Objective Knowledge

Chumly wrote:

How could it not be absolutely true that my dog (I had as a pet when I was a child) is dead? I don't mean to argue consensus and I don't mean to argue proof I mean to argue how could it be otherwise?

Here you've hit on a problem with which idealists, starting with Bishop Berkeley, have had to grapple: if there is no objective reality, how can we explain the fact that people act as if there is an objective reality? Berkeley, for instance, held that objects only existed if they were perceived (esse est percipi). According to that logic, it would follow that objects disappear when they are not perceived. The world, in other words, would blink in and out of existence with the blinking of one's eyes. Even Berkeley couldn't bring himself to accept that result, so he explained the persistence of "objects" by asserting that god perceived everything all the time, which was enough to "fix" those objects in "existence."

Maturana and fresco and others of their ilk have, as far as I can tell, not provided an answer to that question -- not even as unsatisfactory an answer as Berkeley's. They can't tell why people in different "conversational domains" tend to speak of the same objects as if those objects were objectively real. Given that all reality is merely linguistic negotiation, one would expect that there would be a much wider divergence of opinion regarding that "reality," yet, in practice, there is a pretty wide consensus. How that consensus arises should be an abiding mystery for fresco -- a much greater mystery, in fact, than his acceptance of quantum physics in the face of his belief that there are no objective scientific truths.

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Re: Objective Knowledge

rosborne979 wrote:

Everything is a function of probability.

Including probability?

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Much appreciated Joe! I'm going to have to reread much of this thread over the next while as it's a lot to digest.

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Those who are following up the Maturana references might bear in mind the observational "position" to which he aspires. If "everyday life" is considered to be "the game" and philosophers to be the "specatators and commentators" then Maturana would be outside the stadium. For Maturana "cognition" is merely another name for the general life processes involved in "autpoiesis" or the self-maintenance of biological and social organizations. Neither "causality" nor "intelligence" need figure in "autopoiesis" since the occurence and transformation of enduring structures has been shown to arise spontaneously in many complex dynamic areas "far from equilibrium".(Prigogine) In essence, Maturana sees all "organisms" eqivocally, and our "communications" of little more significance than that of ants in a colony, or cells in a body. Sub-units of an orgaization "serve" it by "structural coupling" and concepts of "consensus" can be viewed as a sociolinguistic aspect of this.

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Re: Objective Knowledge

joefromchicago wrote:

rosborne979 wrote:
Everything is a function of probability.

Including probability?

I suppose so.

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fresco wrote:

Those who are following up the Maturana references might bear in mind the observational "position" to which he aspires. If "everyday life" is considered to be "the game" and philosophers to be the "specatators and commentators" then Maturana would be outside the stadium.

This is another problem for both Maturana and fresco. Indeed, it is the same problem that Foucault had (but never acknowledged). If all "fact claims" are instead nothing more than "speech acts," then how can one make a fact claim about a speech act? Or, to put it another way, if everything is just a description (or negotiation) within a certain language episteme (or conversational domain), then that would also include the claim that everything is just a description (or negotiation) within a certain language episteme (or conversational domain).

Maturana and fresco desperately want to have something that is objectively true (fresco, for his part, clings to quantum physics as his realist security blanket), because that's the only way that they can make claims that have any validity for anyone else. But because their epistemologies rule out objective truths, they have no basis for asserting that anything is true. They are, in effect, attempting to use the lever of language without the fulcrum of objectivity. It can't be done.

Far from Maturana being "outside the stadium" looking in, then, it is quite clear that Maturana is standing on the midfield line. He can't claim to be an observer of everyone else's language games when he's a participant in the game too. And there is no basis for him to assert that he enjoys a privileged position with regard to his own observations.

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Re: Objective Knowledge

rosborne979 wrote:

joefromchicago wrote:
rosborne979 wrote:
Everything is a function of probability.

Including probability?

I suppose so.

So probability is probably right?

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My own opinion is that individual pieces of data can be absolutely true. Degrees of probability apply to theories which attempt to explain a collection of data.

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Wandel, I agree; without some consistency in how we interpret data, we'd all be blubbering fools.

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Joe,

Maturana does not claim a privileged position. On the contrary he argues that his "followers" would be following a "visceral response". He is outside the stadium because he is not interested in the details of speech acts, only their functionality within "systems behaviour". He is obviously stuck with "speech" to convey this, but his stylistics are deliberately contrived. (Stylistic analysis allows for poets etc setting up idiosyncratic communication vehicles)

My "visceral response" cannot be explained in terms of simplistic concepts of "truth" or "objectivity" (= game rules). Like Maturana, I am not interested in "the game" but in paradigms which transcend the game.
My own reservations are about concepts of "structure" and "complexity" which systems theory uses as its axioms. Leaving those reservations aside, a successful epistemological paradigm should for me attempt demystify "life", "observation", and the urge to "control". It follows that there can be no desperation in seeking such a paradigm because I must relinquish the urge to control ! Like Niels Bohr I am obliged to embrace "uncertainty" and "non-linearity" (lack of causality). My exposition here might be seen as one organisms "structural coupling" in union or resonance with others.

