Terence Blake informs me that I’ve “been reflecting on the necessary rapprochement between ontology and epistemology,” a notion I find just a little surprising. For, as I told him, I’ve not thought of myself as doing that; I’ve not set that as an intellectual objective. Yet I can see why he would make that observation.
I’ll take it under advisement.
Multiple Worlds
Speaking crudely and informally, I do believe that we live in multiple worlds, each with its own way of knowing. There is no such thing as THE scientific method, not even for science, whatever that is, much less for everything.
Nor is it a matter of anything goes. Some things work, some don’t.
And, alas, we can’t sort these things out ahead of time. We can only try as best we can.
At some point the effort to know will differentiate out a realm of being. Then we know.
Some Points of Comparison
Jay Foster. Ontologies without Metaphysics: Latour, Harman and the Philosophy of Things. Analectica Hermeneutica, No. 3 (2011)
Here’s a suggestive passage, p. 9:
Harman declares himself to be a “traditional” philosopher insofar as he thinks that metaphysical issues are “separate” from epistemological issues. Latour does not entertain this traditional distinction between metaphysics and epistemology, or ontology and epistemology. Questions about how scientists know objects via acquaintance with some but not all of their properties are an indispensable part of Latour’s work. Latour does agree with Harman this far: scientific acquaintance with an object does not involve discovering its nature or essence.
I like that: “...some but not all of their properties...” As you may know, I’ve conjectured that objects have unbounded properties.
Then there’s this old post: Q. Where’s Reality? A. Which One?
This is the crux: "Latour does not entertain this traditional distinction between metaphysics and epistemology, or ontology and epistemology". Neither does Feyerabend, and neither do you, if I understand you aright. But Harman insists on the distinction and insists that he is doing ontology, and so reversing the fashionable hegemony of epistemology. But this purification, this metaphysical "cleansing" cannot work, and is undone by the very vocabulary he uses to effectuate it.
ReplyDeleteWell, it seems to me--and here I'm thinking out loud--that if the distinction between epistemology and ontology no longer does useful work, then what's left is neither one nor the other, but something else. Just what that something else is ...
DeleteOne of the things I bring to this particular discussion is an interest in ontological cognition, which is mostly, though not entirely, about common sense ontology (see these posts in particular). As such it makes no commitment to how the world really is, but is only about how we conceptualize the world. At the same time "ontology" has become a term of art in computer science, where it refers to the set of entities needed to characterize a particular domain.
The thing is there are points where these philosophical ontology discussions, you know, about the REAL world, seem very much like these cognitive and computer science discussions, which are (only) about REPRESENTING a domain of thought. It's as though you could take a paragraph from a philosophical discussion and insert it into a cognition or computer science discussion and no one would know. And vice versa.
Well, if it loo's like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, then it IS a duck, no? Are these two ostensibly different kinds of discussion all that different? A tricky business.
"It's as though you could take a paragraph from a philosophical discussion and insert it into a cognition or computer science discussion and no one would know."
ReplyDeleteI keep on thinking of identity and definitions of ethnicity in a very crude non-philosophical way round this talk. I am given to think laterally but some relationship seems to exist at least in my imagination.
Even within an ethnicity objects transform and are fluid. Ohnuki- Tierney makes the point nicely with regard to rice and Japanese sense of self. Identity with regard to rice and self, transforms in a number of ways that are highly context sensitive, the Japanese self changes historically it changes again in regard to China and represented differently yet again in regard to the West.
Multiple world or one made of multiple context in which objects to not remain static or exist in a single plain of thought.
http://mi-assfo-20.218.synergydsl.com/EAA/Ohnuki-Tierney.pdf
Thanks for the link.
Delete