Category Archives: Inquiry

Relational Ethics

01 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by in Ethics, Inquiry, Personhood, Relationalism

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Time to take a break from my meditations on the year of the plague; life still goes on.

Ethics, especially as caricatured by philosophers who have written on the subject, has (the story goes) often been taught as a collection of rules “informing” the student about what the youth (invariably male, as was the instructor, up until the late 19th, early 20th centuries) should or should not do. In this picture of things, ethics (theory, if you will) was simply the ironclad apologia for the morality (practical, cultural practices) of the day. As noted, this is at least somewhat of a caricature, and if one turns instead to the pages of the great philosophers – specifically Aristotle, Kant, and John Stewart Milli, representing virtue, deontological, and utilitarian ethics, respectively – one can recognize that even as these thinkers morality remained rooted in the assumptions of their day, their ethics as written placed the emphasis not on lists of rules but forms of practical inquiry. This point was given explicit pride of place by John Dewey in the excellent part 2 of the Dewey & Tufts Ethics (the part where Dewey was the sole author), “Theory of the Moral Life.”

But while emphasizing the inquiriential aspect of ethical theory, another aspect of the subject matter – implicit in treating ethical theory as a mode of inquiry – deserves discussion. A simple prescription of static rules would actually suffice were it not for two things: ethics itself is not static, and the nature of that dynamism means that ethics is fundamentally relational in character. I’ll focus exclusively on the latter point here.

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Making Sense

12 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by in General Philosophy, Inquiry, Logic, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

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Whitehead set out to make sense of things. After witnessing all of his attempts to point out how Einstein’s general theory of relativity failed to make the sense it claimed to make (and still fails to do so, but the model centrists won’t permit empirical evidence to get in the way of their clever mathematics), he arguably decided that he needed to step back from epistemology and philosophy of science, to present a more logically primary argument, in the metaphysical form of his “philosophy of organism.” Whitehead centered his argument on what I and Randy Auxier named “the quantum of explanation,” a logical (rather than ontological) center, around which Whitehead constructed his subtle and complex system of making sense. It has been suggested that Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality, is one of the five most difficulty works in the Western philosophical canon. I’m not inclined to argue with such a sentiment, since the most that could be credibly argued is that it might be knocked back to sixth place. For my part, I’m not sure what work could manage that feat.No Sense

One of the points that Randy and I tried to emphasize was that the process of “making sense” was itself a rather complex process, in which the most active word in the proceeding is process: this is not an object you hold, but an activity you engage in. So despite my habitual focus upon contemporary science &/or concerns, this is actually as classic an issue as you can find in the Western philosophical canon. (And I just don’t have the expertise to speak with even casual ignorance about the Eastern canon, a source of inestimable insight and subtlety. I am, however, inclined – ignorant as I am – to suspect that what I have to say here can find its analogs in that tradition.) Continue reading →

Reason as Revolutionary

20 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Ignorance, Inquiry, Intelligence, Logic, Politics, Relativism, Trump

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So now this appears to be happening: several users out in the Twitter-verse apparently are crowing about the repeal of Obamacare while defiantly bragging about keeping their insurance through the ACA. Again, to all appearances, these people are real. Meanwhile, racist Trump designee for Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, questions whether women and LGBTQ people face any serious discrimination in the world. Examples could readily be multiplied. This is because fascism is a movement that does not center on any sort of intellectual framework, while its appeal is to persons of an authoritarian mindset that rigidly compartmentalizes concepts and experiences so that genuine intelligence can never get a foothold on the person’s thinking. Under such circumstances, exercising reason – genuine reason – becomes itself a revolutionary act.revolution

But beyond that quip, what more can be said about the matter? Isn’t that a bit like dismissing Trump’s followers as being stupid? Even if this was true, would it really be an effective approach to dealing with the current consolidation of power by the fascists? In response, I would encourage people to read the above linked posts on the authoritarian mindset, but I’ll have a few more words to say about the nature of genuine intelligence below the fold. But mostly I want to think about the revolutionary aspects of reason around the topics of memory, logic, and leadership. Continue reading →

Foolish Consistency

16 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Donald Trump, Inquiry, John Dewey, Logic, Martin Luther King, Philosophy of Logic

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It is certainly disturbing to see how many people prefer a convenient lie over a disquieting truth. But more importantly, we should make note of how many people will flee in abject terror to the warm, terroristic embrace of a convenient lie when confronted with an indisputable uncertainty, the unavoidable knowing that you do not know. I should get that tattooed somewhere … somewhere where no one will ever see it …dunce-cap

