Creative Energy III: Becoming Adjective, Research Time, 08/12/2017

When a thinker develops a concept comprehensive enough to think through as a framework for understanding the world, his activity changes from just regular old writing about philosophy. What I’m doing right now, obviously, isn’t writing at the intensity and density that actually creates new concepts.

Neither is writing a philosophical lecture. Neither is writing most articles for peer review in journals of philosophy. Creating new concepts is a weird enough process that it can only be snuck past peer review processes.

Imagine if you could achieve immortality. Ask what the
biggest jerk of a genie would do with that wish.

It creates by implication, always present in the text, but it only comes to a reader when she thinks for a second about what she’s read. The true weirdness of creative philosophical writing appears in disguise as something more ordinary.

Example. The key paper by Edmund Gettier is the best example I can think of. Looks like an absolutely mundane little thought experiment, built around some pretty clear symbolic logic. Read it. It looks utterly ordinary.

Think about it. A clear, easy-to-understand demonstration that you can have a justified true belief that isn’t actual knowledge of the situation. It’s a transformative moment.

You realize what he’s done in those three pages, and you understand what it means to break an entire discourse. The philosophy of pure knowledge would never be the same again.

Gettier had an immensely destructive effect. I’m not sure that pure epistemology can find a way out. Thinkers in that discipline frequently return to the problem of justified true belief, but are never able to develop a standard for what knowledge can be so apparently unassailable as the old one.

I don’t know that they ever will. My old friend Walther is a pure epistemologist. I’ll ask him what he thinks.

It’s a cheeky way to think about it, but it makes a good label. Gettier turned himself into a noun – the Gettier Case. Becoming a noun is a very dangerous thing for a person to do – imagine freezing thought in carbonite like Han Solo. That’s what Gettier did with himself.

Good way to secure tenure, but it’s sad that our era considers academic tenure so precious and rare that stasis is a fair trade-off. It’s a joke, but it’s true. There are already plenty of Gettier Cases. But there’s never going to be a Gettian.

Not everyone who looks like a marxist is one. Not necessarily,
anyway.

There are plenty of Kantians – some willing, some unwilling, and some coincidental. A few Cartesians, some Platonists, plenty of Marxists but not nearly as many as most people think, Habermasians, Foucauldians. Some annoying Spinozists and some precious fun Spinozists. I have a friend who’s a Rawlsian, though I’ve never been able to understand why.

Whole traditions have become Aristotelians for centuries. There are all kinds of Platonists, a couple of deranged Heracliteans, plenty of Thomists, not enough Ockhamists, There might be one lonely Scotist left in the wild.

There are a few dull Quineans, intensely argumentative Wittgensteinians. Davidsonians who can never agree on what it means to be Davidsonian. The Arendtians are vibrant, but feel so sad. Countless Hayekians who won’t shut up even when they should.

When you pump out primary material – when you create concepts – you create texts that people can get lost in. There are countless nooks and crannies to explore in thinking about those concepts. You re-read a book, and it expands fractally for you, as different details emerge in the return.

That’s a philosophical concept – a framework for understanding the world should have the same infinite possibility to surprise as real life does. When people encounter this concept, they’re able to pick it up and use it to understand their lives, the cosmos, and the philosophical or theoretical problems they write about.

They may never be able to create a concept themselves – to become an adjective* – but they can become experts in carrying it forward, applying it, advancing it.

* Or at least having the potential to become an adjective. It helps to have a good publisher, or at least get into the right people’s hands.

The Quest for Certainty Still Exists (Not a Post about the Dewey Book), Jamming, 02/08/2013

As I was looking back over yesterday’s post speculating on the possible causes of the controversies surrounding evolutionary biology’s public reception, a curious and dangerous idea occurred to me. Curious because it’s potentially very interesting. Dangerous because, like most vague hints and shiny instincts, it might not make any sense at first brush. But as it develops into a more detailed approach, this idea might become central to some of my projects. 

There seems to be a disconnect between how scientists and most philosophers of science understand what knowledge is, and how everyday people and epistemic philosophers understand what knowledge is. And it all revolves around the quest for certainty.* The first group tends to view knowledge as better when it is complex, subject to doubt, and open to revision. That revision can be a matter of small refinements, or it can be absolutely radical. This is a perspective on knowledge that had thoroughly absorbed the lessons of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. Science doesn’t progress by preserving and adding to an established tradition. It progresses by continually seeking out new fields of study or new techniques to investigate the world, and letting those new discoveries add to, revise, or occasionally completely reorder established scientific models. 

John Dewey, author of The Quest for Certainty, at the time
of his most badass moustache.

* That is, the general search for certain knowledge, not the book by John Dewey called The Quest for Certainty. However, Dewey’s book might turn out to be rather important in working through this idea. I’ve gone through a reasonable chunk of Dewey’s massive output as part of my work — I have an article in volume 33 of the journal Environmental Ethics on how Dewey’s ontological concepts have innovative applications to environmental ethics. But I’ve mostly concentrated on his ontological works (esp. Experience and Nature) and his metaphilosophy (esp. Reconstruction in Philosophy) in detail, not his epistemological work. The Quest for Certainty, the book, may turn out to be quite important as I investigate this.

But the general public aren’t taught about science this way unless they go to university, and even at university, they’d have to study philosophy of science where the professor teaches them about Popper, Kuhn, and their intellectual descendants. The most common public insight about knowledge is that it must be certain, not in any circumstance subject to revision unless the world itself changes. So goes the intuitive popular account of what knowledge is: a scientific theory is a dogma like any other, and we either believe it wholesale or drop it all as a falsehood. If a fact doesn’t inspire absolute certainty, it isn’t real knowledge. 

It used to be a standard in epistemological philosophy that a belief was genuinely knowledge if it was true and you could justify why you believed it. Edmund Gettier wrote a short paper in 1963 consisting of a couple of hypothetical examples of instances of justified true beliefs whose truth and justification were arrived entirely coincidentally — so justified true belief isn’t necessarily a marker of genuine knowledge, because the believer may just have gotten lucky. Ever since Gettier’s paper dropped, a perennial cause in epistemology has been trying to find a standard for knowledge that was even more certain, more rock-solid, than justified true belief.

Now, the complete structure of a scientific theory is a far larger and more complicated beast than a single person’s belief. But they’re both ultimately about the nature of knowledge, and they’re both totally incompatible. Epistemologists and the general public consider certainty the bedrock standard of what we should call knowledge, and anything less than certain is not worth believing. Philosophers of science, scientists, and I consider the best knowledge to be flexible, functional, always open to revision, always hunting for new facts, new evidence, new reasons for the very revision that for the general public invalidates an institution as knowledge. 

Ultimately, I think what conception of knowledge you accept depends on what kind of person you are. If you fear a rudderless world, then certainty will be your standard for knowledge. If I can put it in terms of yesterday’s post, such a person is more amenable to swallowing the pat certainties of religious dogma: you accept these certainties, and you need never have a doubt or ask a question again. If you’re strong enough to live in a world of contingencies, uncertainties, where anything could be open to change, then you’ll understand how science and knowledge actually work.

I’m not entirely sure what to do with this idea, but I think this weekend, I’ll take some long walks and try to figure it out.