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Re: Objective Knowledge

joefromchicago wrote:

rosborne979 wrote:
joefromchicago wrote:
rosborne979 wrote:
Everything is a function of probability.

Including probability?

I suppose so.

So probability is probably right?

Probably.

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It's as close to an agreement you're going to get.

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wandeljw wrote:

My own opinion is that individual pieces of data can be absolutely true. Degrees of probability apply to theories which attempt to explain a collection of data.

Unless you are forced to include the philosophical arguments related to awareness and "knowing". In which case you must admit some level of non-absoluteness.

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But on an individual level, absoluteness is in the eye of the beholder, therefore making it "true." .

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cicerone imposter wrote:

But on an individual level, absoluteness is in the eye of the beholder, therefore making it "true." .

If you define absoluteness at that level, then I suppose so. Of course, then everything would have an 'absolute' value, but there would be multiple absolutes for every individual on the planet.... which isn't a very functional 'absolute'.

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rosborne979 wrote:

wandeljw wrote:
My own opinion is that individual pieces of data can be absolutely true. Degrees of probability apply to theories which attempt to explain a collection of data.

Unless you are forced to include the philosophical arguments related to awareness and "knowing". In which case you must admit some level of non-absoluteness.

I realize that philosophical discussions may lead to individual pieces of data being dependent on subjective interpretation. But I still believe in "objective facts". One philospher said we would be foolish to ignore sense data (even if we only hear descriptions from other people).

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wandeljw wrote:

rosborne979 wrote:
wandeljw wrote:
My own opinion is that individual pieces of data can be absolutely true. Degrees of probability apply to theories which attempt to explain a collection of data.

Unless you are forced to include the philosophical arguments related to awareness and "knowing". In which case you must admit some level of non-absoluteness.

I realize that philosophical discussions may lead to individual pieces of data being dependent on subjective interpretation. But I still believe in "objective facts". One philospher said we would be foolish to ignore sense data (even if we only hear descriptions from other people).

I believe in treating certain things as objective facts because their probability is insurmountably high. This is what prevents the quantum world from collapsing reality, and what allows us to make scientific progress.

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fresco wrote:

Joe,

Maturana does not claim a privileged position.

On the contrary: if he is describing the "conversational domain" or the episteme or whatever it is that he's describing, then he most certainly is claiming a privileged position.

Look at it this way. Suppose Maturana said everyone walks around with a (metaphorical) paper bag over his or her head, and that the only thing that people can see is the insides of their own bags. "But," Maturana announces, "I'm not interested in the insides of the bags, I'm just interested in describing the bags themselves." That, however, ignores the fact that, if the only thing that anyone can see is the inside of their own bag, it follows that the only thing that Maturana can describe is the inside of his own bag. So any description of bags in general would be drawn not from an observation of everyone else's bags, but rather from a minute investigation of his own.

In the same way, Maturana can claim that he is only describing the "systems behavior" rather than the speech acts (or, more properly, the conversational domains), but, on his own terms, he can only do so within his own conversational domain. It's clear that he wants to be able to stand outside and describe the system, but that would require an objective viewpoint that his epistemology absolutely forbids. In the end, all he can describe is the insides of his own conversational domain, which may or may not coincide with the insides of someone else's. His seemingly "objective" claim about the way that language systems operate, therefore, is simply another speech act bounded by the limits of his linguistic episteme, worthy of no more credence than the seemingly "objective" claim that the earth revolves around the sun.

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Joe,

Von Glasersfeld writes

Quote:

it is absolutely indispensable that one diligently repeats to oneself, every time one notices circularity in Maturana's expositions, that this circularity is not the kind of slip it would be in most traditional systems of our Western philosophy. It is, on the contrary, a deliberately chosen fundamental condition that arises directly out of the autopoietic model.

To me, this confirms that Maturana is not describing the nature of speech acts, he is demonstrating them with respect to the paradigm of autopoiesis. This technique reminds me of Wittgensteins "therapeutic" language investigations which asserted nothing, but demolished much.

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fresco wrote:

Joe,

Von Glasersfeld writes

Quote:
it is absolutely indispensable that one diligently repeats to oneself, every time one notices circularity in Maturana's expositions, that this circularity is not the kind of slip it would be in most traditional systems of our Western philosophy. It is, on the contrary, a deliberately chosen fundamental condition that arises directly out of the autopoietic model.

That's rather like saying: "It is absolutely indispensible that one diligently repeats to oneself, that when the Wizard tells you not to notice the man behind the curtain, that you not notice the man behind the curtain."

(On further reflection, it sounds more like the Microsoft excuse: "that's not a bug, that's a feature.")

fresco wrote:

To me, this confirms that Maturana is not describing the nature of speech acts, he is demonstrating them with respect to the paradigm of autopoiesis. This technique reminds me of Wittgensteins "therapeutic" language investigations which asserted nothing, but demolished much.

When you have an imaginary hammer, all you can demolish are imaginary objects.

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