Arbitrary Marks

We’ll see if my post can live up to the title I’ve just crammed into my Wordpress draft. I had a wide-ranging conversation today with a fellow student at the U of C about Empiricism & the Philosophy of Mind by Wilfrid Sellars. I was so disappointed that I didn’t have with me 1) the previous blog post and 2) the text itself.  However, since Sellars has come up in several places recently, I made myself come back home to do some skimming and put together the puzzle pieces we were discussing.

First, the general topic:

How do we obtain knowledge of the world and how do we justify this knowledge? My friend raised the possibility that sometimes we confuse the two, description of our knowledge acquisition and justification. I wonder if this is what’s going on in the social constructivist model–that although we attain knowledge in community and also determine what our norms are, that this doesn’t mean we want to point only to the community in order to justify our norms.

The question, too, is whether these norms are purely linguistic and/or communal, or whether there is a correspondence of some kind with the world in them.  Turning to my Sellars (which is still handily flagged with Post-It flags reading “piecemeal”, “ostentive definition” and “Brandom”), I find the story of Mr. Jones and how he learns to recognize the natural color of a tie under sunlight compared to electric light.  In his analysis of having the concept “green”, Sellars writes:

“Not only must the conditions be of a sort that it is appropriate for determining the color of an object by looking, the subject must know that conditions of this sort are appropriate…one can have the concept green only by having a whole battery of concepts of which it is one element.” (44)

Thus we get “habits of response” to objects in the world in a piecemeal way. This is where I think Bruffee and others have gotten the description of our knowledge-obtaining pretty correct.  And that’s why I don’t have a problem with collaborative learning in the classroom, to some degree. My students will learn about intentional action better by having to carve into the topic in multiple ways, with their fellow student’s perspectives augmenting theirs, with the definitions of Aristotles honing theirs, etc.

Where Bruffee goes wrong, I think, is helped out by both Sellars’ discussion and another article I’ve been meaning to blog–Ronald Giere’s “Perspectival Pluralism.” Sellars notes that people think science has shown “objects aren’t really colored” because it’s our eyes that respond to the wavelengths of light in a certain way. That, he argues is not true in a certain way, because it functions as a negation only within the “common-sense world” (and here I cannot help but think of the Buddhist notion of two truths).  Rather, science’s insight into wavelengths and dichromatism etc. (and Giere goes into this in depth in his paper, very clearly) shows us that our framework itself is the problem.

Sellars then goes on to say that, in terms of our common-sense framework, “objects aren’t really colored” is a false statement. But taken as a point against our framework, it does mean “that the common-sense world of physical objects in Space and Time is unreal.” (83)

Notice, though, what this does not mean, if we continue with the color example (and here I move to Giere).

1) It does not mean that just anything goes–in terms of color processing, there are definitely correct ways within each framework to judge a color.  Some birds are tetrachromats and can see UV light. We cannot see reddish-green or yellowish-blue because of the way our eyes register wavelengths.  If I said I saw red-green or UV, you would think I was crazy.

2) It does not mean that frameworks are necessarily incommensurable–although there may be areas which have, at least initially apparently competing claims. Giere gives the example of a monochromat seeing “a rug as being of uniform brightness while a trichromat sees a red pattern on a green background.” But since we assume there is a single reality underlying our experience, the question then becomes one of what framework is pragmatically suited to our observation.

3) This is where, I think, the question of justification comes in and why we both cannot avoid society and yet must keep the world in view. True, to agree what framework we use depends upon our aims, which will be socially determined. Foucault (you were wondering when I’d get to him) is helpful because he has peeled back the way we construct seemingly “objective” concepts like “deviant/abnormal sexuality” or “madness/criminality.”  Yet, at the same time, even though we may not be carving nature at its joints, Foucault does not deny that there is a reality we are interpreting.

4) This means, I think, that just as Mr. Jones doesn’t think about standards and what he’s doing when he says “This tie is green” and “This tie seems to be green”, since he’s working within the inferential network of concepts (a point that is shared by Sellars, Foucault and Searle, to toss in a third). Yet there are physical-causal constraints upon the way we see ties, the way our bodies function sexually, the way our brains impact behavior.

So, just because we are engaging in a social activity when we justify our assertions (”This tie is green”, “This person is mad”) and the norms we’re using are in the background, potentially shiftable and pragmatic in their origins, we still act as if the world has a structure that is single, not plural. Otherwise, we would not engage the activity of comparing frameworks (say creationism versus evolution).

Thus while Bruffee argues that education is “reacculturation” into an academic discourse–like Mr. Jones learning color judgment-speak–there are ways of 1) comparing cultural discourses and 2) at least contingently, comparing discourse to reality. Number two happens with the caveat that there is no objectivity to be gained, but not by tossing up one’s hands and saying the source of error is what serves only “private purposes of one’s own” (Bruffee).

Conclusion? Even if it turns out that our assumption of a single unified reality must be just a methodological approach (which is Giere’s argument), it seems to work pretty well. We will keep aiming for a universal description of the world, even though it may turn out to be impossible. I suppose I think this comes back to Nāgārjuna’s argument (if it is his argument–and I am still in the process of culling sources on this) that samsara is nirvana and nirvana is samsara.

We transcend the concepts of the world and then return back to those concepts: the Grand Unified Theory of physics is that there is no Grand Unified Theory, to put it in Giere’s terms. That means that we don’t need to discard concepts as being purely socially constructed, but we ought not to idolize them, and thinkers like Nietzsche and Foucault help us to hammer at those idols, revealing their emptiness.

[Afterthought--I started with epistemology and wound up with ontology, like ADHR suggested in earlier comments. Hmm. I'll have to keep working at this.]

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Education, Epistemology, Metaphysics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Email me at arbitrary [dot] marks [at] gmail [dot] com if you think a discussion should be re-opened.