“As Rorty points out: nothing we could say about the mind or brain or how they accumulate knowledge could give any real clue as to how to clearly distinguish between a true or false statement in the general scheme of things. All we can truly know is what we agree on through discourse.” “Im not getting this...is not anything we could say about the mind or brain just one part of what we agree on through discourse?” I think you’re a little off course. But that may be as much (if not more so (my fault than yours. As Voltaire says: if you want to talk to me, define your terms. And sometimes defining our terms, given the linear and, consequently, transitory nature of language as well as the temporal (that which only serves as a momentary stay against confusion (character of meaning, consists of elaborating on what we have said: To approach it from another angle, if you look at what logic actually does, all you really see are descriptions of how it is the mind/brain actually works at bottom. If I say: A is B, B is C, therefore: A is C: all I am really describing (as true as this statement might seem (is how the mind/brain puts things together. And in that sense, it serves the same pleasure that a mathematician might experience from seeing how numbers work together. And in this sense, what we are mainly working with are the underlying structures of the brain that, in turn, influence how we think in terms described by both Chomsky and Pinker. And they are, in this sense, evolutionary legacies of how the mind/brain complex has evolved in the face of its changing environment. However, what it cannot do is tell us much about the truth value of statements we make about the complex environments the mind/brain complex deals with in the general scheme of things. If it does, it is only to the extent of a kind operationalism that says a healthy respect for the analytic/logical approach will necessarily equip us with the tools to move from statements about simple systems, such as 1+1=2, to the more complex of how to best organize society –such as Rand attempted to do with objectivism. At this point, no assertion about how the mind/brain complex works can tell us anything about the truth value of assertions about how reality works. That must be left up to the only criteria left to us: discourse and what comes out in the wash. That said, I agree with you when you say: “It seems to me that to expect knowledge about the physical workings of the brain to enable distinctions between true and false statements to be made would be to expect the impossible based on a conflation of two discourses; the discourse of causes and the discourse of reasons. So, we can say we believe things because of neural activity and this might be elaborated in the form of a description of a succession of neural processes resulting in a specific active neural network correlated with holding a belief. This might tell us how we came to hold a belief, but it cannot tell us why we hold that belief. To understand why we hold beliefs we need to understand the reasons that we hold them, not the causes.” I mean you’re pretty much saying it for me. I almost have to wonder, given the difficulties I’m still having with the more technical aspects of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (I mainly take to the more social/political aspects (if there isn’t something in there that approaches the very point you are making. You may be doing a better job of that than I am. “There is a parallel with contemporary jazz. There is a certain amount of education and familiarity with the tradition before it becomes accessible, one needs to understand the language. But even then one might wonder whether the return was worth the investment. And as with modern jazz, sometimes I get the sense that they are displaying their chops, their technical prowess. It often seems that many jazz musicians today play for other jazz musicians rather than a general audience, for those who appreciate their technical skills and command of theory. The same might be said of many contemporary philosophers. I don’t think this last remark holds only for Continental philosophers. Those who are trained in Analytic philosophy may feel out to sea when reading Continental philosophy, but the same may be true of those who are trained in Continental philosophy when they read Analytic philosophy.” Throughout the book (PMN (Rorty, copping off Wittgenstein, refers to them as different language games. In fact, one of his main arguments is that we cannot hope to find some kind of meta-language game that will bring all the various language games into a commensurable and coherent whole. This is why Hermeneutics (the Deleuzian creation of and play with concepts (the free play between different language games (is offered as a useful tool in the philosopher’s toolbox: the pragmatic truth test (that which just works (along with the truth tests of correspondence and coherence.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 21:29:44 +0000
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