There is a formal structure to at least some kinds of disruptive uncertainty, and that structure is not all that hard to understand. I’ll mostly be discussing that logical structure, which often requires a kind of patience with inconsistency. But I will turn to the psychological issues of those who embrace inconsistency without thought at the end. What I wish to address here are kinds of inconsistency, most importantly noting that there are genuinely and importantly different kinds. I’ll mainly draw on investigations by Nicholas Rescher and Robert Brandom, coupled with developments by Jon Barwise and John Perry. Continue reading →

A Few Resources

14 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by in Authoritarians, Donald Trump, Education, Inquiry, Martin Luther King, Politics

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I am, with certain notable constraints, a book collector. Those constraints are worth noting here: since I have no space to store masses of wood pulp, those books have to be electronic in form, and since I have little disposable money, those books have to be free. In light of the looming political catastrophe facing us not only in the United States, but sadly across much of the world, it occurred to me that many of those books have become horrifyingly more relevant. With that in mind, it occurred to me that I ought to share what I’ve collected for any and all who might be interested. I will update this post as I discover new things, and list the date of the most recent update just above the foldeugene-debs

This in no way pretends to be a comprehensive list, merely a list of things I’ve variously stumbled upon and, on rarer occasions, went out looking for. I’ve not added anything that might be considered “classical” political theory (i.e., part of the “canon” in a philosophy class) as these can be readily found at places like Project Gutenberg. Nor have I included anything that might be viewed as socialist polemics since, once again, this can be readily found at places like the Marxists Internet Archive.

Updated: January 4th, 2017, the Indivisible guide book. Update is at the bottom.

Continue reading →

Slippery Slope

13 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by in Critical Thinking, fallacies, Inquiry, Logic

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The “slippery slope” is the fallacy (if it is a fallacy – some might dispute that!) that says certain actions cannot ever be taken because they lead to other actions, which make still other actions possible, etc., leading finally to some kind of catastrophic action which can no longer be denounced or argued against because of all the little steps that led up to it and gave it permission. It is a frequent traveler with those who would argue against any sort of incremental changes to social institutions or the guarantee of civil rights. Thus, we’ve seen a great deal of slippery slope “reasoning” amongst conservatives denouncing marriage equality, with such claims being floated as, “If gays are allowed to marry, what is to prevent people from marrying farm animals, or young children?” (I’ll not link to any such claims; if the rock you’ve been hiding under these past several years has kept you shielded from such nonsense, I will not be the one responsible for breaking your bubble.)slippery-slope

What inspired me to write about this now was my recollection of how this fallacy relates to the famous sorites paradox: Sorites: noun so·ri·tes \sə-ˈrī-(ˌ)tēz\ The paradox (if it is a paradox) rotates around the question of how trivial actions, too small to have any consequence of their own, nevertheless can sum up to be massive and absolute distinctions. So, in a sense, slippery slope is going down the hill, while sorites is going up it. Continue reading →

Emptiness

05 Monday Sep 2016

Posted by in Inquiry, Logic, model-centrism, Philosophy of Science, Whitehead

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A recent interview on NPR, in their “Short Answers to Big Questions” segment, went to special extremes to demonstrate how monumentally bad science journalism is these days. My discussion here will come in two parts, one short, and one a great deal more detailed. The short part will be a quick debunking of supposedly scientific claims from a conventionally scientific standpoint. In particular, statements are made in this interview with absolute confidence that cannot possibly stand up to even the most basic grasp of physical science. The longer discussion will have to do with philosophical criticisms that run beyond most of contemporary science. This is because so much of that science has degenerated into pure model centrism, and consequently fails to ask any of the fundamental questions that need to be raised. The motivating idea behind all of this is the idea of “empty” space.Empty Bottle

The offending NPR piece opened with a question about how empty a volume of space would be were there only (say) three atoms or molecules within a volume of about one cubic meter. After a few moments discussion about the volume of molecules of air in a cubic meter at sea level (a discussion that appears to contain an unimportant typographical error), the discussion moves out into space, into deep, deep space. The conversation leads to the following (slightly edited) highly problematic exchange:

if there are points in space with only three atoms per square meter, what fills in the rest? The answer is nothing…

for a physicist, the absence of matter is nothing. I mean there is still space and time there, but you know, there – the absence of matter we consider to be a state of, you know, zero matter, zero energy density, is a way of putting it.

