Foucault - Chomsky #2b
(having not yet moved further along in the article)
... but hopefully making more sense today
Creativity ... so, we have an example with this very word. Chamsky is not just using the word differently, he is also examplifying exactly what Foucault is saying. The word "creativity" no longer means what it used to mean once the psychological (and later, the neuroscientific) community have started to make a technical term out of it. And later, when this en-vogue theory gives way to another ... when we have found other more important questions ... the term "creativity" will get taken and used in another sense. And, importantly, this is not progress ... they are failed attampts and reductionism (reducing the term "creativity" to this or that set of elements) and we start over.
In Saul Kripke's (Omaha Central !) ... "Naming and Necessity" Kripke paints the picture of the earliest names of an object merely picking out a thing for later work. We say "gold" ... and later humans are able to compare the maluability and ductibility and etc of the element against other elements even when the gold is white or green or when other gold-colored rocks are found to be something other than gold. The set of properties that "stick" to the description are allowed to change, to become more refined. In the 20th century we learn that gold has 79 protons and an atomic weight of ... ummm .... 197 is it? Now ... if we see a new case of something out there in the world we are going to judge whether or not that new thing, maybe it came on a meteor, is gold based on its atomic properties ... though ... and this is important ... if its not enough like the phenomenal properties of gold (soft, maluable, etc) then it will probably be given some hyphenated taxonomy .... like white gold.
Foucault could reply to the Kripke framework soemthing like ... look ... that's fine ... but what if in the next 50 years we find some quantum energy level description of gold (and other elements) and we start teaching classification in terms of that? We are going to try to reduce all the same terms to some other new thing ... and it will always be the case that there is some other new thing on the horizon.
The thing about something like gold, and chenical elements, though, is that the old description does not get discarded completely. The pre-atomic standards of determining if a thing is gold are still valid today, and even if chemistry were reduced to (quantum) physics, and then again later to something else ... the atomic taxonomy still holds true.
Psychology and other not mature sciences (economics, sociology, etc) are not like this. Some may take a long time to die ... but i doubt there are any psychologists working at the cutting edge of psychology today that are, more than metaphorically or drastic change in word usage, be3haviorists or Freudians or even really Piaget-ian or gestaltest. [Some launchpad ideas, sure, but the structure and language of the study ... the core ontology, has drastically changed] ... and the old terms are no longer valid. At most they are very special cases of a truth.
And again with Newton ... his truths do hold very proximately here on earth, except for the finest levels of measuring. Most science and engineering work could be done just fine even today without knowing any quantum theory or even general relativity. Medicine, a field as old if not older, can not say the same. As noted by Foucault ... it is hard to even recognize past medical writing if you are familiar with today's writing.
But still ... we have to take seriously the problems imposed on us by, say, Newton's 2nd Law ... f=ma. In the Newtonian world 'm' is a constant ... not so post Einstein. f=ma really only does work as a special case in the Newtonian sense.
To me it comes down to this ... are there cases where the old accumulated knowledge remains valuable? If even just one or two areas have now, or are capable of gaining in the future, such a kind of knowledge (that may be reduced to other terms, but is never considered false per se ... such like gold where every case of something having the old phenomenological properties has the atomic properties of AU, and everything with the atomic properties of AU will feel and act like gold) ... ... ...
I think, utlimately, it comes down to this two part questions. Are there Natural Kinds? ... and if yes, can humans uniquely identify them?
[Note that Nelson Goodman's new problem of induction (as well as the older Humean induction problem) does not go away. Logically, the NEXT discovery could force us to change our entire way of thinking ... "grue emeralds". The above is targeting a different complaint ... how to determine if the 'grille' problem is not merely common, but actually indefeatable.]
The Natural Kind question, unfortunately, is not an armchair question. One must say either yes or no. 40,000 years from now, maybe someone can make an informed guess. More likely ... the question will merely have been cast aside, just as Foucault might suggest.
(New scientific theories rarely answer the 'problem questions' brought at them, they make the asking irrelevent. The old-school scientists are rarely convinced of the new truths, but they retire from the field, and the new-school inherits that field.)
