A couple of books by Paul Feyerabend have radically changed my perspective about knowledge and rationality. I highly recommend his "Three dialogues on Knowledge" and "Science in a Free Soceity". Especially if one's rationality prevents one from appreciating something, say for example, the dance of the whirling dervishes, I think the Three dialogues is a very good antedote for it. I have never read a book which changed/freed my perspectives more than this one. It basically shows that there is nothing pure about reason except perhaps some bit of logic; that mostly what matters is aesthetics and taste (bias/intuition/insight/baseera). Thus our beliefs are based on our prior proclivities, rather than the purported deductions from axioms of rationality to logically justified conclusions.
In my reading this is consistent with what Ghazali(ra) has to say about faith based on reason:
‘Whoever supposes that faith is realized through speculative theology, abstract proofs, or academic divisions is an innovator. On the contrary, faith is a light that God, the Sublime and Exalted, casts in to the hearts of His servants with bounty and grace from His presence. Sometimes faith is evidenced internally and is impossible to express; sometimes, through a vision while asleep; other times, by witnessing the state of a pious man and receiving the emanation of his light as a result of his companionship and presence; and there are times when faith comes by the concurrence of circumstance. Indeed, a Bedouin came to the Prophet denying and disavowing him. But when his eyes fell upon his radiant aspect—may God increase its dignity and nobility—he saw in it the light of prophethood and exclaimed, “By God! This is not the face of a liar!” He then implored the Prophet to explain Islam to him and immediately embraced it.’
Realizing what one thinks to be the truth has a lot to do with direct (intuitive) perception of things. I do not belive it is arrived through reasoning; reasoning perhaps follows retroactively, perhaps to add intellectual respectability, and only in simple, straightforward and uninteresting cases.
What does that say about epistemology? It makes nonsense of the idea of "justified true belief", where reasons need to be articulated. Mostly what we believe is what we are already inclined to believe. A believer is inclined to prefer the intellectual proofs of the existence of God. None of the proofs are in of themselves conclusive. Actually the proofs themselves do not have any meaning, only readers impute some value and meaning to them, depending on the time, their background, and their inclination...i.e. whether they are interested in intellectual proofs. We know many pious people in our own history weren't very interested nor impressed with theology, on the other hand the believer's face has always been the "best argument". Aesthetics (perhaps same as sincerity/ikhlas/sidq) takes the front seat. What is in the Prophet's (saw) face that would lead one to draw conclusions and he is truthful (perhaps conclusions aren't drawn, its a direct perception of truth). No axiomatic inferences here.
The state of one's knolwedge/skepticism is mostly dependent not on formal conditions of proof, but rather on the state the heart is in: Its seeing and witnessing. I am not implying that rationality, as a calculater, as something which compares and produces analogies is useless. It has its uses in problem sovling, when the premises are given. But has no power to produce premises.
Even fiqh judgements are intuitive and their justifications retroactive. I can't imagine anyone axiomatically reasoning to a conclusion in fiqh, except only as an after thought, or to justify his view when writing down a fatwa. Furthermore, Feyerabend claims that the highest form of intellecutal exchange is story-telling. And that is again the way God speaks to man in the Quran. And sunnah is like a story too. Stories contextualize knowledge fully.
Hence, knowledge, rather than being something absolute and Platonic, is a living tradition, and understandings which are in the hearts and minds. Knowledge can be taken from books only because those symbols already mean something to the reader, and the text is able to suggest linkages and relations which perhaps the reader was unaware of, and thus, knowledge is ‘gained’ from books, and also because the reader can contextualize the statements. On the other hand if one cannot contextualize it properly, as in the case of a misreading (say a wahhabi reading of the Quran) one is just imputing meanings not intended by the author of the text. Thus meanings are thus the reader’s commentary on the text; in fact, the reader is the commentary (Shaykh Nuh). Even if one is to grant, in fact quite rightly, that the intended meanings are in the knowledge of God, those meanings aren’t accessible. Logicists and semanticists believe meanings are given, static, and unchanging. But given the above considerations, there is no such static thing which is accessible to human beings. Rather each human being approaches the text with his/her own background, reading meaning into the symbols, sometimes with interpretations close to what was intended, and sometimes not. Either way looking up a dictionary has limited benefit, because matters are not settled this way. Meanings are conventional uses of words, and dictionaries are posterior to the conventional use of words, and therefore not more authoritative than the speaker of that language or a member of the relevant culture.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
On Philosophy of Science: The Unconventional Views of Noam Chomsky and Paul Feyerabend
Below are some rather unique conclusions that follow from reading Chomsky's "New Horizons in the study of language and Mind" his article "Language and Nature' and Wittgenstein's "Philosphical Investigations" and of course Feyerabend's “Three dialogues”, “Killing Time”, and “Science in a Free Society”, and his commentary "Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations" ).