The problems here come at two levels, one of fairly ordinary physics and the other at a deeper philosophical level. I’ll deal with both in turn. Continue reading →

Intuition in Mathematics and Physics: A Whiteheadian Approach

05 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by in 2015 International Whitehead Conference, General Philosophy, Inquiry, Logic, Mathematics, naturalism, Philosophy of Science, Public Philosophy, Whitehead

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This is just a quick shout-out to my friend and colleague, Ronny Desmet, for putting together the papers that were presented at the 2015 International Whitehead conference in the new book, Intuition in Mathematics and Physics: A Whiteheadian Approach, in which yours truly is a contributor. Intuition Mathematics

The articles within are from Section IV, Track 2 of the conference. The table of contents is not yet available at Amazon, so the contributions are as follows:

  1. Integral Philosophy – An Essay on Speculative Philosophy – Ronald Preston Phipps
  2. Reflection on Intuition, Physics, and Speculative Philosophy – Timothy E. Eastman
  3. Whitehead on Intuition – Implications for Science and Civilization – Farzad Mahootian
  4. Whitehead’s Notion of Intuitive Recognition – Ronny Desmet
  5. The Beauty of the Two-Color Sphere Problem – Ronny Desmet
  6. The Complementary Faces of Mathematical Beauty – Jean Paul van Bendegam and Ronny Desmet
  7. Creating a New Mathematics – Aran Gare
  8. Whitehead, Intuition, and Radical Empiricism – Gary Herstein
  9. What Does a Particle Know? Information and Entaglement – Robert J. Valenza
  10. A Neurobiological Basis of Intuition – Jesse Bettinger

The Qualities of Quantities

20 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by in argument, Critical Thinking, Inquiry, Logic

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An oddity about philosophers, and especially logicians, is that when they talk about “quantity” they are not talking about numbers, or numerical counts. Rather, they are talking about the ways things can be gathered together (or singled out) using words like “all” or “some.” These ideas are called “quantifiers.” I want to do three things (briefly, as always) here: say a little about the “basic” quantifiers (“all” and “some”), say a little about how they get dropped from common discourse and argument – whether from laziness or deliberate obfuscation – leading to much gratuitous confusion. Finally, I want to say something about quantifiers that typically do not make it onto philosophers’ or logicians’ lists, yet are at least as common in ordinary discourse and argument as the “principal” two are. My purpose here (as always) is not to lead you onto the path of righteous proof making, but simply alert the reader to the importance of these operators so that they might not slip by quite so stealthily in the future.abacus_logo1

The second greatest sin in logic is to allow things to pass implicitly; the greatest sin is to block the road of inquiry, which is one of the things that happens when concepts are allowed to pass implicitly. Allowing things to remain implicit means that vague statements are permitted, by innuendo, to become concrete, thus leading us astray (blocking inquiry) from the directly stated vagueness. Sometimes things really are ambiguous, and they must be allowed to stay that way until real data, rather than jumping at conclusions, enables us to clear up the ambiguity. That, or recognize that the ambiguity is not – or, at least, not yet – cleared. Continue reading →

Luck is Not a Method; Hope is Not a Plan

25 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Inquiry, Logic

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Having taught a variety of philosophy courses in my less than traditional career, one of the ideas I am most committed to conveying to my students is that it is not good enough – not by a long shot – to simply be “right.” Quite the contrary: it is better to be mistaken for good reasons than to be “right” by accident. After all, even a broken clock is “right” twice a day, but that doesn’t make it a reliable timepiece. It takes a real commitment to inquiry and logic to be mistaken based on genuinely substantive reasons. And the most important difference is, of course, that if you are mistaken, but on the grounds of solid reasons, then that mistake can be rectified by finding and correcting the mistake in those reasons. Because if you are mistaken on the grounds of good reasons, then it is necessarily the case that the mistake is somewhere in those reasons.craps2

This can be a tricky notion for younger persons to accept. (It is an especially tricky notion for narcissistic sociopaths of any age to accept. Consider, for example, Donald Trump … ) The notion that “being right” is the only thing that counts, regardless of how one achieves that particular form of “right”, is arguably a driving factor behind a great deal of plagiarism. But conclusions that are achieved in fashions that are not methodologically sound are not “conclusions” of any kind, they are dogmatically asserted bullet-points, as cognitively vacuous as mere barnyard noises. Not only do such things fail to advance inquiry, they actively impede inquiry. Continue reading →