Can we ever really know reality?

@Olivier5,

You missed the key contextual issue above your selection.

Quote:

It is only when we want to consider the observer as the object of our scientific inquiry, and we want to understand both what he does when he makes scientific statements and how these statements are operationally effective, that we encounter a problem if we do not recognize the subject dependent nature of science.

As for Marurana's credentials and circular style .....

Quote:

"Languaging", as Maturana occasionally explains, serves, among other things, to orient. By this he means directing the attention and, consequently, the individual experience of others, which is a way to foster the development of "consensual domains" which, in turn, are the prerequisite for the development of language. - Although the sentence (you might say, the languaging) with which I have here begun is at best a pale imitation of Maturana's style, it does perhaps represent one important aspect of Maturana's system: The circularity which, in one way or another, crops up again and again.

In my interpretation, 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. According to Maturana, the cognizing organism is informationally closed. Given that it can, nevertheless, produce descriptions; i.e., concepts, conceptual structures, theories, and eventually a picture of its world, it is clear that it can do this only by using building blocks which it has gleaned through some process of abstraction from the domain of its own experience. This insight, which Maturana expresses by saying that all cognitive domains arise exclusively as the result of operations of distinction which are made by the organism itself, was one of the points that attracted me to his work the very first time I came across it.

QUOTE FROM Ernst von Glaserfeld
Former Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Georgia, Research Associate at the Scientific Reasoning Research Institute, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was a member of the Board of Trustees, American Society of Cybernetics, from which he received the McCulloch Memorial Award in 1991. He was a member of the Scientific Board, Instituto Piaget, Lisbon.

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@Olivier5,

And what YOU have to realize ( Wink

) is that Maturana's "biology" is based on the concept of autopoiesis and differs markedly from mainstream biological paradigms. I suggest you research that concept before jumping to conclusions about the relevance of the literature I cite.

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A long time ago, the Pyrrhonians realized that searching for a criterion for what is real leads inevitably to infinite regress. You need a criterion to establish the validity of the criterion, another criterion for that one, etc etc etc. If this has ever been satisfactorily resolved, I'm unaware of it and would love to hear about it. This seems consistent with Gödel's incompleteness theorems (to the limited extent I understand them).

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@fresco,

I didn't 'miss' it. I omitted it. In fact it makes matters worse for Maturana: it is only because he adopts a certain frame of analysis that he ends up stuck in circularity. He avoids any broad social perspective. Languages are in use in vast communities or groups, eg 'all english-speaking people', and those vast communities (and their sub-communities speaking regional or specialised versions of the language) use, influence, manage and co-create the language as a common heritage of theirs. And what do they use language for? To describe and share events, thoughts, emotions etc. In science, to describe theories or facts that are by necessity independent of any particular observer, because replicable.

Take away the representative function of language, deny any referent 'out there' for language, and you deny its social utility as a medium of meaning, of sense, that is to say: language helps humans share their descriptions of the world. These are more or less accurate, as compared to some theoretical objective state of affairs. If you take away the OBJECT, there is nothing to talk about, except mathematics perhaps.

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@fresco,

I have researched the concept already, and finds it useless to understand language. Language is not something biological.

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@Olivier5,

The whole point is that Maturana deflates language to a behavior- "languaging". He does that in order to have paradigmatic continuity and consistency across all species. He is "thinking outside the box"..the box which has lead to failure of informational models for cognitive processes.

Now you may not like his system, but from what you have written here I doubt whether you understand it or the constructivist epistemology which drives it. Maturana is not without his critics but none of the criticism detracts from his attempt to expose the problems involved in what psychologists and philosophers concern themselves with...the observation of observation.

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@FBM,

FBM You are correct about the infinite regress with respect to words like "reality". That is why pragmatists stop at Wittgenstein's dictum "meaning is use" (and by that he meant use in negotiation of "what is the case" in everyday contexts)

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@fresco,

Rather, you fail to understand to vacuity, circularity and self-condratictory nature of Maturana's thoght. You are like a moth attracted by a cheap neon light.

He writes poorly indeed. Anybody trying to replace Plato's cavern metaphor by another metaphor where men are all pharmacologists deserves to be shot. But a poor writter never 'deflated' language... Maybe he tried to do so, or maybe he THOUGHT he was trying to do so... but that is not what he is doing. What he actually does is USE LANGUAGE TO CARRY SOME MEANING, like we all do.

You cannot deflate language BY THE USE OF LANGUAGE. He should try mime instead, although that's just another language... :-)

In short, just because Maturana can't do better than poor languaging doesn't mean everybody else is doomed to make as little sense as he does.

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@Olivier5,

Thank you.

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@fresco,

Most welcome.

This is really basic logic: anytime anyone tries to reduce language or cognition or consciousness to biology, just remind that person that his theory IS cognition, IS language, and that by arguing his/her idea, the person is expressing a belief in the power of that idea at least, and potentially the power of other ideas, to describe or represent the world more or less AS IT IS in some theoretical objective state.

