[Wittrs] Re: The Vexing Question
- From: "iro3isdx" <xznwrjnk-evca@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 03:04:28 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "SWM" <SWMirsky@...> wrote:
> Now it's my turn to ask what part of what I said you don't
> understand? I have already explained what I mean by conceptual
> analysis. It is not divorced from the world or from our actual
> linguistic practices. Indeed, it is intrinsically tied to them.
Sorry, but I find it unconvincing.
If I take a physics class, I will be taught how to wield a ruler, how
to use a thermometer, how to connect a galvanometer. Or in chemistry I
will be taught how to titrate. There is no problem connecting
scientific terminology to reality, because that is what is taught in
the lab classes with hands-on practice. Philosophy, by contrast, is
pretty much done from the arm chair and the contact with reality is
largely illusory.
I'm not trying to attack philosophy. I'm just shocked at the way you
dismissed attempts to actually connect it to reality.
> The question then is to what extent we order the inputs we receive? I
> presume you didn't mean that we do it completely then when, before,
> you made statements that seemed to say that?
This misses the point entirely. I have been arguing against the view
that we receive inputs. The point, rather, is that we order our
behavior toward the world in ways that would allow us to construct
useful representations of the world. And if the resulting
representations are ordered, then that ordering comes from the way we
ordered our behavior.
> The order is in the world.
So you assert. But all you have done is assert.
> If we were ordering something that wasn't there, we would quickly
> stumble into the croc's mouth or whatever other strange and
> inconceivbale thing is awaiting us.
Are you somehow presuming that every photon of light has a little label
attached reading something like "this photon comes from a crocodile",
and we just look at the label to see how the world has ordered things?
That the world can be said to have crocodiles is an artifact of human
classification schemes. The current classification scheme derives from
the work of Linnaeus, from less than 300 years ago. The way the
biological world is ordered today is significantly different from the
way it was ordered before the work of Linnaeus. If you ask biologists
today, many will tell you that there is something arbitrary about the
division into species.
>> According to idealism, you start with representations, and invent
>> a world out of those representations.
> No, idealism holds that the phenomena of the physical world are
> just phantasms of the mind, that all that is physical is merely a
> particular construction we place on mental phenomena which are the
> real basic things of the universe.
Maybe we are reading different literature. You seem to be describing
solipsism rather than idealism. Berkeley used the slogan "being is
perception." He was not denying perception. If we allow
"representation" to apply to what comes from perception, then he was
not denying representations. He was denying that there was a material
world as a source of those representations. I think he viewed the
perceptions as coming directly from God, though I'm not certain of
that.
>> I am very explicitly disagreeing with that. I say that we start
>> with an unrepresented world, and invent ways to form representations.
> But you don't want to say the representations are totally invented
> I take it?
My view is that we construct representations, by following the
procedures we have invented. We don't just "fake them up" which the
idea of a totally invented representation would suggest.
>>> But whatever it is, please consider the argument I make above about
>>> crossing the street.
>> Sorry, but it was a silly argument, based on your misinterpreting
what
>> I wrote.
> That's possible but what you wrote did assert that we create
> our world.
I'm quite sure I never said that.
>> In an earlier post, I used the camera as an analogy. I clearly
>> distinguished between using a camera to take picture (form a
>> representation), and inventing a camera. It's in the inventing of
>> the camera where human input is most important.
> Inventing comes along later in the process.
Sigh!
The camera example is only an analogy to illustrate the point. Of
course we don't invent cameras until late. But we do invent neural
structures and we do invent behaviors. And those inventions come
early. They are what gives us access to the world.
> Pragmatics is based, in the final analysis, on empirical data. What
> works in the real world or works better will out.
I am saying that it is mainly the other way around - the empirical data
is based on pragmatics.
>> There is no "physics of the data". Mathematics deals with data,
>> physics deals with the physical world.
> Data is the information we get from the empirical, read physical,
> world.
And how do we get that data?
>>> Thus, he notes, we order the world pretty much in accord with how
>>> the world is ordered.
>> But I find no basis for that.
> If we didn't, we'd have a hell of a time surviving from an
> evolutionary perspective.
That seems to be a misunderstanding of evolution. The principle of
evolution implies that those who find useful ways of ordering the world
will be the survivors. It nowhere says that the world has to be a
magically pre-ordered place so as to make it possible for humans to
survive.
Regards,
Neil
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