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.
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