We have been discussing dangerous ideas lately. I asked my daughter (Bebe) to write an essay on her dangerous idea. Here is her idea: My Dangerous Idea: Dissolution of Solution Turbulence has long beleaguered conversation about prescriptivism and descriptivism in the ways of metaphysics, linguistic theory, and ethics. Semantically, the split represents two possible preferences in processing language: for the prescriptivists, that means establishing fixed definitions for words and phrases according to standards academia believes ought to prevail. For the descriptivists, preference is settled in the observation and acceptance of new words and intentions that evolve and emerge spontaneously over time. While the former is rigid and rooted in an exclusive groups decision-making process (the dictionarians of our Western world), the latter is flexible and modest. It listens to and echoes the way things actually are, instead of ought to be. So descriptivists will accept the introduction of new words, learning their appropriate placement and establishing consistency in their employment, but prescriptivists will not. The new new is a no no. Obviously, the descriptivists and prescriptivists agree on one indecisive principle: a threshold of consistency. While their thresholds exist at different measurable scales, with dictionary descriptivists prioritizing early mimetic behavior and prescriptivists refusing acknowledgement of it because it ought not to exist, they still share a scale -- a local world in which quantities, not intensities, determine tipping points. Usually, descriptivists and prescriptivists are divided over the subject of a words symbolic subsumption. When a word is taken over by a host body, usually a group of people who subvert it for their own use, there is discussion about whether to preserve the word and deny that slang, co-definitions exist (prescriptivism) or to acknowledge and accept the word and its new meanings all the while recognizing and examining its historical transformation. A current example of this frustration exists in the feminist community, where the word feminism has been proverbially hijacked and redressed, distributed to mainstream media outlets, and modified into a symbol with a meaning that is not the same as it was in another temporal vector space. Should proponents of the first feminist definition deny that the new meaning of feminism is the meaning of feminism? Or should they accept that the definition has changed and subsequently regroup? These are classic prescriptivist vs. descriptivist questions. What the semantic prescriptivists fail to realize is that without allowing new definitions of the same words to emerge and dominate, conversations about why and how are silenced. And if silencing the symptoms of human behavior is dangerous as it prevents chasms of elucidation to incite social reform, then isnt prescriptivism syllogistically dangerous? -- And not the kind of revolutionary danger that describes descriptivist subversion, but the kind of fascist, reactionary danger that accompanies prescriptivist censorship. The mechanics of language will prevail regardless; without consistency there is no understanding. But the politics of rejecting definitions and ideas through institutional suppression is not essential to any avenue of comprehension; in fact it is at odds with all of them. In ethical conversation, one may cringe at the thought of accepting descriptivism as a framework for processing judgment. It is in opposition to the idea of a universal morality, that good and bad decisions can be objectively deduced from the data of the circumstance. It seems outrageously dangerous not to establish a set of rules for how people ought to behave according to the indisputable facts we have about what is good and what is bad. That is, after all, the line of thinking that inspired the United States Constitution -- and who could argue with a document like that? Oh, right. The Supreme Court. See, the data that we, people making ethical decisions, use to deduce the morality of a circumstance is influenced by personalized variables, ineffable characteristics known as qualia. The most obvious example of qualia is the aura of color. As described by G.E. Moore in Principia Ethica, if one wants to understand yellow, one must see examples of it. It will do no good to read the dictionary and learn that yellow names the colour of egg yolks and ripe lemons, or that yellow names the primary colour between green and orange on the spectrum, or that the perception of yellow is stimulated by electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength of between 570 and 590 nanometers, because yellow is all that and more[...] We make decisions using data from personal memory, public history, mathematical probability, and semiotic agreement (the vertebrae of communication). If someones sensation of pleasure is data, what is measured is their raphe nuclei releasing serotonin to the brain. But the experience, the essence of that release Being pleasure, can only be described as qualia. Yes, it can be measured. No, its ulterior relevance cannot. At the moment, the prescriptive definition established for moral is minimizing the most amount of suffering. Through this logical framework, mathematical deductions can be made about maximal morality, although hypothetical potholes about higher sub-quantities of quality in a smaller macro-quantities surface (especially in the paradox of saving one Gandhi or four homeless men, and killing one homeless man to save four peacemakers). But even within that hypothetical, quantities are privileged as the ultimate arbiters of a moral decision. More or less pleasure? Most or least suffering? This numerical hegemony is endemic of universal prescriptivism. According to a branch of ethical philosophy called ethical non-naturalism, this tendency to affix definitions to good and bad, then measure the quantities of those qualities within circumstantial epistrata is known as the naturalistic fallacy. As Arthur N. Prior, author of Logic and the Basis of Ethics continues that the fallacy is the assumption that because some quality or combination of qualities invariably and necessarily accompanies the quality of goodness, or is invariably and necessarily accompanied by it, or both, this quality or combination of qualities is identical with goodness. If, for example, it is believed that whatever is pleasant is and must be good, or that whatever is good is and must be pleasant, or both, it is committing the naturalistic fallacy to infer from this that goodness and pleasantness are one and the same quality. The naturalistic fallacy is the assumption that because the words good and, say, pleasant necessarily describe the same objects, they must attribute the same quality to them. Natural law theorists contend goodness is not suffering or/and pleasure. Contemporary philosophers, many of whom are neuroscientists, have even been able to measure pleasure sensations in brain patterns and chemical analysis. So it is without question that pleasure is not so ineffable it cannot be described in the particle structure of a dopamine molecule. Sam Harris describes this as the science of breaking down terms into constituents. Proponents of ethical subjectivism agree that circumstances contain and are within parts, which can be analyzed at scales to which we are capable of computing. But thats the problem: computation. Universal moral theory, the prescriptivism of meta-ethics, isnt a dangerous idea in that it threatens comfortable modes of livelihood, it is a dangerous idea in that is uncharacteristically unaccountable. It scientizes morality by defining constituents, distributing static meanings, and establishing rational equations to discern ethical output. While it is consistent in its computational efficacy, it is also consistent in its failure to consider and listen to the Other. While the Other usually refers to a political scapegoat in academic discourse, here it refers to the possibility of entropy and Un-Truth. Moral computation may measure constituents, but moral computation is in itself a constituent of a scale it does not know and its proponents do not acknowledge. No equation is essentially in a position to generate solutions because no equation is actually static, it is always dependent on the constituent organ it occupies. Thus, moral realists do very little to describe reality when they invent their own values to accompany the variables that begin rational equations: X = [...] -- the science used to generate these definitions are always already corrupted by their placement in impossibly larger, unquantifiable, qualic spaces.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 22:01:27 +0000
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