There's no way around language.

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@Olivier5,

"Realists" of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your conditioning.
http://www.oikos.org/vonobserv.htm

BTW the "objections to Piaget's constructivism" mentioned here are from those who could not understand that his system was metalogical. It short, it could not rely on logic to account for logic.

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@Olivier5,

Note in particular the paragraph

Quote:

The critics' misunderstanding may have originated from the fact that Maturana, like the rest of us, is obliged to use a language in his expositions that has been shaped and polished by more than two thousand years of realism - naive or metaphysical - a language that forces him to use the word "to be" which, in all its grammatical forms, implies the assumption of an ontic reality. An attentive reader of Maturana, however, can hardly help noticing that almost everything he says, is intended to "orient" us away from that inevitable implication.

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@Olivier5,

To some degree, we are the slaves to language. For those who understand that science is the only form of human endeavor that attempts to explain our environment (through language), our genes and environment pretty much dictates how we perceive our very subjective lives.

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@fresco,

It is obvious there are people who speak and write in a way that not especially smart people think is the way very smart people speak and write. The former group seem less interested in actually communicating ideas, opinions, or information…than in gaining whatever succor they derive from the adulation (real or feigned) of the latter.

You happen to be one of those people in the former group, Fresco, so I am reasonably certain you understand what I mean.

Perhaps Mantuana is also.

If your blind guess about REALITY is that blah, blah, blah…why not simply state it as your blind guess…rather than engage in these repeated and unending appeals to authority to the blind guesses of others in which you indulge? You may be appealing to someone who posits what he posits just because he is as insecure as yourself.

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@Chumly,

Quote:

Nope, your position is incorrect in that you misunderstand the essence of science, which is far more than simply observational. As such and at the risk of argumentum ad nauseam science I'll prove it.

Consider Ohm's Law I = E/R

With this scientifically derived formula, I can predict the amount of current should I firstly have measured the voltage and resistance.

I can also predict that as long as no other variables are changed that the current will be directly proportional to the voltage and the resistance will be inversely proportional to the current.

Did you watch the Twin Towers falling in 2001?

Before their fall, watch that the underground of the building besides the towers was releasing smoke like crazy, like if it was on fire.

The cause was the broken cables caused by the hit of the airplanes. The junction of the cables without insulation created a heat capable to melt iron, as you can see in the video as well, melted metal that can't happen by the burning fuel of the crashed airplanes.

Now well, when this heat reaches the main electric cut off, you have two or more reactions. The most common is the heat coming from such a "shortcut" scenario, that the resistors of the main electric generator or distributor will trip and the power will be cut off.

The second reaction might be the main distributor or generator "absorbing" the heat caused by the junction of the different phase bared cables, and release it, sometimes as explosions, sometimes as melting itself.

Who can predict that any of these two scenarios will be the consequence?

NOBODY.

What you can predict is solely what you can control, something that you can manipulate. But you can't predict the damage caused by a huge meteorite, however you might have an estimate, a educated guess, a hypothesis.

Science is mostly trial and error, and predictions are mostly in what can be controlled at the time of the test or experiment.

Lets go further. You predict that one apple plus another apple gives you two apples, this is based in the basic mathematical principle of 1+1=2.

However, when you try to apply the same mathematical principle in a third world shelter, a government agency where cash money is counted, I can tell you that the basic mathematical principle might not work because in the first scenario someone will steal apples before even get counted and in the second scenario money is also "lost" thanks to the wonderful prodigies happening with our government at work.

You can't controlled it, you can't predict how many apples you can find and how much money is "lost" each time.

What about when a comet which appearance is predicted for such and such date but never shows up? Perhaps was pulled by the gravitational force of a planet or the Sun, perhaps had a collision and was destroyed, and so forth.

Science can't predicted.

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@fresco,

If you REALLY thought reality was a problematic concept, you would jump from the tower bridge and see if you REALLY died or not... But of course you know very well what would REALLY happen and you don't want that. Funnier and far less risky to sport that trendy distanciation from reality on an internet message board....

Fake.

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@Olivier5,

"Trendy distanciation" !
Very Happy

I'm flattered !

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@fresco,

You're so easily flattered... or should I say flattened?

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Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be observed (seen, heard, touched, smelled or sensed in any way). This is a fundamental concept studied in the field of developmental psychology [...]

Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist who first studied object permanence in infants, argued that object permanence is one of an infant's most important accomplishments, as without this concept, objects would have no separate, permanent existence. In Piaget's theory of cognitive development infants develop this understanding by the end of the "sensorimotor stage," which lasts from birth to about two years of age.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence

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@Olivier5,

Yes. I lectured on Piaget some time ago. If there is something you don't understand just ask.

BTW Flavell is much more succinct than Piaget himself.
https://www.questia.com/library/5678062/developmental-psychology-of-jean-piaget

But to place Piaget in a philosophical rather than a psychological context you might start here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivist_epistemology

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Can we ever really know reality?

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