[Wittrs] More on Analytic Philo vs. Neuroscience

From: kirby urner <kirby.urner@xxxxxxxxx>
To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 30 May 2011 16:56:30 -0700
On May 29, 6:40 pm, John Phillip DeMouy <jpdem...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Kirby,
>
>
>
> > I asked him during the more intimate dinner, to which I had privileged
> > access as a board member (mom my valued guest), whether he had
> > any sense of a countering school of thought.  He mentioned Searle
> > and this hazy legion of analytic philosophers but I think he's got no
> > clue re the Wittgensteinians.
> > The analytics are clinging to Enlightenment Rationalism in his view.
> > He senses the demise of positivism, as we all do.  That's quite the
> > backward-looking view though.
>

Here's a picture of Lakoff at the podium, this being the smaller dinner
room at the Heathman (nearby pix), not the great hall, the next door
Schnitzer (not captured to Photostream this time).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/5776564517/in/photostream

With his back to George in the above picture, in the white shirt, is
Terry Bristol, our president, and featured interviewee in this recent
public broadcasting footage:

http://www.opb.org/programs/oregonexperience/programs/35-Linus-Pauling/text_pages/44

(this is a house where I meet, we meet as Wanderers, sometimes
inviting out-of-town philosophers into our midst, engineers... full length
TV bio of Linus Pauling features tonight, we're having pizza)

My daughter just popped into my office, home from a friend's.  She needs
to work on her cases for Dallas.  She's 16.98 and one her district debate
tourney, Lincoln-Douglas format.  She just ran by her argument, which is
quirky.  That gets you points in "Keep Portland Weird" Portland, but will
Dallas judges be in the mood for ToonTown views?  Do we care?  She'll
have fun anyway.  We can't assume our values translate, just because jet
air travel exists.

The debate topic is public knowledge:  "resolved, the government
should put protecting universal human rights above the national
self interest."  You can see right off it's bogus in forcing this to fit
an either/or mold.  One could argue that always and only by protecting
universal human rights has the government ever in any way truly
advanced its own interests, not to clinch a side, but to point up
the mental poverty of Columbia's citizens (Columbia being a fictive
nation wherein Americans got it right by telling more of the truth
more often -- a far off land, with much higher living standards, far
better health care).

> Unfortunately, people lumping together "Analytic Philosophers" and
> dismissing them collectively is all too common.  Many would just attach
> the label to, e.g. Peter Hacker, one of the foremost Wittgensteinian
> critics of "Cognitive Science", and lump him with Searle, notorious for
> writing (damning him with faint) "praise" of Wittgenstein and for
> rejecting numerous principles of Wittgenstein's philosophical method and
> misrepresenting him on various points.  This use of labels to obscure
> tremendous differences is found in the oddest places.  (The same thing
> happens with the reception of so-called "Continental Philosophy", of
> course, and the labels become an excuse to stereotype and disregard.)

Hey John, almost didn't hear you with all this bulldozing going on,
quite the hard hat area all of a sudden.  Found too many of the same
thing on Google Groups, interleaved with yours, deleted two of 'em.

From my side, it's like not up to Everyman Tourist to keep it all straight,
who's analytic and who's not.  That's like going to a four star hotel and
getting bawled out because you don't know the difference between a
head Maitre'De and a nursing student, your having confused the restaurant
and hospital gestalt circuits in your loopy lobes, a hit on the head while
falling downstairs from Dr. Oliver Sack's office, where you were being
treated for an unrelated condition.

No, four star hotels shouldn't be bawling out guests, for lack of
nomenclature sophistication.  Likewise I don't see philosophers as
necessarily deserving of any "get it straight" treatment, their having
chosen to hyper-specialize on ways only professional hoteliers could
begin to really follow (and they're getting compensated, have excellent
room service).

Is Anglophone philosophy even four stars anymore?  Well that depends
if we include Richard Stallman (GNU, EFF) as one of the greats in
our Hall of Fame.  Maybe as a step up from Quine?  I didn't think so.

The academic analytics have parted ways from the geeks.  We'll be
pirating our own meaning for those words ("philosophy"... "analytic")
thank you very much, owing more to Wittgenstein, Ada Byron,
Alonso Church, other pioneers of the great language games, the
glass bead logics (LISP being one of them, APL another), envisioned
by Leibniz (still a superhero).

Whatever those hyperspecialists were doing, I'm not sure I need to
care.  Might as well read Episcopalian religious tracts before I noodle
about in their foobarred prose.  Wittgenstein was busy steering away
the men he loved from the stench of Oxbridge, as if from a stinking
Titanic.  Do we blame him?  Some do.

