubt this?
Decartes thought the method would match reality
- He is proposing independence in our thinking. We don't need to rely on others nor on traditions
- We are responsible for our understanding of the world, because we construct our understanding of the world.
- The alternative would be a reliance on what is, what has been said = tradition
- Most people believe in dualism
- modes of existence that are minded and bodied
- you couldn't understand the explanatory concepts without that knowledge - like "up" and "down", which refer to our physicality
- The disengagement from our body encourages disengagement from society, and encourage selfishness
- The materialist enterprise is to try and to take something like mental intuition, embodying it by translate into algorithmic form
- Cartesian - all thinking translated into programming and yet monistic - materialism
other than mediational?
- the platonic - melding of reality and metaphysics
- Aristotle - object intellect - knowledge - is one - informed by "form"
- Hopkins - "the inscape" - similar to the notions of the Platonic Form
- we do not take this too seriously because we live in a post-Newton world that is materialistic
Today we are cultural-social agents, in ways that break up the mediational; breaks dualism
- opposite of mediational = contact theories
- Contact theories are displaced by Decartes and mechanistic worldview
- Contact theories do not / cannot achieve hegemony in our culture such as the mediational have
Cartesianism creates a sense of self-responsibility
- narration begins
- "being adult and grown up"
- secularism - "come of age" finding the hard truth over "childishness"
- an internally changing narrative, implying being "rescued by Darwinian heroes"
// That is, the idea that we are responsible for our own understanding, through interpreting the world through our senses, creates a sort of internal narration. If everything is based on 'I' than, 'I went here, did that, grew up, am growing old'. This in turn is extended to the idea that the collection of I's as society are engaged in a process of progress, punctuated by hereos, unique I-minds who can alter events.
- The Light metaphor of Plato vs. the light metaphor as generated by us
- Plato: "out there" that we have to find
- Us: the 18th C Enlightenment
- Enlighten: and we believe it because it "makes sense" when "you look at it"
// The light of our minds, the briallance of our rationality. Not for nothing the cartoonists use the lightbulb to indicate ideas
Others (Heidegger) see Cartesianism as an imposition and why?
To conclude: So, the common sense of our age is made over and is divided by Cartesianism - mention of The Matrix - and those who agreed and those who didn't, which shows a division in common sense
End of Part 1
// Commentary: This first lecture was an overview of the Cartesian bias in our popular culture. He noted how the first exercises of the method, Decartes asks that one consider this for a good month, because it seemed so counter-intuitive to a 17th Century audience. Today, we grow up within the Cartesian worldview, as is best exemplified by the popularity of The Matrix
. Taylor mentioned that at the end of this lecture, saying he watched it because his students had seen it, hated it, and mentioned that not everyone agreed with its ideas. However, tonight's lecture was about establishing that even the disciplines which consider themselves post-Cartesian, post-dualist, use language inherited from the popularity of this philosophy.
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Part 2, 12 November 2004
- Skepticism is the dark companion of Cartesian hegemony
- Decartes uses skeptical arguments to bolster his arguments
- the common theme is to get to irrefutables
// ground thinking in things that people can't argue with, which is the basis for contempoary philosophic argument/theory and the scientific method
Humeian impressions
- the Humian skeptical variant
- Hume is famous for seperating causation from coincidence: with two events, do we have causal connections?
- The assumption is take a particulate and argue whether is connected or not
- "we don't pick out bits except by placing it in a larger background - because only in this background makes it a bit"
- You need a context to identify things
(A running joke during the lectures was that there was provision in the UN Charter of Human Rights preventing a lecturer from talking beyond an hour - at this point he checked his watch and brought up the joke.)
Kant
- Kant - halfway figure - gave the beginnings of a set of arguments to remove the mediational (the transcendental deduction and the refutation to Hume's skepticism and atomization)
- if something is going to be a "bit" - a bit of something else - it can't just be a sensation, it had to link to something. 'To be a bit of something is has to be about something'
- our sensations link to our perception of context - of an object - of our context, grasped as a larger whole
- The big mistake is made by Locke and Hume - they assume intelligibility to the whole - as if each bit contains its context, as if you could define lumber only by houses ('My my, that pile of wood will make a fine house', as opposed to other options).
Heidegger
- the idea that values come over facts
- a factual picking up of things happens before we assign value
- Heidegger argues against this - the world 'inhabits us' before, and later we learn how to distinguish its elements, its bits
- only because we've been evolving forms of context from childhood to adulthood - developing skills an disciplines to contextualize
- our 1st way is things are significant/relevant
- we are mostly in the world of significant tools rather than contextualized bits
// the basic introduction to Heidegger's thinking always makes the point that we use our environment in terms of tools - we take for granted the use value of everything. The example always given is that of a hammer - we don't think too much about it when we use it to drive a nail, but if the hammer was broken, and was then useless, we are very much aware of how useful it would be - it's use-value is brought to our consciousness. Of course, this reminds me of something else, a saying: 'if your only tool is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail'. Our tools also begin to define the way we look at the world, which is a useful metaphor but a limited one. We aren't really that unimaginative - instead of looking at everything as nails, we actually go about inventing new tools.
