[lit-ideas] Re: Auerbach on Mimesis
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2008 07:56:20 +0900
On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 3:48 AM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> I'm a bit surprised to learn that politics, marketing, creative cooking,
> 'therapy,' anthropology do not make use of measurement and observation, and
> that they all ignore empirical findings.
Professor Paul, I am shocked. From what I wrote you learned no such thing.
Perhaps I mistook you when you wrote yourself of experiments and equations,
failing to realize that you had nothing more in mind than empirical
observation and the sort of inference that goes on when, after a bit of
palaver, businessman A says to businessman B, "Looks like a deal to me" or
my wife says to me of something I've cooked "A bit too much salt." I had
thought that, being a philosopher, you had something a bit more precise in
mind, the sort of thing described in tomes on scientific method or books on
number theory.
More precisely, what I had in mind is a diagram from a discussion of general
systems theory, where the author shrewdly observes that, from a scientific
perspective the world is divided into three zones. One, at the bottom of the
diagram, is the zone of mechanical explanations, where relationships are
simple and experiments can be conducted. At the top of the diagram is the
zone where statistical explanations work, given proper sampling based on
independent observations. Most of the world, however, falls in the middle
zone, where things are too complex for mechanical explanations and too
interconnected for statistical sampling.The activity called philosophy
appears to fall in there; but so do a lot of other things, which involve
measurement, observation and thinking about empirical findings but would not
ordinarily be considered either physical science or equations. Things like
cooking a souffle, catching a muskrat, starting a business, ending a war,
etc.
That said, coming from my own disciplinary background, I still find the
proposition that philosophy is an activity an interesting place to begin. It
opens up all sorts of anthropologically interesting questions: Who engages
in this activity? Why these particular people at this particular place in
time? How do they identify each other and distinguish what they are doing as
philosophy or non-philosophy? Why does the Reed philosophy curriculum
include courses on metaphysics and epistemology but not anime, accounting or
aromatherapy?
There is, perhaps, evidence that bears on these questions in Walter's
definition of philosophy as
" a transcendental form of inquiry into the apriori conditions necessary for
the
possibility and limits of specific discourses and competencies."
Here we might note any number of interesting assumptions, e.g., a
perspective above and beyond the fray, from which the philosophical umpire
can determine the rules of whatever language game has caught his mind. We
may wonder at the premise that the language games in question are divided
into specific discourses and competencies whose possibilities and
limitations can be precisely defined, when the the language games we play
seem much more changeable and much more muddled than that. Assumptions and
definitions, sure bet, we can't get along without them. Can't play a game
without some rules. But they all wind up seeming somewhat askew, leading
people, including philosophers, to go on tinkering with them. But, for all
this niggling, Walter's definition at least gives us another place to begin:
not experiments, not equations, transcendental inquiry. Everyone here on
board with that?
John
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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