Introduction (Continued)
The chapters
Each chapter in this volume is
accompanied by a substantial abstract that lays out the theme of the chapter.
What I plan to do now is to give some idea of the family of concerns that link
these chapters in a variety of ways. As noted, the starting point of this
exercise is the idea of science. When we face the entirety of human inquiry in
its kaleidoscopic state, we need some categories to describe the spectacle. The
idea of science seems to offer that handle. Modern science represented a very
classical conception of human knowledge as an objective quest for the real
properties of the world. With its grand mathematical architectonic, physics was
able to develop tools of investigation that unearthed deeply hidden features of
the universe. But its highly esoteric form of discourse and extremely theory-internal
conception of the world makes physics unavailable to the general cognitive
agent, including the physicist outside his specialist forum. With the advent of
modern science then it looks as if humans engage in two basic forms of inquiry:
let us call them scientific and cultural, respectively. As we will see in the chapters that follow, the
labels themselves are of less value than details about the underlying forms.
In
the scientific mode, human inquiry claims knowledge of reality: the knowledge
constitutes the truth-claims of science, and the reality constitutes the joints
of nature so postulated. The discourse is assumed to be absolute and objective.
The truth-claim no doubt is a human action, but the truth—such as, the earth is
round—is independent of any agent, community, tradition, textual and social
context; in other words, truth lays bare the world as it is. It is commonly
believed that the scientific conception of the world is objective in the sense that it does not have a (preferred) point of
view; Thomas Nagel (1986) called it the view from nowhere.
In
contrast, much of our lives includes a subjective
point of view, the point of view of the human agent; these may be thought of as
views from somewhere. As Nagel (1986)
and Davidson (1991) pointed out, the two views need to be reconciled in order
for us to lead a meaningful life including social and political lives. Nagel
then goes on to show how the reconciliation is to be achieved to address a
range of classical philosophical problems, such as the mind-body problem.
Speaking roughly, the distinction between view from nowhere and view from somewhere is one way of
formulating the distinction between the scientific and the cultural.
My
interests are markedly different from the suggested distinction. I think there
is another distinction between the scientific and the cultural which is related
to, but not sufficiently captured by the subjective-objective distinction. As noted,
both the subjective and the objective perspectives are needed to reach human
thought and action (Davidson explicitly adds the inter-subjective perspective
to the other two); human thought is the result of a reconciliation of
these things in any case. I think a scientific-cultural distinction arises even
after such reconciliation is reached. The first two chapters in this volume
discuss the issue.
The
starting point is the conception of knowledge. In the first chapter (Human Reality), it is shown how the
concepts of knowledge, truth and reality are intimately related; if a conception
of mind-independent reality is unavailable, so are the concepts of knowledge
and truth. The problem is that human knowledge and, therefore, the conception
of reality are necessarily products of how humans are designed; if humans were
designed, say, as bats, the conception of the world would have been very
different. So if the notion of objectivity is understood in terms of a
mind-independent reality, then that notion appears to be problematic, if not
downright incoherent. There is much room for skepticism then regarding realist
claims. Within the design though, it is striking that the human mind
can sometimes detect formal/mathematical regularity in the external world. The
phenomenon is poorly understood but its shining existence cannot be denied.
Perhaps it is possible to recover some version of the notions of knowledge,
truth and reality around this phenomenon. I discuss the possibility with more
constructive details in the second chapter.
However,
the formal mode of inquiry is rarely available in the vast stretch of human
cognitive life. This suggests a broad distinction between forms of inquiry
regarding the presence and absence of the formal mode, which amounts roughly to
the distinction between the scientific and the cultural. It could be that the world
and the knowledge of it are reached in very different reflective terms between
the two forms of inquiry. In that sense the world lost in our analytic pursuit
may be regained in our poetic form of inquiry in which the world is grasped by
immersing ourselves in it. The elusive world, that we are unable to discover
except in rare cases by looking at it from the outside, is cheerfully embraced
as a lived world from the inside.
The
second chapter (Science and the Mind)
focuses on the historical fact that the scientific mode is a great human
achievement, but it works in very restricted domains of simple systems. That’s
the price we pay for our penchant for objectivity. Genuine scientific
understanding is reached primarily through the formal mode—the Galilean style—which
is available only for very simple systems. The chapter points out that the arts
also sometimes search for formal/minimalist conception of aspects of the world,
but the method of search is distinct, resulting in a vastly different form of
inquiry. It is reasonable to expect then that a genuine science of the mind is
also likely to be restricted only to those aspects of the mind where the formal
mode is available. Human language is perhaps the most promising example of such
an aspect of the mind. There are serious limits to the inquiry even there, as
the next two chapters suggest.
(To be continued)
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