... but hopefully making more sense today
Creativity ... so, we have an example with this very word. Chamsky is not just using the word differently, he is also examplifying exactly what Foucault is saying. The word "creativity" no longer means what it used to mean once the psychological (and later, the neuroscientific) community have started to make a technical term out of it. And later, when this en-vogue theory gives way to another ... when we have found other more important questions ... the term "creativity" will get taken and used in another sense. And, importantly, this is not progress ... they are failed attampts and reductionism (reducing the term "creativity" to this or that set of elements) and we start over.
In Saul Kripke's (Omaha Central !) ... "Naming and Necessity" Kripke paints the picture of the earliest names of an object merely picking out a thing for later work. We say "gold" ... and later humans are able to compare the maluability and ductibility and etc of the element against other elements even when the gold is white or green or when other gold-colored rocks are found to be something other than gold. The set of properties that "stick" to the description are allowed to change, to become more refined. In the 20th century we learn that gold has 79 protons and an atomic weight of ... ummm .... 197 is it? Now ... if we see a new case of something out there in the world we are going to judge whether or not that new thing, maybe it came on a meteor, is gold based on its atomic properties ... though ... and this is important ... if its not enough like the phenomenal properties of gold (soft, maluable, etc) then it will probably be given some hyphenated taxonomy .... like white gold.
Foucault could reply to the Kripke framework soemthing like ... look ... that's fine ... but what if in the next 50 years we find some quantum energy level description of gold (and other elements) and we start teaching classification in terms of that? We are going to try to reduce all the same terms to some other new thing ... and it will always be the case that there is some other new thing on the horizon.
The thing about something like gold, and chenical elements, though, is that the old description does not get discarded completely. The pre-atomic standards of determining if a thing is gold are still valid today, and even if chemistry were reduced to (quantum) physics, and then again later to something else ... the atomic taxonomy still holds true.
Psychology and other not mature sciences (economics, sociology, etc) are not like this. Some may take a long time to die ... but i doubt there are any psychologists working at the cutting edge of psychology today that are, more than metaphorically or drastic change in word usage, be3haviorists or Freudians or even really Piaget-ian or gestaltest. [Some launchpad ideas, sure, but the structure and language of the study ... the core ontology, has drastically changed] ... and the old terms are no longer valid. At most they are very special cases of a truth.
And again with Newton ... his truths do hold very proximately here on earth, except for the finest levels of measuring. Most science and engineering work could be done just fine even today without knowing any quantum theory or even general relativity. Medicine, a field as old if not older, can not say the same. As noted by Foucault ... it is hard to even recognize past medical writing if you are familiar with today's writing.
But still ... we have to take seriously the problems imposed on us by, say, Newton's 2nd Law ... f=ma. In the Newtonian world 'm' is a constant ... not so post Einstein. f=ma really only does work as a special case in the Newtonian sense.
To me it comes down to this ... are there cases where the old accumulated knowledge remains valuable? If even just one or two areas have now, or are capable of gaining in the future, such a kind of knowledge (that may be reduced to other terms, but is never considered false per se ... such like gold where every case of something having the old phenomenological properties has the atomic properties of AU, and everything with the atomic properties of AU will feel and act like gold) ... ... ...
I think, utlimately, it comes down to this two part questions. Are there Natural Kinds? ... and if yes, can humans uniquely identify them?
[Note that Nelson Goodman's new problem of induction (as well as the older Humean induction problem) does not go away. Logically, the NEXT discovery could force us to change our entire way of thinking ... "grue emeralds". The above is targeting a different complaint ... how to determine if the 'grille' problem is not merely common, but actually indefeatable.]
The Natural Kind question, unfortunately, is not an armchair question. One must say either yes or no. 40,000 years from now, maybe someone can make an informed guess. More likely ... the question will merely have been cast aside, just as Foucault might suggest.
(New scientific theories rarely answer the 'problem questions' brought at them, they make the asking irrelevent. The old-school scientists are rarely convinced of the new truths, but they retire from the field, and the new-school inherits that field.)
posted by Thomas F. Schminke at 7:15 PM
1 Comments:
I think, too, that your idea of "rational reconstruction" is similar to what Foucault is doing. So with regard to gold, he hypothetically wouldn't care so much how we determine its "kind" through a numerical code as much as he wants to account for the intellectual (and ultimately political) process of assigning gold such a number to begin with and what this assignment has covered up and how this assignment has contributed to the structuring of the experience of human reality.
Post a Comment
<< Home