Re: [Fis] Consilience and Structure

Dear Rafael, et al.,

I was not making any arguments, just guessing why I was not understanding
everything very well. Perhaps I'm just wrong about that.

Anyway, I think I now get the gist of what you are saying, and it sounds
right to me. I like what William Whewell says about what he calls the
fundamental philosophical antithesis between subject and object, reprinted
in:

Butts, Robert E. (ed.) (1989). William Whewell: Theory of Scientific Method.
Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/Cambridge.

Whewell's view is that subjective and objective elements are inseparable
parts of all knowledge. All knowledge is subjective, but this does not
preclude it from being objective as well. Interestingly, Whewell's
consilience of inductions is a method for testing how well our conceptions
(the subjective element of our knowledge) succeeds in carving nature at its
joints (my paraphrase). So, the consilience of inductions, which
essentially involves the use of conceptions, points us towards the truth.
Science tests and improves its conceptions by this consilience of
inductions, and this is a never-ending process of improvement. This is quite
distinct from John Stuart Mill's view that correct scientific conceptions
are determined by (seen in) the empirical facts from the beginning. Mill's
empiricism was an early form of logical empricism.

Everyone I know disagrees with Mill--it was Kuhn, in part, who educated
analytical philosophers about the so-called theory-ladeness of observation
(although logical empiricists such as Carnap also recognized this). But
it's still not widely known that Whewell, in constrast to Mill, embraced the
concept-ladeness all the way down to perception as an essential element of
human knowledge, and had a sophisticated view about why human knowledge is
nevertheless objective (to the extent that it is) thanks to, and not in
spite of, our use of mental conceptions. Without the subjective element,
there is no consilience of inductions, and therefore no objectivity.
Perhaps this is oversimplified a bit, but it shows how very different it is
from Mill's empiricism.

Cheers,
Malcolm

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rafael Capurro" <capurro@hdm-stuttgart.de>
To: "Malcolm Forster" <mforster@wisc.edu>; "fis-listas.unizar.es"
<fis@listas.unizar.es>
Sent: Saturday, November 13, 2004 12:57 PM
Subject: Re: [Fis] Consilience and Structure

> Malcolm
>
> thanks for your open and 'consilient' answer concerning the gap between
> continental and analytical philosophy. In fact if you make this gap, then
> the gap is there! Why don't you just try to think about what I was
> referring to (and forget the philosophers I mentioned) when I wrote the
> following argument:
> We can make a conceptual difference (I mean an 'analytical' difference)
> between the concepts of relation and reference. Relation is then used for
> all kinds of connections between things, while reference should be
> reserved for practical relations. This could be paralleled to Koichiro's
> external and internal stances. If you accept this difference, I mean if we
> take this difference as: 'Given that...' or 'suppose that...' (in old good
> analytical jargon), then we can proceed by making an explanation that the
> experiment with the retina could be analyzed (and 'explained' or
> 'interpreted') by saying that we expected (from a universal point of view)
> that the retina behaves as something universal or objective, but, indeed,
> this is not the case. The retina is 'falsifying' our theoretical
> (objective) framework. The retina works, we would then say, with
> 'references' not with neutral or objective 'relations', just because (and
> as far as) the retina is a living organism. This does not mean, that
> objective or universal relations are not valid, they are just not the way
> the retina works. We would have then 'saved the phenomena' (Greek: 'sozein
> ta phainomena') which is the main task of philosophy (and science...)
> since Socrates.
>
> To argue: this is Heidegger and Husserl, and I am/was trained in another
> school, is, I think, not a very good (analytical) argument. I was also
> trained in continental philosophy and had to do my job reading the
> analytical guys. By the way, I think we live in the meantime in the
> post-analytical era (since some 10 years or so...)
>
> kind regards
>
> Rafael
>

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Received on Mon Nov 22 09:36:55 2004