Some of the unique consequences of these views are:
(1) Everything is conceptualized by the mind before we can see it. This is how we perceive. So, there is no such thing as sense data theory of meaning. We do not have anything prior to it being conceptualized. So, there is no apple outside of a concept apple which gets invoked in our minds. Just like there are no colours before the prism which creates the spectrum, just as there are no meanings prior to the conceptualization of the mind. The existence is there, just as the light is, but there is no differenciation, and no colours.
Corollary: Ibn Arabi said that God is not known through a concept. My reading of some of his easier works, though it may sound immodest, seems to suggest that he held the same Kantian/Chomskyan view that everything we see is conceptualized by the mind/language. And thus he says God is not known through a concept, rather directly through the soul. And he says those who worship Him through a concept ("All-foriving, All-merciful, All-compassionate...) will never really know Him, but only through a concept, even in the akhira. And hence, Ibn Arabi delineates the limitaitons of rationality. And thus the emphasis on the direct experience of the Divine, for this is the only real way to know Allah.
(2) Science is merely model making based on the conceptualizations in the mind which our faculties can carry out (Kant). There is no Bunge's "realism" about science. Physical objects are conceptualized in the mind. Electron is a concept, atom is a concept, at par with acceleration and force. We make mathematical connections which we test. There are no entities outside the mind as such. Because we have no access to them outside of what our mind can conceptualize. So, we have no direct apprehension of the so called mind-independent reality through by-passing the inevitable conceptualizations of the mind. Hence our perseptions are all personal. Science has little to do with mind-independent reality, because we don’t have direct access to it, and the moment we apply language to it, it means we are assigning meanings to things we can identify (after conceptualizing them), either through our intuitive appratus, or through some scientific apparatus which translates input into something we understand intuitively (like a black spot on the screen), so either way we are only dealing with conceptualizations. Thus, Being/being, whatever it is, we only know it through our own, perhaps reductive, conceptualizations. Any comment remark on the acutality of the Being/being is unjustified, because that would mean by-passing our own language, and conceptualization, and once we do that, we aren’t being coherent, we can’t make sense. So, perhaps Sufis can experience Being/beings (God, realities) directly, and not mediated through the senses and the mind. Hence the intellecutal limits to access the Being/being are severe.
I believe the works cited above would relieve one from a lot of technical hair-splitting which results from an exceptional and mistaken use of language by so-called intellectuals (realists). The mideavel talk of substance is a typical example. One has to match the use of the word 'substance' to something we can conceptualize in order to make sense of what is going on in the mideavel texts; the closest concept being a point in space dressed up with properties, or as Russell suggested, a bundle of properties without any essence. As chomsky says, there is no clear sense of the word ‘matter’ (because matter is an intuitive concept: something solid we run into). He also suggests that contrary to widely held scientific opinion, water is not H2O. Rather water is that which is usually and conventionaly referred to as water, and which is never pure H2O. Things are not equal to their chemical compositions. Chemical compositions is a certain way of looking at things, i.e. through a set of conceptualizations called the periodic table (i.e. divide the physical being as it reacts to our prodding, or experimentation, into this scheme rather than the intuitive scheme of chairs and tables), and with certain ends in mind such as on how to get different elements to react with each other to produce something useful. But none of these schemes have any claims to ultimate realities; rather these are ways in which we interact with Reality or Being.
Thus it is immodest to project our own conceptualizations to the point of claiming them to be realities in the absolute sense.
