Jul 25, 2016 11:14 PM
(Jul 25, 2016 07:34 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: [ -> ]C C, can I ask you something else that's a little off topic? Do you think that my use of art is a vain attempt to fit in? Do you think that Socrates was right, that the artist is twice removed from the truth?
No, many (like MR seems to) take similar pit-stops with the Muses. As for art being even more distant from the "truth"...
"Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own--unaided by the describing activities of humans--cannot.” --Interview with Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty: I argue that when extended in a certain way they [Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey] let us see truth as, in Jame’s phrase, 'what it is better for us to believe,' rather than as 'the accurate representation of reality.' Or, to put the point less provocatively, they show us that the notion of 'accurate representation' is simply an automatic and empty compliment which we pay to those beliefs which are successful in helping us do what we want to do.
[...] But it is fruitless to ask whether the Greek language, or Greek economic conditions, or the idle fancy of some nameless pre-Socratic , is responsible for viewing this sort of knowledge as 'looking' at something [the mirror of nature] (rather than, say, rubbing up against it, or crushing it underfoot, or having sexual intercourse with it). --Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Whereas science is a regulated investigation and tire-kicked description of a supposed "given" (the broadest of which ideas like reality or world signify), art is freedom of conceiving and representing the given. Even though specific instances of creative expression might reflect the characteristics or theme of a past, current or regional movement -- the overall pursuit is still a liberating from standard, familiar constructs (when not utilized to exemplify / reinforce those conventions).
Art also has one foot in prescription. It may provoke the viewer, reader, listener, smeller, feeler to deliberate on what confronts him/her: "Okay, so this is how _X_ is interpreting be-ing, life, etc. So what ought you to do about it? What sort of meaning, concerns, revelations, and goals fall out of that, if any, or tearing of the veil? Will you be slightly or greatly modified by it or wallow in the stark 'is of the situation or abstract something else from it or inject something higher upon it, or reshape it?" Or maybe the work already issues advice or direction or propaganda, rather than stirring it out of the subject.
Dennett is said to have once distinguished between himself and Richard Rorty by explaining that he wanted a constrained philosophy that scientists could appreciate. Whereas Rorty wanted to provide basis for the freedom of conception which artists enjoyed (or emulate such via his neo-pragmatism).
- - - - - The Given slash epistemological foundation - - - - -
Willem deVries: Antecedent to epistemology, Sellars’s treatment of semantics essentially constitutes a denial of what can be called a semantic given—the idea that some of our terms or concepts, independently of their occurrence in formal and material inferences, derive their meaning directly from confrontation with a particular (kind of) object or experience. Sellars is anti-foundationalist in his theories of concepts, knowledge, and truth.
Traditional epistemology assumed that knowledge is hierarchically structured. There must, it was believed, be some cognitive states in direct contact with reality that serve as a firm foundation on which the rest of our knowledge is built by various inferential methods. --Wilfrid Sellars, SEP
Eric M. Rubenstein: But empirical knowledge is possible only if there is ultimately a stratum of most basic knowledge, which in some way involves our making cognitive contact with the world. It is natural to think that this most basic contact with the world involves our having sensory experiences. We can know the world, ultimately, because in some manner the world reveals itself to us through sensation. Or better yet, the world gives itself to us, in a form we can understand. If it didn’t, it would be hard to understand how we ever know anything. For Descartes, and for centuries of philosophers since, the basic knowledge which forms the foundation of knowledge is just the knowledge of our own inner states, our own thoughts, feelings, and sensations that we have from being in sensory contact with the world.
As for these inner states themselves, we both have them and also know them just by being in sensory contact with the world. In short, sensing the world was held, from Descartes on, to be sufficient for the production of inner states which we in turn know about just because of that sensory contact. For instance, simply sensing a red patch would be sufficient for knowing that we are sensing a red patch. We may doubt whether there really is a red patch there (maybe it is blue and the lighting misleads us), but our knowledge of the sensation of a red patch itself is immediate, direct, and a result simply of that sensing. The knowledge that we gain is, again, knowledge of our own sensations or thoughts.
As plausible as this picture seems, Sellars takes issue with it, referring to it as the Myth of the Given: that there are such sensory episodes that by their mere occurrence give us knowledge of themselves, is a myth to be dispelled, one to be replaced by a better account of the nature of sensing, thinking, and knowing. Of course, our aim here isn’t to explore Sellars’ reasons for thinking such episodes are mythological, nor to pursue his views on the nature of knowledge. Instead, we’ll address only what Sellars thinks is missing in this traditional account of knowledge of our inner, private episodes. Doing so will help explain why, according to Sellars, knowledge of even our own private episodes is itself much more complicated than the tradition held. Paradoxically, however, though knowledge of our own inner states is more complicated, explaining how it is possible will make our knowledge of other peoples’ inner episodes less complicated, less vulnerable to skepticism than traditionally thought.
What then is required for knowledge of our own inner, private episodes, say knowledge that I’m having a sensation of a red triangle, if it isn’t just that I am sensing a red triangle? What else is required besides the actual sensation? In short, knowledge requires concepts, and since concepts are linguistic entities, we can say that knowledge requires a language. To know something as simple as that the patch is red requires an ability to classify that patch, and Sellars thinks the only resource for such rich categorization as adult humans are capable of comes from a public language. Knowledge, and in fact all awareness, according to Sellars, is a linguistic affair. There is no such thing, accordingly, as preconceptual awareness or prelinguistic awareness or knowledge. Sellars calls this the thesis of “Psychological Nominalism,” and it is at the heart of his epistemology and theory of mind. We don’t know the world just by sensing it. We don’t even know our own sensations just by having them. We need a language for any awareness, including of our own sensations.
Importantly, this also creates a serious problem. Remember that Sellars is sympathetic to the claim of First Person Authority (even if it is to be modified or revised in some manner). Sellars does think that we can know our own thoughts better than others can. But his Psychological Nominalism threatens this, and threatens our claim to be able to know our thoughts at all. Consider how we could ever come to be aware of our thoughts and the like in the first place. Relying on the mythical Given would have helped, for we would be aware of such episodes just by having them. But we’ve rejected that account.
Instead, any awareness, even of our own thoughts, requires the concept of that of which we are to be aware. So, to be aware of a private, inner episode requires the concept of a private, mental episode. But how can I have the concept of something which is in me in a way that you can’t see? I can’t get it by noticing my own private sensations (as we’ve seen, that presupposes we already have the concept and the source of the concept is now what is in question!). Nor can I get the concept of a private episode by noticing yours, for it is private to you. And of course, you can’t notice yours, nor mine either! How do we, or anyone for that matter, get the concept of something hidden, inner, and private, in the first place? (Compare this with becoming aware of something public: I can learn the concept, cow, by, for starters having you point cows out to me. But that is because we have common, shared access to that object, which isn’t the case for private episodes).
Sellars has now forced us to confront the difficult question of the source and nature of the concept of an inner episode. What is the status of that concept? And how do speakers of a language come to have it, given that possession of it seems to be a condition for anyone noticing their own private episodes? --Wilfrid Sellars: Philosophy of Mind, IEP