At the risk of incoherence, I will repeat an argument I made a
dozen years ago, but which seemed not to be noticed in the epistemology
wars which preceded the science wars.
Usefulness, if it is constantly tested from many angles against an
uncooperative nature, is in the long run much more than a pragmatic
criterion. (Physicists Reading Physics, 1985)
In Shaping Written Knowledge (1988) I then go on to develop the notion of
reliably reconstitutable phenomena. This does not require that properties
are the same for all ways of observing, but only that phenomena (that is
our recognition, ostention, observation and accounts of phenomena) become
more robust the more kinds of activities these epistemic recognitions are
useful for. That is, a recognition and account of a phenomenon becomes
more meaningful and more reliable the more occasions and variety of
occasions we have for usefully noting and invoking it. Further such
robustness suggests the usefulness of looking for the phenomena on other
kinds of occasions and attempting to invoke our account. Reliable
reconstitutability means that phenomena are there every time we look for
them (that is constitute them as experiencable human knowledge) in the
appropriate ways. Garfinkel, I am told, described knowledge as
instructions for locating phenomena, just as an address serve as
instructions for finding a house. To speak to your concern about aether,
while we do have reliable directions for visiting those things we call
atomic nuclei (at least in the ways which we count as evidence of 'seeing
and recognizing' nuclei) we do not have a reliable way of visiting what we
call aether. Nobody seems to live at that address, indeed it appears to be
a false address, aolthough future alternative maps might locate where it
is hiding and how we could get there to notiooce it.
This does not lead to absolute claims about the way things ARE,
but does lead to robustly reliable claims about WHAT WE CAN TREAT THINGS
AS BEING in increasing ranges of activities.
Cheers,
Chuck
On Sat, 12 Jul 1997, Jay Lemke wrote:
> 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.
> BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
> INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
>
>