Wittgenstein
- Another atomistic theory - that introduces words and gives them meaning one by one, referring to the passage in Augustine's Confessions where Augustine contemplated on how he learned language. Wittgenstein pointed out that we don't in fact learn language that way at all, rather that we learn language as part of greater contexts. The Augustine model is one where there is a one-to-one correspondence between an idea in the mind and a sound.
- Wittgenstein argues that this can't work and is impossible.
- "If you want the meaning, look for its use".
- "style setting", that is, contextualizing, is needed to communicate the meaning of every single word. Taylor used the example of the lectern, suggesting that if he wanted to teach the audience a new word for it, he would have to communicate the context to help them understand its meaning, defined by its precence in the lecture all, and that it was the thing behind which he spoke.
Robert Brandom
- his point is to move away from a theory where representation is central to knowledge, but inputs should be the center.
- information has ripples and ramification / implications, which cascade into context
Heidegger
- our understandings of our environment consists in how to move around in it and use it, without needing facts about it
- we have a 'use' understanding of our homes without having a topological understanding - the understanding to transfer into facts
// that is, our knowledge of how to move about in our homes is independent of a map, if we were actually to see a cross section of our house, we'd have a different understanding of what rooms are where and how they relate to one another in terms of layout; at least this would be true of those among us who haven't built their house. In other words...
- our ability to catch a ball, tie a tie, is not knowledge that is separable from the object - the actions associated with them
// another example is how we sometimes forget the phone number, but remember how to dial it
- scientific, explicit knowledge, depends on 'representation' but that is not "the only game in town"
The error is reading the method, the Cartesian method, back into reality, which leads to a heroism of "checking for ourselves"
// At this point in the lecture I was reminded of a joke I'd seen on Slashdot, regarding a discussion on Leonardo da Vinci as a programmer: "All your technology are belong to Leo". Leonardo da Vinci is one of these Cartesian heroes, held up by the scientific community for his method of empirical inquiry.
The Cartesian method implies
- that you could 'build it up all on your own'
- if we just look at the nature of languages and the ways we get 'get inducted in conversation'
- when we write on our own you operate monologically but that should bend back into the conversation
- the dialogic - even though the monological in based on a target audience
- the ability to be monological is dependent on the dialogic
- beings of language are subject to questions such as, 'is that the right way to describe something'
Heidegger
- 'thought in between', in conversation
- work on the development of language in children shows how getting a grasp on concepts arises in exchanges which are emotional and also 'exchange rituals' which explore and stabilize the emotional levels of the child who allows them to grasp a concept.
- the capacity to be 'minded' - connected to language - emerges in exchange
What has been lost with the 'Cartesian hegemony'?
- modern western culture - disembodying, excarnation
- 'I am my mind and my body is but a vehicle'
modern ethical philosophy
- Kantian 'utility actors'
- to ancient ethics, moral motivation doesn't determine the right things to do
- In the Modern
- visceral feelings are distrusted
// The Cartesian hegemony as resulted in the favoring of the mental and the rational. The distrust of the body as merely a vehicle results in a our distrust of emotional motivation. Taylor suggests that ethics should incorporate our gut reactions. Because these lectures are at Trinity College, and are supposed to be somewhat connected to spirituality, he raised the example of the Good Samaritan
- The Good Samaritan could be seen in one way as precursor to Kant - a duty to help. Or, he could be seen as someone who took pity on the abused fellow. And pity is not something that you can learn, it is an ethic of empathy, a gut reaction
- The modern condition distrusts philosophies incorporating emotional considerations because of Cartesian excarnation.
// In the question and answer period, the following notes where made:
- Hume, the extensions of sympathy/empathy
- Popper - the conjecture/refutation to undermine each others argument to get better articulations
- Humeian condition - that each sentence would be intelligible outside the context
End of Part 2
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// Commentary: today's world is one of the Cartesian hegemony, and everyone thinks of themselves as minds who think therefore they are. The 2nd lecture argued that Cartesianism isn't accurate, because it puts all the responsibility on the individual, neglecting how much of our understanding is dependent on our interactions with one another. It is not simply the case where an individual can heroically manufacture reality in their mind, and think for themselves. In fact, those among us who do that are often diagnosed with schizophrenia. No, instead we come to agree through our 'dialogic' interactions (that is, through dialogue, through talking with one another) on reality. We agree that the meanings of words are what they are, we agree and understand that we have things in common.
So, 'an end to mediational epistemology' means: an end to knowledge through the senses, and our own heroic interpretation of the knowledge, in favour of interpretation through dialogue, which properly grounds knowledge in appropriate context.
