There does seem to me to be a rather basic contradiction (of the awkward
rather than the productive sort) if an analysis hopes to use necessity as a
solution to the factorization problem but then finds itself having to
reconcile necessity and historicity. I doubt all claims of logical
necessity outside of closed, artificial systems (and modern mathematics may
suggest that we have to give up even for these). That leaves claims of
practical necessity, and they are all (1) products of history, (2) known
only over some timescale, and (3) not necessary as things change. So we
come back to some very basic issues of how to DO factorization.
Everyone seems to agree that we don't do factorization very well in
practice most of the time. The diehards just argue that it is in principle
possible to do it. (Which really doesn't seem too useful to me.) But in may
in fact NOT be possible in principle to do it, not because of some
metaphysical ontological property of reality (or the lack of one), but
simply because the timescales don't match up. If you want to factor out the
influence of culture and social attitudes, you need a timescale for doing
so that is so long that those factors will have changed before you're done.
Or you need the efforts of such a large group of people working on this
that they themselves begin to constitute a new subculture with more rapidly
diverging attitudes and values of their own. Frankly, in every way I've
ever considered the issue, factorization is a hopeless chimera, and I think
we would do much better to work more seriously on alternative
epistemologies that do not assume or require factoring the subject out from
the object.
This is not to say that there are not some special cases, or classes of
cases, where we can have at least a little well-founded confidence that we
have a first approximation to a factorization that is valid on some useful
timescale. Those are the cases that philosophers are always going on about
(rocks, trees, chairs, etc.). But they don't generalize to the matters that
interest us (love, trust, education, politics, meaning, social change,
etc.). They are not typical cases. They are not a model for how we should
look at life in general.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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