next »

[PseudoCyAnts]

Or: scattershot harvesting of percolated thoughts
bubbled up resultant from event-horizon triggers
occurring deep within the subconscious

Code:

hopefully, this constitutes fair warning properly served-up...

For many years now, at variable intervals and frequency, I've played around with describing the limitations/flaws concomitant with the digital revolution. Admittedly, its most common usage as been a tool to increase the rhetorical force of sarcasm and satire. Underlying much of it is a postulated framework resting upon unproven axioms. A primary one being:

The Digital Age attempts to properly quantify information by mapping all data to individual binary bits:
({0-1}, {yes-no}, {is-isn't}, {true-false}, {on-off}, {white-black}, etc)
This perspective obviously comes burdened with an underlying assumption that everything can be reduced down to 2-position switches.  Arguably, this set is then used to promulgate more complex types of boolean logic, using {loops/ifs/ands}, and the resultant data becomes even more complex through iterations and the use of larger datasets for input.  Still, at the most basic level of data entry, all is codified as a boolean deuce.

Boolean Deuce or Boolean Dupe?

Advancements in knowledge about Quantum Theory seem to be offering glimpses of the Digital Revolution's End. Science has evolved to the point that it it now capable of experimentally testing the assumption: Within the scope of Quantum Physics - there are no variables that exist prior to investigation - a priori is a fantasy.  There are strong indications that at the level of Quantum Analysis, this is physical reality.

Never cast your pearls at the feet of Einstein, while hanging ten, tubed in the wavefront of the post-digital...

Postpositivism: the name of a ward found on the indoctrinology floor at a rehabilitative facility

What brought this to the top of the stack tonight, was encountering the litte{R}attie school of thought: Postpositivism, aka Postempiricism,  which brought into being its own antithesis, and a war ensued on a bipolar plane.  A strong affinity to a philosophy of vagrant objectionism provides a perspective from the stadium's asymmetric skybox seats, where I sit undazed and bemused at the spectacle of dialectic warfare on the field below, in which one team can be properly categorised as "objectivists".  Blessedly beneficed with a profound anti-randian epiphany of epic contortions.

there had to be Austrian-schooled somewhere in all of this

postpositivism:  This is not so much a coherent theory as a general reaction and move away from positivism. Postpositivism emerged amongst a group of thinkers in the philosophy of science, such as Kuhn and Feyerabend, and in analytic philosophy, or the philosophy of language, such as with Quine, Putnam and Rorty. More generally, the term is also applied to alternative approaches such as hermeneutics. A heterogenous group, all, to differing degrees, criticise the empiricist basis of positivism. In particular, positivism of the Vienna School, and to a lesser extent, the 'positivism' of Karl Popper, held several key tenets as part of its orienting methodology and epistemology. Among these, the post-positivists most severly questioned 1) the cumulative growth of scientific knowledge, or the 'cumulative convergence on truth' which justifies belief in a scientific realism (Kuhn and Feyerabend); and 2) a correspondence theory of such knowledge, in that such aggrandizing truths of science really do pertain to phenomena as they are in the world (Lakatos, Goodman, Putnam, Rorty, ~Quine) - ie. a justification of knowledge because it grants direct access to the real.

"Postpositivism," Archaeopaedia (emphasis mine) - tonight was my first encounter with the website: Archaeopaedia: A glossary of the archaeological imagination.  It's a lightly populated collaboration in progress hosted at Metamedia at Stanford, which also offers tentative glimpses into the future of collaborative net projects

Since the 1950s, many philosophers of science have attacked positivism—the theory that scientific knowledge is grounded in objective reality. Reconstructing the history of these critiques, John H. Zammito argues that while so-called postpositivist theories of science are very often invoked, they actually provide little support for fashionable postmodern approaches to science studies.Zammito shows how problems that Quine and Kuhn saw in the philosophy of the natural sciences inspired a turn to the philosophy of language for resolution. This linguistic turn led to claims that science needs to be situated in both historical and social contexts, but the claims of recent "science studies" only deepened the philosophical quandary. In essence, Zammito argues that none of the problems with positivism provides the slightest justification for denigrating empirical inquiry and scientific practice, delivering quite a blow to the "discipline" postmodern science studies.Filling a gap in scholarship to date, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes will appeal to historians, philosophers, philosophers of science, and the broader scientific community.

Zammito, John H. A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, back cover - Google Books limited preview

• Matthew David (2008), "Sociological Knowledge and Scientific Knowledge", Sociology Compass 2 (1) , 337-351 doi:10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00073.x
• David L. Morgan, "Paradigms Lost and Pragmatism Regained: Methodological Implications of Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Methods", Journal of Mixed Methods Research, Jan 2007; 1: 48 - 76.
• Peter Francis Colbourne, "Beyond Postpositivism"

A strange aspect of this is that in large, it's a battle being waged within the Social Sciences. The Physical Sciences seem to have accepted quantum reality, and have advanced onward towards a proper embodiment of it within.

• Philosophy of Science blog: Postpositivism, Falsification, and the Method of Science
  

Portrayed arrayed, choreographed and staged, as a Moral Quarrel.

