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THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION

~ Science, logic, and ethics, from a Whiteheadian Pragmatist perspective (go figure)

THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION

Tag Archives: Narrative

Test

20 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by Gary Herstein in Critical Thinking, Inquiry, Logic

≈ 8 Comments

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Critical Thinking, Narrative

This post can be viewed as a companion piece to my one about “proof.” Proof is a kind of test to which a certain, rigidly constrained, set of ideas can be subjected. While it is important within that limited context, proof mostly stands out as an all-but-unachievable ideal, the kind of ideal that suggests the outside limit for the types of tests that might be applied to ideas, concepts, claims, hypotheses, and so forth. There are a great variety of such tests, and they do not line up along a single unimodal, univocal spectrum. But it does seem to me that they do converge at the far ends of this lattice, this partially ordered set of possibilities, to proof as the highest ideal at one end, and vapid opinion, as the most dispensable example at the lowest (and, sadly, commonest) end.Test F

There are primarily three families of tests for ideas, and each such family breaks out in a variety of ways: logical coherence, empirical adequacy, and narrative intelligibility. Following Whitehead’s argument in the early pages of Process and Reality, I take “logical coherence” to be something that is vastly larger than just proof-theoretic completeness or model-theoretic semantic sufficiency. Both of these latter are formal ideals, part of the above, generalized concept of “proof,” that seldom realize themselves in the real world. Logical coherence is not such a desiccated abstraction; rather, it is the requirement that ideas “hang together,” at least “locally” (in metaphysics, this requirement becomes “globally.”) Continue reading →

Making Sense 2: Storytime

03 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by Gary Herstein in Critical Thinking, General Philosophy

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being human, Narrative, Philosophy of Mind, Relational thinking

Making sense of things is a process of variously discovering and applying logical coherence, empirical adequacy and – the hard one – narrative intelligibility. Narrative is the subject of this post.

Narrative is a fancy word for “story telling.” And there is quite a story to tell.

Let us go back a bit, and by “a bit,” I mean before human beings even existed. Why would early hominids ever develop language in the first place? Did it somehow facilitate hunting? Well, other pack hunters like lions, dolphins, and troops of chimpanzees do not seem to suffer from its absence. (The latter group will evidently go out on murder raids against their own kind, again without any assistance from language.) Exactly what information could one convey with language, while hunting, that observation, practice and hand signals could not do better? Just imagine one hunter using language to assist in the hunt: “HEY FRED! CIRCLE AROUND TO THE LEFT! THERE’S A HERD OF ANTELOPE RIGHT OVER TH… oh … Never mind.” As anyone who has ever hunted in any capacity – or merely thought about the subject for an instant – will instantly recognize, stealth is of far greater importance than extended communication.

Continue reading →

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“But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is, that it adds to interest.” – Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

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