Some of the unique consequences of these views are:
(1) Everything is conceptualized by the mind before we can see it. This is how we perceive. So, there is no such thing as sense data theory of meaning. We do not have anything prior to it being conceptualized. So, there is no apple outside of a concept apple which gets invoked in our minds. Just like there are no colours before the prism which creates the spectrum, just as there are no meanings prior to the conceptualization of the mind. The existence is there, just as the light is, but there is no differenciation, and no colours.
Corollary: Ibn Arabi said that God is not known through a concept. My reading of some of his easier works, though it may sound immodest, seems to suggest that he held the same Kantian/Chomskyan view that everything we see is conceptualized by the mind/language. And thus he says God is not known through a concept, rather directly through the soul. And he says those who worship Him through a concept ("All-foriving, All-merciful, All-compassionate...) will never really know Him, but only through a concept, even in the akhira. And hence, Ibn Arabi delineates the limitaitons of rationality. And thus the emphasis on the direct experience of the Divine, for this is the only real way to know Allah.
(2) Science is merely model making based on the conceptualizations in the mind which our faculties can carry out (Kant). There is no Bunge's "realism" about science. Physical objects are conceptualized in the mind. Electron is a concept, atom is a concept, at par with acceleration and force. We make mathematical connections which we test. There are no entities outside the mind as such. Because we have no access to them outside of what our mind can conceptualize. So, we have no direct apprehension of the so called mind-independent reality through by-passing the inevitable conceptualizations of the mind. Hence our perseptions are all personal. Science has little to do with mind-independent reality, because we don’t have direct access to it, and the moment we apply language to it, it means we are assigning meanings to things we can identify (after conceptualizing them), either through our intuitive appratus, or through some scientific apparatus which translates input into something we understand intuitively (like a black spot on the screen), so either way we are only dealing with conceptualizations. Thus, Being/being, whatever it is, we only know it through our own, perhaps reductive, conceptualizations. Any comment remark on the acutality of the Being/being is unjustified, because that would mean by-passing our own language, and conceptualization, and once we do that, we aren’t being coherent, we can’t make sense. So, perhaps Sufis can experience Being/beings (God, realities) directly, and not mediated through the senses and the mind. Hence the intellecutal limits to access the Being/being are severe.
I believe the works cited above would relieve one from a lot of technical hair-splitting which results from an exceptional and mistaken use of language by so-called intellectuals (realists). The mideavel talk of substance is a typical example. One has to match the use of the word 'substance' to something we can conceptualize in order to make sense of what is going on in the mideavel texts; the closest concept being a point in space dressed up with properties, or as Russell suggested, a bundle of properties without any essence. As chomsky says, there is no clear sense of the word ‘matter’ (because matter is an intuitive concept: something solid we run into). He also suggests that contrary to widely held scientific opinion, water is not H2O. Rather water is that which is usually and conventionaly referred to as water, and which is never pure H2O. Things are not equal to their chemical compositions. Chemical compositions is a certain way of looking at things, i.e. through a set of conceptualizations called the periodic table (i.e. divide the physical being as it reacts to our prodding, or experimentation, into this scheme rather than the intuitive scheme of chairs and tables), and with certain ends in mind such as on how to get different elements to react with each other to produce something useful. But none of these schemes have any claims to ultimate realities; rather these are ways in which we interact with Reality or Being.
Thus it is immodest to project our own conceptualizations to the point of claiming them to be realities in the absolute sense.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
The Continuum of Knowledge: Philosophy and the Sciences
There are many ways in which phillsophy is connected to the sciences.
(1) There is no line separating philosophy and any of these disciplines: sociology, literature, political science, economics, mathematics and computer science. For example: Take computer science. In the undergrad program eventually the courses get quite theoretical and difficult and there is no way to manage then execpt through the realization that most of the founders of the field were philosopher-mathematicians, and it was through studying their works that one could really understand what computer science was all about. For example you have to understand the work of Godel. Now Godel is taught in mathematics department, in computer science department and of course in the philosophy department. But Godel's proof is so crucial that even sociologists and anthropologists use the ideas (but without understanding the full-blown proof).
(2) It is evident from the history of philosophy, that many of the other subjects which have become independent fields at university were first studied and written about by philosophers, and because of the practical success of those writings that subject became independent, and took a life of its own. But the core principles of these sciences continue to be studied in philosophy department. For example take economics. The only way to understand the core of economics is to understand the history of economics, and that cannot be done without reading through those who are counted among the philosophers. (For example a recent work, a very good one, on economists was called "Worldly Philosophers").
