Language Games

As an undergraduate, I certainly acted on that impulse to procrastinate. In my limited experience, philosophers or aspiring philosophers are not different in this regard, and in some ways, seem to procrastinate to an even greater degree.

Is this part of the philosopher in me slowly dying? If picture below is any indication, then either (p) I’m growing up or (q) I’m slowly divorcing myself from philosopher-type habits. As it turns out, if p or q, then r: D tracks his assignments.

Millions of Americans are embarrassingly ill-informed and they do not care that they are. Are you one of those people?

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My interview on ABC made one thing clear: In our society sex workers are still presented as tragic, lost, Dickensian characters.

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I’ve been reading and rereading Longino’s “Feminist Epistemology as a Local Epistemology“.  I originally came to it because, in missing philosophy, and in particular epistemology, I wanted to go back and read influential works that curriculum or ideological influences made impossible.   Of course, neither of those constitute something intentionally enacted.

I think my favorite part of the essay is where Longino points out problems with the a central ontological commitment that drives empirical research: the idea that, in general, it is best be as simple as possible when it comes to a theory’s commitment to the existence of types of entities.  If the data can be explained in a simpler way, then it should be.  This idea, one that Longino takes as a standard virtue in epistemology, and often presumed in the natural science, is frequently characterized as “what closes the gap between evidence and theory”.

I understood these virtues also as justification for, as well as motivation to, invoke the use of “Occam’s Razor”.  Occam’s Razor is the normative view that more often than not, the simplest theory is the best choice.  While this description seems equivalent with the description issued above, it is not the same as Occam’s Razor belongs squarely to the area of theory selection/comparison.  Thus is rears its head only in the context of a philosophical or scientific dispute over which one of two or more possible theories a particular scientific community should invoke and/or “project”–to use Nelson Goodman’s terminology.

Longino’s arguments against both the standard epistemic value (simplicity) and the standard method of theory selection (Occam’s Razor) bring up important inconsistencies that many academic philosophers have failed to acknowledge and/or listen to–as Longino also points out.

In any event, here are her most concise arguments levied against these normative constraints:

i. This formulation begs the question what counts as an adequate explanation.  Is an adequate explanation an account sufficient to generate predictions or an account of underlying processes, and, if explanation is just retrospective prediction, then must it be successful at individual or population levels?  Either the meaning of simplicity will be relative to one’s account of explanation, thus undermining the capacity of simplicity to function as an independent epistemic value, or the insistence on simplicity will dictate what gets explained and how.

ii. We have no a priori reason to think the universe simple, i.e. composed of very few kinds of thing (as few as the kinds of elementary particles, for example) rather than of many different kinds of thing.  Nor is there or could there be empirical evidence for such a view.

iii. The degree of simplicity or variety in one’s theoretical ontology may be dependent on the degree of variety one admits into one’s description of the phenomena.  If one imposes uniformity on the data by rejecting anomalies, then one is making a choice for a certain kind of account. If the view that the boundaries of our descriptive categories are conventional is correct, then there is no epistemological fault in this, but neither is there virtue.

I will discuss these and analyze them in greater detail in a (near) future post.  In the meantime, you can see Longino’s piece Louis P. Pojman’s The Theory of Knowledge-Classical and Contemporary Readings (Third Edition)

I’m adding an FAQ page to this site because I think it warrants one.

Let me know what you think once it’s completed!

Thanks,

David

I apologize for taking a few days off.  Actually, I haven’t really been taking days off in the usual sense.  Most of my time has been devoted to searching for an apartment in Boston.   I’m moving there in several weeks and have just now realized how seriously expensive it will be.

I will most likely make another post (the 2nd part of the previous post) either tonight or tomorrow.  Then I’ll be gone for the weekend and won’t be back until monday.

Political language games deserve more attention from Wittgensteinians, I think.
What sort of bridges could be built between the following:
(1) a conception of language games as a philosophical method for dissolving and/or removing absurdities about the meaning of “philosophically loaded” terms like understanding, ‘the mental’, and ‘definition vs. example’ and

(2) a conception of language games as a method for dissolving the politically absurd. What I mean by this latter term is

p: any statement issued by a government official that ought to immediately make questionable their epistemic authority regarding action taken in response to domestic and international crises

Let’s take a look at Dick Cheney’s recent comment about the alleged relationship between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam.

Cheney: “We’ve never made the case or argued the case that somehow Osama Bin Laden was directly involved in 9-11. That evidence has never been forthcoming.”

What exactly could he mean by “we’ve never made the case”? We have to construct cases in which it would be intelligible to say “we never made the case that x” despite our knowledge of the fact that the Bush administration very quickly ran with an idea of

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Please do yourself a favor and watch Monty Python’s “International Philosophy”.

