Re: minds of our own?

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Sat, 12 Jul 97 22:10:49 EDT

Philosophers these days find it fashionable to critique ideas
for what they call 'incoherence' (as opposed to the old-fashioned
idea of just being plain wrong -- and I suppose this is a sort of
progress, though of course these same philosophers will endlessly
defend the necessity of believing that propositions are either
true or false, unless meaningless, because not to believe this
would lead them into incoherence ....:).

It seems to me slightly incoherent, in the sense that it is damn
hard to operate a discourse simultaneously with both assumptions
-- though quite easy, as your posting ably shows to shift from
one to the other by 'changing the subject' a bit -- if the assumptions
are (1) the physical world has intrinsic properties, and (2) all
observations of the physical world are relative to the observers'
activities for observing -- especially an empirical theory of
the physical world which claims that observations are the basic
way we learn about the intrinsic properties. This makes sense only
if the properties turn out to be the same for all ways of
observing, and of course the problem in both modern physics and
especially the human sciences, is just that they don't.

In fact it would seem to me reasonable to try to save the notion
of a coherent world precisely by dropping the assumption of
intrinsic properties and replacing it by a notion of purely
relational ones. This is what science does in practice, but
what philosophy absolutely forbids it to do in principle. But,
c'mon, what do we really believe: that there is an aether and
it's not detectable, or that there just isn't such a beast?
Our practice, not our philosophy, is what evidences our real
beliefs. Or, more simply, I prefer Feyerabend to Lakatos.

JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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