Kimberly "Jew of Linz" Cornish seems more like a noble captain, a
"going down with the ship" type.  More power to him.  "Doctors of
Philosophy" still have rank in some namespaces, so go for it.

> Personally, I regard (and have defended elsewhere this idea)
> contemporary Anlophone philosophy as properly "Post-Analytic" and
> Wittgensteinians like Hacker are the true Analytic philosophers of
> today, (and a minority in the current milieu) because they actually
> still regard the proper task of philosophy as conceptual analysis, do
> not regard philosophy as either somehow continuous with empirical
> science or as able to reveal metaphysical truths.  Those ideas are
> central to Oxford Linguistic Philosophy and Logical Positivism alike - a
> remarkable consensus during the interwar and immediate postwar period
> (and a consensus even partially shared by most Phenomenologists, the
> "Continental Philosophers" of the era) but are largely abandoned today.

I see all that was good about Analytic Philosophy getting snarfed
up by Computer Science and other successor lineages.  Philosophy
itself died out along that branch.

It's still alive in the west in Systems Science, Urban / Regional Planning,
some other interdisciplinary realms frequented by so-called "polymaths"
(like Bucky Fuller).  Wittgenstein has gained a lot of respect among
engineers, among followers of Buccieralli (MIT) for example.
http://web.mit.edu/sts/people/bucciarelli.html

Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics have proved their
relevance, as we transition our spatial geometry to a more secure
footing, more Eulerian (flexible, topological, pneumatic), less brittle.
HDTVs, LCDs, faster/better chips, made it imperative that we get
more operational in our thinking.  "Meaning as use" helps unstick
the mind from any particular logjam that might be holding us back.
Wittgenstein helps us limber up in the gym.  We don't just
investigate language games, we invent them (e.g. Facebook and
Twitter).

Lakoff, in neuroscience, was just not getting much of a picture in his
philosopher-detecting connect-the-dots circuit because the signal is
just so weak.  Signs of life have been dimming.

You have a nation in two wars and no one in the newspapers quoted
as "a philosopher" about anything.  It's just not an occupation that
has currency or gravitas.  "Standup Philosopher" is synonymous
with "Unemployable" in this neck of the woods (not that unemployable
is necessarily a bad thing, given Portland is where young people go to
retire -- and it's hard work pulling a bike trailer for Food Not Bombs
some days (I'm employed by the way, as a logic coach, mechanized
division)).

>
> Hacker's taking on nonsense in the fields of Psychology, Linguistics,
> Neuroscience, and Cognitive Science while remaining true to those
> principles of conceptual analysis making him one of the standard bearers
> for what Wittgenstein had to teach us.  Of course, Wittgenstein taught
> so much and there are others continuing the tradition in quite distinct
> ways, ways one might see as quite remote from Hacker's approach, though
> they share a common inheritance.

Maybe we can rescue this Hacker, have him join the other hackers.
He should come to OSCON, help us pioneer philosophy on Youtube
(like with TED/TEDx/Ignite talks).

From my point of view, what saved philosophy in the early 21st century
was reforging ties with classic spatial geometry, ala the polyhedrons.
Coxeter was a king in that realm, and a student of Wittgenstein's.

The 1900s avant gard maybe thought Polyhedrons were over and
done with (too Da Vinci, not "Cubist" enough (snark)), but they were
wrong.

Philosophy got another lease on life because of old faithfuls like Phi.
There's nothing in Wittgenstein that puts on a red light re Polyhedrons.
On the contrary, he's interested in color and DuckRabbits and so are
we.

>
> It may be best though that Wittgensteinianism remain a minority view,
> never an orthodoxy, and that within that minority, diversity flourishes.
> Doctrinaire approaches are inevitable when ideas harden through
> consensus into dogmas and doctrinaire approaches, however inspired by
> Wittgenstein they might be, are antithetical to the spirit of
> Wittgenstein's work.
>

Good words of warning.  Yes, I'm all for a minority clique not being too
quick to share the fame and glory.

Hyper-specialists are on the defensive these days, not the "experts"
everyone
was supposed to wanna grow up to become.

A few good philosophers are fighting those next wars (always five or six
looming, try to keep that to under two or three).  Preventative health.
Anticipatory.  Looking ahead.  That means science fiction, planning,
storyboarding.

All the most promising philosophers look future ward, by definition,
which doesn't mean one can't have a head for history.

Kirby

> Take care,
> John
>
> __________
[Wittrs] More on Analytic Philo vs. Neuroscience

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