Comments on: Against certainty

By: Wayne

Wayne — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:25:57 +0000

Dave, your article is especially meaningful to me since I have devoted much of my intellectual energy for the last four or five years to foundational studies. In my case foundations of logic and mathematics. Given that absolute certainty is an illusion, how do I justify the amount of time and energy that I have spend on foundational questions? I don't think I have ever asked myself this question before, so the "answer" I give now is very preliminary. I suspect that I do not have a strong craving for certainty. I am, and have been for some time, comfortable with my lack of faith. Uncertainty, like taxes and death, just seems to be a basic part of our condition. If there is a divine plan, our inability to know what the plan is part of that plan. So I am an agnostic, not applied to me personally, but collectively to all of us. Additionally, my research has led me to call into question standard textbook practices of logic (for example, the use of modus ponens). No doubt someone will come along later and point out where I too have erred. I thrive on this kind of give and take. As you put it, uncertainty can be liberating. I remember when I was younger wishing I was raised Jewish and not Mormon where, so I thought in those days, instead of appeals to authority, rational inquiry into religion was encouraged. I think more than anything else, it is the false sense of certainty of most Mormons that first distanced myself from my Mormon upbringing. When I left Provo and moved to Cambridge I hoped to find a niche for myself in an unorthodox form of Mormonism and sought out Mormons without this false sense of certainty, but the few I met were on the way out. I haven't been to church since. So if not certainty, what is my motive for studying foundations? I think the goal is clarity, not certainty. It is a pragmatic not a spiritual quest fueled by curiosity. It is a quest that is optimistic but humble, avoiding somehow the twin dangers of absolutism and intellectual defeatism. I have been fortunate to know philosophers of a pragmatic stripe. Several of the leading philosophers of science and mathematics at UC Irvine and other places, call themselves naturalists and reject a prescriptive role for philosophy. They take to heart much of Quine and the later Wittenstein, but without excessive reverence for these or any other intellectual figures. A great example is Penelope Maddy. Here are some links describing her work: her new book, her book on mathematics, and a longish description, which I confess I haven't read but it does looks interesting and accessible.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 14:29:31 +0000

Cool. I’m seeing the show in two and a half weeks. Can’t wait.

By: Lane

Lane — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 14:04:29 +0000

“to reach for any bullshit transcendence.”

I know introducing Serra here may not really apply, apples and . . . sardines? perhaps.

His early work has all that macho industrial process stuff that communicates “deal with it” but these new pieces are so fu**in” REFINED! notice the perfection of all the edges and how they form these amazing dimentional drawings, notice the light as it falls on those curved edges.

The EXQUISITNESS of it all is mind boggling. To me they are not so much about the brute force of the ship building technology but the supreme intellegence of the computer.

Anyway, just a thought.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 02:50:51 +0000

P.S. So I don’t think Serra is about certainty in the sense Rorty is against. Serra’s stuff is too heavy, rusted, obviously the result of specific and massive industrial processes to reach for any bullshit transcendence. “Here’s what I did with this metal. Deal with it.” No room for theory, as Bryan says.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 02:47:32 +0000

Thanks all for the comments. Miller, I'm a terrible philosopher, but what I meant by the last sentence was I guess something along the lines of, "If we keep thinking of our task as finding the ultimate, timeless vocabulary, we're going to fall again and again into the mistake of thinking that we have found it, or outlines of it, already. We're going to mistake the knowledge we have -- which is knowledge; Rorty isn't making the claim that we don't know anything -- for apodictic or at least permanently-fastened-down knowledge. It's not. And if we recognize that, if we learn to better appreciate our own historicity, we can better learn from other cultural viewpoints, whether from the past or simply radically other cultures in our own time. Even though we're basically imprisoned in our own language, time, culture, etc., we can learn to look past the boundaries if we're not looking for the eternal or the transcendent (which simply isn't there) but for something other." That's probably a load o shit, but there you go. As for a Rorty recommendation, even non-specialists like Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, which I confess I haven't read (but I will!). If you've had at least a couple years of analytic philosophy courses, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is fantastic.