Re: Arbitrariness - Pragmatic brainteaser?
Gary Shank (P30GDS1 who-is-at MVS.CSO.NIU.EDU)
Thu, 18 Jan 96 10:39 CST
Well, Edouard, I was trying to shed more light on the New
Zealand issue and not to solve anything, and I am far far frar
from being anything close to a philosopher, pragmatic or other-
wise, but let me take a crack at this issue as i think a good
pragmatic-oriented semiotic consultant might address it.
The issue is I think, the following: how can two (and in this case
three, see later) cultures live together and share resources etc
in a reasonable way? Here, I am taking the age-old stance of
putting reason against power. Sure, the more powerful can wrest
resources from the weak -- always have and unfortunately maybe
always will. But that still does not allow us to simply accede
to power and submit to its primacy. Remember, Peirce saw logic
as a subordinate science grounded in ethics. That is, logic is
a tool we use in order to do the right thing. Neitchze and all
power mongers of his ilk saw that 'might makes right' but I want
to go in the direction of reason.
One way that two cultures can interact is for one to assimilate the
other. In the case of the Maoris, they literally assimilated, ie
ate, the earlier culture, which we will call the Natives. The
British assimilated figuratively, in that every Maori expression of
meaning and order was replaced with a British expression. Note
that some of those expressions were names, and others were, I am
assuming, ways to do things and to be in the world.
The pragmatist then says -- is there any way for us to accomodate
these patterns of meaning? Note that I am going well beyond the
notion that patterns of meaning involve just the names of things.
Here I turn to the Peircean model for resovling issues of truth --
that which is true is what we will have when the community of
inquirers reach the end of inquiry. Note that Peirce is not saying
the community of Peircean inquirers -- he is saying the community
of inquirers, period. Further more, the job of inquirers, ironicall
y enough, is to make mistakes. But we need to make illuminating
and insightful mistakes, which are then correctible by futher
inquiry. Dogmatically and persistantly clinging to either the
results of one's inquiry or the mode of one's inquiry to the ex-
clusion of others viiolates this principle in the extreme.
So now we are going to talk in concrete terms. First, we assume
that things will have different levels of meanings to the Maori
and the British. Just to move the discussion along, I am going
to create some pretend data. We will pretend that the Maori are
much more concerned with water, because it plays a primary role in
their mythology, while the British are concerned with boundaries
and states and physical landmarks. Since the British are less
concerned with water, all water names revert to Maori. The British
names for the states etc are preserved, along with some of the
physical landmarks. The crucial physical landmarks -- eg the highes
mountains, the widest valleys, are labeled on maps etc as having
no name, in deference to the names that the Natives gave them,
which are now lost forever. In this fashion, at least the place
for the names that the Natives is held open, with both extant
cultures agreeing to abide by the process.
Going beyond the problem of names and labels, we now proceed with
the process of putting together Maori and British modes of inquiry
and seeing the areas of agreement and divergence. We can do this
because we understand that there are aspects of being and reality
which neither mode of inquiry has yet discovered, and it is a
pretty good bet that there are aspects of being and reality that
the Maori inquirers have discovered which are unknown to the
British and vice versa.
I realize that this is a pretty lame solution, but i dont know
enough about either culure to do any more. I think if we look
at the idea of cooperative inquiry and the genuine synthesis of
these inquiry findings to further our knowledge of reality, then
I have also answered Jay's concerns. Given that every mode of
inquiry privileges certain aspects of reality, and conceals other
aspects, it is important that we learn to synthesize these modes
to develop the richer picture we need. Note that i am not really
talking about eclecticism, because eclecticism requires that we
respect the grounds of the modes of inquiry used, while synthesix
allows us to say that the correspondence theory is right about "x"
and wrong about "y", the semantic theory is right about "y" and
wrong about "z" and so on.
I also hope that I have repsected Angel's excellent suggestion
about moving away from jargon and puttting the discussion into
a practical and useful light....
gary shank
gshank who-is-at niu.edu