Transcending Postmodernism

M. Kaplan, I. Hamati-Ataya

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137358561
• eBook ISBN: 9781137358578
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Contemporary philosophy is torn between a reliance on the pragmatic meanings of designated objects and a foundation based on formal theory. This book shows that philosophical knowledge, which no more has a terminal state than an infinite set has a last term, advances when the dialectical relationship between the two approaches is synthesized. The choice of designations is intimately related to theory and the form of theory is intimately related to the character of designated objects. The intimate dialectical relationship between theory and meaning is explored in detail in the area of international theory. The recent emphasis on realism rests on a regressive misunderstanding of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice that loses Newton's acute understanding of it, an understanding that underlies the great advances of physics, and that is lost in the contemporary social sciences.

Part I

A World View

1

The Operations of Mind That Produce Language

Many writers speak of language as if it is a matter of words and sentences the meanings of which can be provided by inspection. However, language, and its evolution, apart from syntax, results from a mode of inquiry in which names relate concepts to referents. Naming is used to distinguish objects from other objects.

Concepts are used to characterize the qualities of referents. The naming of qualities separates them from other qualities. Thus, ‘color’ and ‘brightness’ distinguish related qualities from each other. ‘Blue’ is a specific value of ‘color’ and ‘dark blue’ is a specific value of ‘blue’. In the current world view, the concept of color can apply to some types of objects and not to others.

Referents exist objectively, that is, they are objects of knowledge, only insofar as names apply concepts to referents. The belief that referents are objective and that thoughts are subjective misrepresents a recursive process in which minds relate different types of objects to each other.

Thinking and experiencing have no locations in space or time. When the thought or experience of an agent is objectified, that is, when it is treated recursively as an object of thought, it can be given a location in space and time. It is then that the objective procedures of science can be applied to it. The failure of some philosophers to understand the recursive character of this process gives rise to the supposed dichotomy of objective referents and objectless, and hence mysterious, subjectivity.

Toward the end of this chapter, while discussing the error in Gottlob Frege’s (1952) claim that the same object may have more than one sense, I will show from a different perspective why Charles Sanders Peirce’s claim that the meaning of an object depends upon its use is incorrect.

My position is that the meanings of names, that is, of signs, not of objects, depend on how they link concepts to referents, that is, on how they are used to designate objects. Naming separates objects from a surround by applying concepts to incoming information. This process designates something as an object if it is relatively unchanging. Names, including numbers, are employed in theories in their capacity as signs. This enables them to function analytically. Newton’s theory can be applied only if the elements of the theorems, for example, mass or energy, can be given numbers. This may be determined pragmatically by using instruments to provide cardinal measures. Then the application of the theory to referents provides an interpretation of the theory that is related to this application within the framework of a contemporary world view.

It is not possible to identify the referents of a theory and to distinguish them from other referents unless one starts with an interpretive schema, a world view, that permits this. One can distinguish the referent, that is, the object, ‘morning star’ from the object ‘evening star’ only if one can distinguish the concepts ‘morning’ from ‘evening’, ‘star’ from ‘meteor’, and ‘light’ from ‘dark’. In short, all inquiry, including theoretical inquiry, has a foundation in a world view, although an evolving one, in which its analytical and ideographic elements evolve in a complementary fashion along with the world view within which they have their places.

That judgments of truth depend on the fit and density of available information will be supported in the next chapter. The complementary relationships between the namings of objects and the characterizations of objects are central to our understanding of the world. They permit alternative formulations of the relationships between objects, that is, referents, concepts, and names. This process is dialogical, even if only within the self, insofar as it involves recursive evaluations of evidence. It is dialectical insofar as changes in some of these hypotheses require other changes in the ways in which names are perceived to link concepts to referents. Names, thus, are used to designate referents as the objects that fit the characterizations that constitute meaning. That is why the meaning of a name, but not of a referent, is related to its use.

Understanding of this process, as will become evident in the second chapter, is linked to the claim that the truth of a theory is related to the fit and the density of existing information. Thus, when I claim that a theory is true, I am claiming, as I will show in the second chapter, that its use fits the overall body of available information, that is, the current world view, better than alternative theories, not that it follows from a set of axioms.

