Tag: epistemology

entry 28

meta-philosophical suspicion/hypothesis:

When philosophers (such as Richard Rorty and Paul Feyerabend) criticize contemporary philosophy through radical questioning of the legitimacy/foundations of epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie) – epistemology being right at the heart of philosophy – I think what they are truly attacking isn’t exactly epistemology in general, but instead specifically rationalist epistemology. And thus, despite providing cogent critiques of contemporary philosophical tradition, the negative conclusions that they draw on philosophy in general are too broad/general.

There is a trend of self-abasement in philosophy: of philosophers arguing that philosophy itself is a misguided, counter-productive and over-valued tradition/under-taking. In particular philosophy as an abstract tradition and philosophy as essentially epistemology. In this context, both Feyerabend and Rorty regularly draw connections to rationalism, e.g. to trends originating with Descartes or with pre-Socratics – their criticisms are made largely within contexts of identifying historical & theoretical consequences of various forms of rationalism. But they fail to reach the conclusion that this rationalistic form of philosophy which they criticize is of course contingent on whether philosophers operate within rationalism.The contents of their criticisms suggest that the epistemologies/philosophies they criticize are not the only possible/potential forms of philosophy…

And while I agree with their criticisms, I think that their criticisms are in fact themselves epistemology: they are epistemological, or meta-epistemological*, discussions and criticisms of rationalistic epistemologies! Their detailed, philosophical, critical exploration of the flaws of certain contemporary theories of and assumptions about knowledge are exactly what epistemology truly is! And indeed, this is philosophy.

*To me, it is relevant that a meta-level is involved, that the writings I have in mind are philosophy of epistemology. And, at the same time, I think a philosophical epistemology is one that includes – or rather appears only together with an attempt at – the next meta-level… And this goes for any topic or discipline… And this maybe a key distinction to rationalistic epistemology: that rationalistic epistemology is without the meta-level, presenting itself as an abstraction that is simply true in a vacuum. And this is anti-philosophical.

entry 26

This concerns philosophical discussions of the mind-body distinction and of the nature, concept and definition of consciousness & mind:

It maybe noteworthy that when more rationalistic philosophers, e.g. Karl Popper, are trying to define or explicate a notion of consciousness/mind for the purposes of a discussion/argumentation, they tend to emphasize sense-of-self as the defining or essential feature of consciousness/mind & de-emphasize actual qualia. (Which means they de-emphasize/ignore the concept that most directly and simply refers to subjective experience and the contents of consciousness in general – in favour of something more abstract.)

This maybe a consequence of the rationalistically stunted/inhibited introspection/vision of such thinkers: They fail to notice that one doesn’t actually see* a self – that self is a less concrete, more abstract entity, and that a sense of self is a very complicated basis for definition, as it is just an intuition/feeling of something that is already abstract and complex – unlike the more direct contents/constituents of consciousness, such as colours in a dream, which one does see. And the stunting of this kind of introspection or of introspective visual intuition occurs as follow:

Rationalists systematically ignore, neglect, devalue, inhibit, repress, and dismantle their intuition;**

then they destroy their understanding/idea of intuition;

then, in this new world where intuition is a broken and thus useless tool, they use just-based-on-an-intuition as an argumentative/rhetorical tool against opposing ideas, especially ones that clash with a rationalistic worldview.

*this can, theoretically, be generalized beyond the visual, but seeing suffices for the purposes of these points, and generalizing to something like perception in general to includes things like smells and tastes is counter-productively difficult because the notion of perceiving/perception is, in current philosophical discourse, too broken and confused.

**Taking intuition seriously/sincerely is antithetical to rational method/thinking, and intuitions are treated as something irrational and primitive that should be handled from the outside and treated with suspicion.

entry 21

Everyone has biases, always, & it’s OK to have biases.
And the mitigation, reduction and transcendence of biases that is prescribed by rationalism – by the ideals/principles of rationality – is folly.
 
[A proponent of ideals of rationality may reply that this results in pure relativism, ]but actually this needn’t/doesn’t result in relativism:
What’s important isn’t whether one has biases, but whether one’s biases are fixed* or can move, i.e. whether there is a dogma that is a/the fixed (and oft-unnoticed) source of one’s biases or whether one[‘s mind] is open to dialectic, unconstrained movement of ideas & evolution of theories/paradigms & organic growth and development of the overall ideological/theoretical/philosophical [meta-]structure…
 
I’m suggesting a mode of thinking that results not in biases being reduced [until they maybe disappear], but instead results in uncovering of a bias going hand-in-hand with a new, biased part of theory/mind being produced** – of which the bias later should/can be uncovered… So this is a step-wise, indefinitely continuing process by which a theory or mind or philosophy organically changes and grows.
 
And maybe on the meta-level I’m distinguishing between two ways of thinking/doing philosophy: seeing biases as negative or seeing them as interesting and as a necessary component of any temporary theory that one uses before one has reached the totality [of knowledge] (which of course nobody has and is indefinitely far in the future…
 

*if they are fixed, and one insists on reduction of bias, then the result is denial.

**meanwhile, the part/structure of theory/mind that one has found a bias in isn’t sanitized and maintained – it is commensurately exited/abandoned as one’s ideas move and one’s mind shifts to a new theory – the shifting of biases is a logical result of the movement/change of ideas. (or it is (temporarily) accepted along with its bias…)