No, I'm saying exactly the opposite, or at least something quite different.
The truth claims made by the catholic church are indeed of an entirely
different nature than those of (can I say mainstream?) physics. Firstly,
they _primarily_ concern themselves with describing entirely different
phenomena for entirely different reasons. But one may be both a catholic
and a physicist. Perhaps what you're trying to get at can be put under the
heading of social functions of particular consensual domains (not to be
confused with a teleological social "purpose"). Both physics and the church
claim truth/power/knowledge that pertain, on the one hand primarily to God,
and on the other, primarily to the physical universe. Each have goes at
encroaching on the others' turf (eg Paul Davies, Fritz Capra, the Jesuits,
Descartes, etc). Neither of these fields, or consensual domains, or
socially embedded sets of socio-historically constrained praxes, or
whatever you want to call them, are homogenous, they are merely organised
around certain assumptions about the way things are.
Further, they have well-established traditions of how to say what it is
they say. Some aspects _may_ be mutually exclusive - the magnificat, the
virgin birth, and so on for the church - but the physicists would seem to
be at a disadvantage here because, historically and culturally, the
discipline comes from the church, at least it does in the West. Thus its
advances have a logic that lends itself to reappropriation by the church
for the church's purpose of proving that god not only exists, but that "he"
(to use the patriarchal assumptions of the church) created everything,
however indirectly.
>In other words, does the validity of the
>truth claims (a form of speech act) found within a consensual domain derive
>from the fact of consensus or from a correct, though necessarily dynamic
>and incomplete, objective knowledge.
No, no. I'm talking about a consensus on ways of describing various
realities (gods, rocks), not of agreeing on objective truths, partial or
otherwise, although basic truth assumptions play a big part in any social
domain (but they are most often historically "submerged"). Consensual
domains exist, survive, diverge, break apart into ostensibly new ones,
reproduce, and so on, precisely because of disagreement and tension -
dialectical tension - within them, usually about what the truth "is".
>This seems to be what you are saying
>when you write, "But these descriptions are only valid for two entirely
>different consensual domains." This would seem to imply that Galileo's
>statements about the position of the earth relative to the sun were not
>valid (does that mean true for you?) unless someone accepted the premises of
>his consensual domain. Is that what you want to say?
No. His description of the world was not valid within his consensual domain
(ie the church), hence his punishment: he was disallowed his description
within the dominant domain in which he was operating. When I say "valid", I
do not mean "true", I mean its validity pertains to a socially and
historically constituted set of ways of saying/doing/knowing (praxis?).
Also, I'm not talking about consensual domains consisting of one person
(this is second order stuff and where CL gets stuck for me). I'm describing
social, historical, and cultural domains that develop their "ways of
saying/describing" over time. These ways of knowing/saying/doing are
necessarily material, embodied practices, which are "valid for this
historical period" (to misquote Marx).
>I must admit to not understanding what you are referring to when you say
>"consensual domains". Do you admit of consensual domains in which objective
>knowledge is not a basis for truth claims; i.e., distinguish truth claims
>about reality from other types of truth claims?
I'm not sure what you mean here. Anyway, what I'm saying is that there are
different _orders_ of reality, some of which are harder to make claims
about than others. For example, I may think, because of my background,
experience, and predisposition, that you are attacking me by putting up
these questions and arguments and so on (I don't in the least, but let's
pretend I do for the moment). Now, this could be a very real threat; "real"
for me, and for others who think like me, in every sense of the word. But
this is a harder "thing" - a more difficult order of reality - to talk
about and discuss than the composition of a rock or of oxygen or of the
brand of my car (I don't have one).
--- snip stuff about White (I don't know this work, I'm sorry) ---
>
>(of course White never experienced Mercury in retrograde, but hey!!)
>
> However, your use of the notion of "verifiable truth claims restricted to
>consensual commnities" muddies the picture for me so I'm not sure if it
>allows of the progressive growth (including inevitable revolutions in
>structure) of objective knowledge.
Well, I see it the other way around. For me, an insistence on a
one-dimensional model of objectivity disallows too many ineffable social
phenomena. What do we say is not materially constituted? Rocks-> air ->
thought processes -> ideological constructs -> social consciousness? Where
do we draw the materiality line? If it's not a material process, what is
it? If we can't admit that descriptive domains, which are separate from,
but interdependent with, more concrete or tangible domains (eg the world of
rocks, atoms, sausages, and other "things"), then how the devil are we to
compare them and see how they interact?
I'm loathe to hang on to incommensurable assumptions about what's real and
what's not, and what's material and what's not. Is a recurring, deluded set
of perceptions as real as a scientifically verifiable observation about the
composition of a rock? If so, why? If not, why not? Are deluded or
inaccurate assumptions about the world real and true for those who hold
them over a long period of time? Who gets to say what is real and true in
any given field? I ask myself these questions and answer that if the heaven
that the catholic church describes exists, it must be further down the road
from where I live, OR, I say that all catholics are deluded, OR, I say that
we ought to have an epistemological rather than ontological dualism (ie
delineate that which can be known from that which can't), OR, I say that we
might as well give up trying to describe or understand human social life
from a scientific perspective, thus sticking to rocks for objective truths.
None of these answers is satisfactory to me.
Positing consensual domains, socially and historically developed ways of
saying and doing, and therefore knowing, I think, opens up the potential
for a more complex understanding about human knowing (and therefore doing)
- not about what "counts" as knowledge, but how different knowledges about
the world are developed: ie knowledge about knowledge formation,
construction, destruction, redundancy, and so on. For humans, I think this
has most, if not all, to do with language, and therefore, with what I call
descriptive domains. Cf a physicist describes the moon in terms of
weight/density/velocity/distance from the earth, whereas a poet might
describe the moon in an entirely different way, appealing to emotion -
which one of these is an untrue description of the moon? Do we define truth
in terms of "not false", or in terms of "verifiable facts", or in terms of
"accuracy"? If it's any of these, then much of the human mind, including
emotional states must remain unknown, since our apparatus for observation
is not yet up to the task.
> If there is such a possibility, a
>position that seems to me to underpin CHAT, then the objective knowledge of
>living beings and social consciousness should, in theory, be as attainable
>as our knowledge of the domain of non-organic matter.
Perhaps, but we're obviously a long way off right now. I'm just trying to
understand something in a certain way, and thus I find myself having to
invent or appropriate new language since I disagree with a lot of what gets
said these days about the subject. Perhaps I'm not doing it all that well.
-- snip --
>Nevertheless I do believe that those
>directions derived from the dialectical materialist tradition (including
>Vygotskian directions) provide certain "never to be lost truths" about
>cultural-historical reality comparable to the truth of the laws Galileo
>derived from simple experiments with falling bodies.
I agree with you entirely. I think my conception of consensual domains is
well within the tradition of dialectical materialism. This is accidental
though. I started with this systems perspective (autopoiesis, Maturana,
Varela, Luhmann, etc) and then read Adorno, then Marx, then some Vygotsky.
It all makes sense to me so far. Obviously I either need to explain myself
a little better, or else abandon what I find to be a useful approach. I
don't think we diverge in principle, at least in respect of dialectical
materialism. We may disgree on a "materiality threshold" or something like
that. But I don't see any less materiality about language and thought than
the materiality of a rock or a sausage.
regards,
Phil
Phil Graham
p.graham who-is-at qut.edu.au
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html