(3) There is no line (not even a vague one) that separates philosophy and science. There were physicists who wrote philosophy, and vice versa. In fact the development of Relativity Theory was motivated by Ernst Mach, a philosopher whose writings inspired Einstein on the lines of his Relativity Theory. And those at the core such as Dirac and Bohr continued to contribute to the philosophical understanding of Relativity Theory and Special Relativity, and they quite naturally wrote in both philosophy and science journals.
(4) Any scholar of any of the western sciences has to study philosophy. For that matter any conscientious student has to do the same. My friends who did their undergraduate studies from McGill were forced to study philosophy and logic, because that was the only way they could really understand their field because most of the leading writers in any field are eventually philosophers (or are versed in philosophy and inevitably their writing assumes that background).
(5) My view is that only mathematics (applied mathematics leads to most of the ideas in the hard sciences) and philosophy are two pure fields, in the sense, that all other fields are derived from these two (mostly a combination of the two). For example: computer Science is a branch of number theory, and the theory turns on Godel's Proof and other results that were arrived at in 1936. The theory has remained the same, and the founders of this field were for example Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, Kurt Godel, all of them philosopher-mathematicians and wrote in philosophy journals.
These are among the many arguments that lead to the position that philosophy is not a well-defined core of ideas. In fact, it straddles every field and the only way to understand any field is to go to its philosophical and historical roots. Newton was called a natural philosopher, because there was no physics at his time. Just because physics is an independent field taught outside the philosophy department does not imply it does not have philosophical ideologies hiding beneath it.
(1) There is no line separating philosophy and any of these disciplines: sociology, literature, political science, economics, mathematics and computer science. For example: Take computer science. In the undergrad program eventually the courses get quite theoretical and difficult and there is no way to manage then execpt through the realization that most of the founders of the field were philosopher-mathematicians, and it was through studying their works that one could really understand what computer science was all about. For example you have to understand the work of Godel. Now Godel is taught in mathematics department, in computer science department and of course in the philosophy department. But Godel's proof is so crucial that even sociologists and anthropologists use the ideas (but without understanding the full-blown proof).
(2) It is evident from the history of philosophy, that many of the other subjects which have become independent fields at university were first studied and written about by philosophers, and because of the practical success of those writings that subject became independent, and took a life of its own. But the core principles of these sciences continue to be studied in philosophy department. For example take economics. The only way to understand the core of economics is to understand the history of economics, and that cannot be done without reading through those who are counted among the philosophers. (For example a recent work, a very good one, on economists was called "Worldly Philosophers").
(3) There is no line (not even a vague one) that separates philosophy and science. There were physicists who wrote philosophy, and vice versa. In fact the development of Relativity Theory was motivated by Ernst Mach, a philosopher whose writings inspired Einstein on the lines of his Relativity Theory. And those at the core such as Dirac and Bohr continued to contribute to the philosophical understanding of Relativity Theory and Special Relativity, and they quite naturally wrote in both philosophy and science journals.
(4) Any scholar of any of the western sciences has to study philosophy. For that matter any conscientious student has to do the same. My friends who did their undergraduate studies from McGill were forced to study philosophy and logic, because that was the only way they could really understand their field because most of the leading writers in any field are eventually philosophers (or are versed in philosophy and inevitably their writing assumes that background).
(5) My view is that only mathematics (applied mathematics leads to most of the ideas in the hard sciences) and philosophy are two pure fields, in the sense, that all other fields are derived from these two (mostly a combination of the two). For example: computer Science is a branch of number theory, and the theory turns on Godel's Proof and other results that were arrived at in 1936. The theory has remained the same, and the founders of this field were for example Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, Kurt Godel, all of them philosopher-mathematicians and wrote in philosophy journals.
These are among the many arguments that lead to the position that philosophy is not a well-defined core of ideas. In fact, it straddles every field and the only way to understand any field is to go to its philosophical and historical roots. Newton was called a natural philosopher, because there was no physics at his time. Just because physics is an independent field taught outside the philosophy department does not imply it does not have philosophical ideologies hiding beneath it.
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