You really have to listen to what the commentators say, because every one of their comments is related to the professed ideas of the philosophers they are commenting on. It’s absolutely hilarious.

Unfortunately, Wittgenstein isn’t in much of it. And the reference the commentators make (I believe) are strictly related to the Logico-Tractatacus. Nevertheless, god this clip is hilarious (for a philosophy major)

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I have an idea that I’d like to share: I believe that the meaning of “I” as it is used in MMORPG’s poses a very interesting kind of language game.  In fact, I think it’s so entertaining that I’m calling all of you who read this, and who happen to be an MMORPG player, to contact me with your thoughts concerning epistemic and/or ontological implications with respect to how it is you or players you know use the term “I” in MMORPG’s.

 This may seem a bit too broad, especially if you are not familiar with the way ‘epistemic’ and ‘ontological’ are used in academic philosophy.  If this is the case, but you’re still interested, then contact me and I can give you a more detailed explanation of what exactly I mean when I say that “the way “I” is used in MMORPG has significant epistemic and ontological implications for those who who use it”

Briefly, what I want to say is that when it comes to MMORPG’s, self-reference (the way a linguistic convention is used to denote the first-person), epistemic authority (the way a linguistic convention is used to empower, verify, or guarantee the truth and/or justification of the content of an expression), and/or agency (the freedom to think and/or partake in spontaneous, self-motivated meaningful acts) can take on very different functions within a particular community of speakers (gamers).

In short, I want user input! In a few days I’ll construct a questionaire for anyone who responds to this post with their email and name/nick name.  If you’re involved in this, you can then respond at your leisure, though I ask that you be reasonable in your response time (no more than a couple of weeks, please). 

I will then use your responses (as data) to construct a Wittgensteinian description of the relevant factors that go towards determining the meaning (i.e. how the “I” is used and/or how it’s used is explained) of the “I” and related expressions (e.g. “my”, “myself”, “mine”, and any other expression used to express character experience as personal experience).

“I think, therefore I am”

What is the sense of this proposition? We need to evaluate it according to the way in which it has been and currently is appropriately used.

“I think” is a rather vague expression: we want to say that in all matters of thinking, there must be something thought (as an example, and one of the first such cases, consult Socrates’ premise in the Theaetetus that “…and in all matters of thinking, there must be something thought of”)

But of course there is the sense of “I think” such that “I think” need not be intentional and or conscious in the way that we take the first part of Descartes’ infamous conclusion. Example: “I was thinking that the year Napoleon  died was 1891, but…”  But what?–when we express our consciousness of a mistake, or our doubt over a belief we previously held to be sound, we use the “I think” as a merely an introduction to the part of the proposition that answers the question, “what is in doubt?”

For instance, consider the sense of “to think” as it exists in a different tense! “I thought that you were going to pick up Emily at 4:30…”

Suppose we know nothing more. Here, the “I think” expression (manifested in a different tense, I know) has a very different sense: one that admits of doubt, one that would not be a precursor to an infamous philosophical necessity. “If I thought that you were going to pick up Emily at 4:30, then clearly you know that by the time I said “I thought”, you knew that something contrary to what I thought actually occurred!”

Need we be in the past-tense to identify distinct senses of “I think”–let us try something in the present and see if Descartes’ use of “I think” still provides a foundational epistemic starting point from which to springboard an entire metaphysics based on the dualism of mind and matter.

“I think 4x=16 is correct, but check my math.”

What is the sense of “I think” here? Clearly, the “I think” is merely a clue–a clue to the reader and/or audience that the speaker’s knowledge and/or understanding of the upcoming expression is shaky at best, that is, dubious–the sense is quite distinct from the sense of “I think” in “I think therefore I am”!  In Descartes’ use of “I think” it is an instance of a category of activity-the activity of the mental having of an experience-and based on his stipulated conditions concerning the nature of doubt, it passes the litmus test and is thus a proper candidate for spring boarding his epistemology of skepticism.

We must understand that we use philosophical concepts in various ways. We use them for different purposes, in some cases to hint at an upcoming doubt, or perhaps to name a counter-factual possibility!

“If I thought that today would be rainy, at the least I would have brought a rain coat.”

To think, to have thought, and to be thinking are used in very different ways. They share an infinitive form, but they are used in such variety that it is borderline ridiculous to name any commonality between their meanings. Additionally, and more importantly, the same tense of the verb “to think” need not necessarily imply a mental activity in the way Descartes, or should I say Descartes’ interpretors (who knows what Descartes really meant, after all), have in mind.

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