... well, not really. Lars Walker takes on subjectivity: Living in the purple zone. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The problem with people going on about subjectivity is that they tend to forget that the terms is a relational one: Knowledge involves a relation between subject and object or else between subject and subject. The notion of "purely subjective" is purely fantastic.
Is the notion of the purely objective and the pursuit of the purely objective, fantastic too?
ReplyDeleteYes, Noel, it is. You cannot bracket yourself out of the picture and shouldn't try. Knowledge is in the relationship between knower and known and it is by virtue of the relationship that the former is enriched.
ReplyDeleteBy claiming the pursuit of the purely objective is fantastic, you are suggesting that any science that pursues the purely objective is science fiction.
ReplyDeleteI don't mind scientists having opinions or personal relationships with facts. How could they not? But I think the best scientists concentrate on justifying their work primarily through a mathematical process, which is an entirely separate and independent factor to whatever personal relationships, opinions or feelings they may have.
You've mentioned before that it is not possible to prove anything exists, including us. Here's something Winston Churchill said that you might find interesting:
"The idea that nothing is true except what we comprehend is silly ... Some of my cousins who had the great advantage of University education used to tease me with arguments to prove that nothing has any existence except what we think of it. The whole creation is but a dream; all phenomena are imaginary. You create your own universe as you go along. The stronger your imagination, the more variegated your universe. When you leave off dreaming, the universe ceases to exist. These amusing mental acrobatics are all right to play with. They are perfectly harmless and perfectly useless. I warn my younger readers only to treat them as a game. The metaphysicians will have the last word and defy you to disprove their absurd propositions.
I have always rested upon the following argument which I devised for myself many years ago. We look up in the sky and see the sun. Our eyes are dazzled and our senses record the fact. So here is this great sun standing apparently on no better foundation than our physical senses. But happily there is a method, apart altogether from our physical senses, of testing the reality of the sun. It is by mathematics. By means of prolonged processes of mathematics, entirely separate from the senses, astronomers are able to calculate when an eclipse will occur. They predict by pure reason that a black spot will pass the sun on a certain day. You go and look, and your sense of sight immediately tells you that their calculations are vindicated. So here you have the evidence of the senses reinforced by the entirely separate evidence of a vast independent process of mathematical reasoning. We have taken what is called in military map-making 'a cross bearing.' We have got independent testimony to the reality of the sun.
When my metaphysical friends tell me that the data on which the astronomers made their calculations, were necessarily obtained originally through the evidence of the senses, I say 'No.' They might, in theory at any rate, be obtained by automatic calculating-machines set in motion by the light falling upon them without admixture of the human senses at any stage. When they persist that we should have to be told about the calculations and use our ears for that purpose, I reply that the mathematical process has a reality and virtue in itself, and that once discovered it constitutes a new and independent factor. I am also at this point accustomed to reaffirm with emphasis my conviction that the sun is real, and also that it is hot - in fact as hot as Hell, and that if the metaphysicians doubt it they should go there and see."
Hi Noel,
ReplyDeleteIn saying that we cannot prove that we exist, I was not suggesting that we don't. I was challenging the notion - which I think is obviously false - that something is true only if it can be proved. I don't have to prove that I exist. I know that I exist without the any need for ratiocination. Nor was I suggesting that nothing exists "objectively." I was pointing out that we know the objective world by virtue of our relation to it as subjects. (I should think that quantum mechanics could be said to demonstrate that.) And it also seems to me that this knowledge obtained by purely mathematical processes without the involvement of the senses is hardly what we are talking about when we speak of ordinary, everyday knowledge - and exactly how would you know that it was truer anyway? What is the standard of comparison? You seem to be yearning for some cold, abstract reality far removed from the delightful mess we actally inhabit.
What gave you that impression? All I'm trying to do is defend science, that body of work that gave us those ordinary, everyday things like lightbulbs, computers and microwave dinners. I don't think science is fiction, or fantasy. Science looks for proven answers. It doesn't invent them based on personal whim, relationship or opinion.
ReplyDeleteI was pointing out that we know the objective world by virtue of our relation to it as subjects.
Is that the only way we know the objective world, through our subjective relationship with it? You don't think "the mathematical process has a reality and virtue in itself, and that once discovered it constitutes a new and independent factor?"
Anyone suggesting this to you is Mr. Spock?
What is the standard of comparison?
I think it is evidence, objective evidence.