Like Eva, the idea that we can assign people to 'epistemological positions'
offends my intellectual sense. Most of the classificatory systems I've ever
seen of this sort strike me as formulated from such extremely narrow
viewpoints that the idea they could encompass all possible, or all
reasonable positions seems mere hybris. There is no grid of the alternative
positions that would not look different if drawn from another position
within, much less outside one such classification. It is merely a
rhetorical ploy, of the sort favored mainly by a certain school of modern
philosophers. We hear far too much these days to the effect that beyond
some positivist or realist empiricism there is only the slippery slope to
something deadly. There are far more fruitful ways of being meaningfully
part of a world than are dreamt of in a few philosophers' -isms of one
culture in one moment of history. In fact, being provocative as noted, I
don't believe that it is in fact ever legitimately possible intellectually
to designate all possible views on any matter, and so it is never
conclusive to argue after the fashion that since X must be A, B, C, or D,
and is not A or B or C, it must be D. I doubt this mode of argument even in
logic and mathematics, much less in more open systems of discourse. The
covering premise can be true only by stipulation (as it is in some formal
systems), and so the conclusion's validity is limited to such systems.
We heard from Bill Barowy a long and wonderful personal account of some of
his experiences as an experimental physicist. Many of you know that I
started out as a theoretical physicist, and there are rather dramatic
differences in these two subcultures. I liked Bill's account of opening
black box after black box in search of possible instrument error, but his
conclusion was quite non-Bohrian, as well as non-Latourian. Because the
phenomenon has been shown to not be a function of a non-standard box, does
not mean it is a function of something solely outside the box. The
phenomenon is the product of the working-box-and-whatever system. We do not
just factor out the box. We factor in a working box, as opposed to a faulty
box. As Latour points out it is rather arbitrarily asymmetrical to
attribute our 'mistakes' only to our technology and our 'findings' only to
nature. Bohr had made this point first for quantum phenomena, and later for
all observations and measurements. Latour fits it into a larger picture of
cultural bifurcations between the social and the natural, the technological
and the natural, etc.
I quite agree with David Dirlam that we ought to do more counting of things
whose likenesses we have determined to be relevant for the purposes for
which we are doing the counting. People just count Things because they
believe that all kinds are natural kinds, that Things and their Properties
go together in a solidary way rather than that we have to construct
categories, similarities, and differences. They count 'homosexuals' and
examine 'their' genetic or neurological 'properties' without considering
the hundreds of different ways one could construct the category and which
of those might be relevant for the purpose of the counting (or whether its
relative arbitrariness subverts the logic of their counting methodology
beforehand).
And I certainly would rather count processes or practices rather than
Things for many, many reasons.
As to the famous 'World-Out-There', for most purposes I agree with Eva:
it's just a character in a story. The frame of that story is useful for
some limited (very limited) purposes, and doesn't matter for many other
purposes. This is not to say there is no way to draw a distinction between
the imaginary and the real: there are thousands of different ways to draw
such distinctions. Imagining more and other ways is a very useful check on
the otherwise inarticulable biases of the ways one does it currently.
Epistemologically, I will say only this (as I have before on xmca in these
discussions): We know from inside the system, as participants, and the
observer stance is a dangerous illusion.
Metaphysically (and you can't have an epistemology without a metaphysics --
when modern philosophy gave up the latter for good reasons, it should have
given up the former as well, and gone and done something more useful), I
can only tell stories that might be disappointing or inspiring. Maybe one
could say that Out There is Something (or that we are part of some
largest-scale, some multiple all-possible-scales Some-Doings), and that in
it we and all the rest are Heterogeneous by all possible criteria and
parametrizations, and that for us, in it, Meaning is possible -- that is,
if some parameters be stipulated, not all possible remaining patterns are
equally likely to be found useful by some criteria for some purposes. But
all imaginable parametrizations (and then some) are possible, though not
yet relevant to any of us. A lot of stipulations are already built into our
material world: our bodies, our ecosystems, our material cultures and their
semiotic tools and formations. From them and with them we make sense of our
wider participations in the Doings, in many ways, and very partially. There
are no unique solutions.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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