Ludwig Wittgenstein did not appreciate the complementary relationship between names or numbers on the one hand, and senses (meanings) on the other. This led him to invent a language games approach that loses the combinatorial power that logic and theory provide through the use of names and numbers irrespectively of their meanings. This will be illustrated in subsequent chapters. A related failure, although from an opposed perspective, drives the belief of many physicists that theories can account for the world in a non-evolving foundational sense. It is the openness of an analogical system of interpretation that leaves space for new information recursively to influence the development of new theories or logics that account for evidence that existing theories cannot account for.

Correlatives

The designations of objects invoke correlative concepts. No correlative concept can be understood except by contrast to its polar opposite. In particular, an understanding of the correlative relationship between the nomothetic and the ideographic aspects of knowledge is indispensable to judgments of truth, whether of theories or of individual events or experiences. Being and becoming are correlatives. More importantly, ontology and epistemology are correlatives. No statements about referents are meaningful until they are related to the concepts that characterize or designate them. However, it is not possible to apply the concept of truth to the designations of objects without taking into account the instruments used to make characterizations, whether these are neurological systems or microscopes. Efforts to treat either ontology or epistemology as foundational will produce only needless puzzles.

I have attached an addendum to this chapter that gives a dense account of how I. Langmuir used theory to refute apparently factual, that is, ideographic, observations of the results of scientific tests. This addendum illustrates the way in which nomothetic information is intimately involved in determinations of ideographic information and vice versa. The contrary errors of Wittgenstein on the one hand and of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam on the other stem from a failure to appreciate how correlatives relate to complementary judgments of truth within the framework of partial or whole world views.

One approach absolutizes the ideographic. It treats description as if there is such a thing as a designated object that can serve as a fixed basis for the application of contexts. The designation of an object to which contexts are related cannot be determined apart from an examination of a larger, and evolving, realm of knowledge within which it is distinguished from other objects by the qualities and measures of qualities that are linked to it. W. V. O. Quine’s powerful ‘The Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (Quine 1951) – a simplified version of which I included as an appendix in Justice, Human Nature, and Political Obligation (Kaplan 1976a) – undermined the thesis of logical positivism.

The other position treats analytics as if in principle fixed designations can govern individual subject matters. For instance, the principle of contradiction is considered to be a universal axiom of logic. However, I show in Chapter 4 that there are analytical systems within which the principle of contradiction does not have a role.

The evolution of knowledge

I share with my late, and distinguished, colleague, Mr. Leo Strauss, the belief that the great period of Greek philosophy represents a defining moment in human civilization that has never been matched. It is inspiring to revisit the ways in which Socrates and Plato moved philosophy beyond the positions of the pre-Socratics and in which Aristotle moved it beyond the position of Plato. However, just as the classical Greek philosophers refused to accept previous positions as inviolate, I believe a significant number of central Greek positions require review.

The history of philosophy, I believe, is a never-ending saga of reformulations that result from the discovery of problems in existing paradigms, including the classical Greek paradigms. Our understandings of the world rest on a dense set of interpretations of informational inputs the fit of which is called into question by the recursive consideration of new information.

Aristotle’s distinction between prior and posterior analytics, for instance, was related to his distinction between unitary and composite objects. Experience, according to Aristotle, plays a significant role in the understanding of composite objects. This led him to limit the role of theory with respect to composite objects. Aristotle’s analysis advanced on Plato’s analysis by showing why unitary objects supported theory in a way that composite objects could not in the classical Greek state of knowledge.

Cracks in the Aristotelian edifice began to emerge by early modernity. Syllogistic logics could not be used to prove relevant propositions that were known to be true – for instance, that the head of a cat is the head of an animal. This led to the development of new systems of logic that permit logical analysis of data that could not be brought within the framework of syllogistic logical systems. ‘If a cat is an animal and if x is the head of a cat’, then ‘x is the head of an animal’ followed from the axioms of new Port Royal logical systems. Thus, the appropriateness of a system of logic can no more be determined independently of ideographic factors than ideographic identifications can be supported in the absence of theory, a position that is examined in the addendum to this chapter and developed further in Chapter 4.

Galileo transcended the formulations of classical physics by showing that the instruments of his day could be used to make measurements of the qualities of objects that are common regardless of the objects to which they are applied. These measures then were employed in theorems that were used to make predictions that were confirmed by practice. Such novel positions led to the modern paradigm.