• Kosuke Shimizu, Kansai Gaidai University, Japan, "God’s Invisible Fist: power and knowledge of the Asian Crisis", AntePodium, journal published by The School of Political Science and International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington, III-199
• Chuck Blanchard, "Relativism, Post-Positivism and the Pope", A Guy in the Pew blog, April 23, 2008

[LarryH]

A nice little rondo on the subject I must say.  I wish I had had a little animated stroll down an English garden path playing behind your text.  

Even a semi-educated person like myself has at least to take a shot at Frege or Russell’s Principia but I’m too much a villain to even try to strike a pose suggesting comprehension.  I do get the problem, thank you David Hume.  The introduction of the psychological (Nietzsche) and a particularly challenging construction of it (Sartre) has led me to posit that the first principle of human cognition is limit.  Whatever god or nature has given us as a means of accessing the world is circumscribed by limits of capacity.  Regarding subjectivity, Nietzsche was my Socrates and Sartre was my Hume.  Added to this is the inescapable likelihood that human cognition has and still is evolving.  Anthropological knowledge seems to suggest that as the species evolves and interacts with its milieu, its modalities of perception  are altered.  Like the physical universe itself where no two events ever occur in exactly the same way, no two cognitions even in the same creature are exactly the same.  This is the limit.

This is not a rejection of empiricism or its ambitions.  My brother is an astronomer.  Long ago he explained to me that while I enjoyed listening to him talk about the universe, the pleasure was not mutual due to my lack of understanding of astrophysics and its attendant disciplines.  As a way of compensating and since I had been educated in classical Euclidean geometry, I set about to work through Ptolemy’s Almagest, proof by proof.  Regrettably there is one proposition he uses, 128, that does not appear in any edition of Euclid’s Elements so I was never able to complete the task.  Nevertheless I was able to experience the delightfulness of the complexity and seemed accuracy of his explanation.  And it made all the more spicy the drama of the Copernican revolution and the efforts of Galileo including the social controversies.  Both the pragmatic value and the esthetic pleasure of empirical investigation are too compelling to not belong in every man’s life.  And by extension the efforts toward a Philosophy of Science are equally compelling.  The failures of Russell’s efforts for example are at least as exquisite as Ptolemy’s but also much more full of insight due to the advantages of being a modern.  For me they are an important part of the narrative of what I call “limit.”  

I have a further conclusion that my notion of “limit” has brought me to and that is my explanation for the impulse toward empiricism.  It has to do with how mortality colors every human perception.  It comes from the notably unscientific Theological consideration of the idea of eternal life in heaven.   If you think about it the notion of eternal life is completely at odds with the human experience.  If one thought that they had “forever” then they would sensibly conclude that at one time or another they would master every subject, every skill and enjoy every available pleasure in every possible way.  For the human temperament, the dilemma would be “Why do anything since eventually it will happen anyway.”  Only the limits of time, of mortality, compel choices and give meaning to endeavor.  Science and its method are quintessentially human both because of faculties of comprehension but also because of the subjectivity of being.  If the book of Science is ever written will it become like the memorization of the times tables, a droll if practical exercise but devoid of any gratification.  The last essay you reference seems to speak to this in terms of IPE.  If some day the world is reduced to one culture with one set of predispositions will we have arrived at the heaven of understanding or will we have come to the end of human experience.  Fortunately there is the newborn baby who must answer all of this for themselves and there is the Shaman who sees a monistic holism beneath the multiplicities of Democritus.  And round and round we go.

Thanks for the conversation.  

[Devon]

I'm not sure there is any one thing in postpositivism, as you say, but it has been the defining enterprise in Analytic philosophy for the past half century.  Logical positivism gave rise to a host of impoverished theories - radical behaviorism (the doctrine that mental states talk is just ways of describing the characteristic outputs given certain inputs), emotivism in ethics (the idea that moral judgments are just fancy ways of expressing 'yay' and 'boo').  Since Chomsky buried B. F. Skinner, all these parsimonious theories have fallen to robust forms of realism about mental states, moral truths, etc.  These are good times to be a philosopher (except for having to be a philosopher, if such you are).

[Devon]

I'm not sure there is any one thing in postpositivism, as you say, but it has been the defining enterprise in Analytic philosophy for the past half century.  Logical positivism gave rise to a host of impoverished theories - radical behaviorism (the doctrine that mental states talk is just ways of describing the characteristic outputs given certain inputs), emotivism in ethics (the idea that moral judgments are just fancy ways of expressing 'yay' and 'boo').  Since Chomsky buried B. F. Skinner, all these parsimonious theories have fallen to robust forms of realism about mental states, moral truths, etc.  These are good times to be a philosopher (except for having to be a philosopher, if such you are).

But, I should add, in this mode, postpositivism isn't anti-empirical.  In the old philosophical division from three or so centuries ago, many analytic philosophers today are rationalists (they believe that our ideas do not come wholly from experience), but they are generally a little bit hostile to the idea that the world is really as ambivalent as quantum mechanics makes it seem, and despite Quine's rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, I think that most act as though there still is a meaningful difference between genuinely a priori statements and a posteriori ones.