The modern paradigm made more extensive use of the concept of necessary truths – axioms which if true are necessarily true – than did the Aristotelian paradigm because it was able to produce general theories based on axioms that took account of experience and that applied to composite objects. Its problems arose from the respects in which it agreed with Aristotle that true theories would apply without exception. However, nothing, including Newton’s theory, is independent of boundary conditions. Hence, no theory can be true in Aristotle’s sense of necessary truth.

The modern paradigm began to fray even further when J. G. Fichte questioned Kant’s account of knowledge. Fichte’s major work The Science of Knowledge (Fichte 1982[1970]) made use of a transactional account in which self-consciousness is produced by the reflexive – I prefer the term recursive – consideration of consciousness, in which consciousness is as much an object as is carbon. Hegel applied recursive transactional analysis both to the material objects of experience and to the concepts that apply to them. That is why he said that concepts are objects of experience. That was Hegel’s answer to Cartesian dualism. Agency was external to evidence. The beliefs of the agent were objects equally with the knowledge of the agent that his beliefs were knowledge to which he had recursive access.

Thus, concepts characterize, that is, interpret, objects, ranging from social conditions to the neurology of subjects. Hegel believed that knowledge must have a certain foundation, that is, that it must rest on an identity between concept and referent. Because recursive transactional processes did not provide such a foundation, identity – that is, necessary truth – was relegated to the end of history in the Absolute.

When Peirce rejected the concept of truth, he was rejecting truth only in the sense that a premise if true is necessarily true. He did not reject the notion that something may be true in a pragmatic sense, that is, in the sense that its application will accord with experience. Because this conflicted with the belief of many physicists that Newton’s system in principle was identical with the world of referents, Rudolf Carnap used recursive logical analysis in an attempt to make the concept of identity meaningful despite differences in interpretation. This is why Carnap’s brilliant, but incorrect, version of necessary truth was so firmly accepted by so many advocates of science.

The mere fact of interpretation is not sufficient to undermine Carnap’s thesis. A computer interprets the signals it receives but its digital operations, that is, its use of names and numbers, follows inexorably from the code it employs. The analytic aspect of theories is embedded in their consistent use of names. However, the application of an analytical system to the world cannot be reduced to a digital form, though the common measures of physics permit it to come close. Yet Max Born was able to prove that over a sufficiently long sequence, prediction will fail.

Quine’s convincing attack on positivism in his ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ is supported by other demonstrations. Werner Heisenberg was able to prove that an accurate measurement of one related observable quality such as position produces uncertainty in a related observable quality such as momentum. Correlative modes of inquiry are in a state of complementarity. Kurt Gödel was able to prove that there are true arithmetical propositions that do not follow from the axioms of arithmetic. As other logicians have shown, there are areas of inquiry within which the axiom of contradiction does not apply. I was able to prove to the satisfaction of an eminent mathematician, Saunders Mac Lane, that a theorem is an analogy by proportion from the standpoint of recursive, that is, metalinguistic, analysis.

Hence, the modern paradigm, to the extent that it retained the concept of necessary truth, became untenable. All theories are analogs when applied to the world and, thus, are not identical with their referents. At some point, they fail to account for experience. I was able to show that even the most simple of concepts, a point, was not identical with its empirical referents (see Chapter 2). Thus, all theories are analogies.

Nonetheless, Newtonian theory, although surpassed by relativity theory, still gives superbly good accounts of the world. Other theories may not do as well, but many have significant pragmatic utility. Thus, the philosophical question that needs answer is not whether theories can be said to be true but what one means when one says that they are true.

To answer this question one must move beyond Peirce’s rejection of an identity between concepts and their referents to an analysis of how one moves from a theory of a system of names (whether of a solar system, a social system, or a moral system) to its application in a world in which general theories such as that of Newton are usually not available. This will make systems theory central to analyses that apply to some areas of knowledge in which general theories such as those of physics are not possible.

I will attempt in this chapter to show that theory, including systems theory, does not depend on identity in the Aristotelian sense if the nomothetic and the ideographic aspects of reality are un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Unknown Kaplan: Synoptic Knowledge after Postmodernism
• Part I A World View
• Part II Analytics
• Part III Systems
• Part IV Applications
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index