Friday, 30 April 2021

Does it matter?

I confess that I haven't succeeded in surviving the poor sound quality of lectures on Perspective Realism.
I don't want defame anyone, so I'll pretend that it works to interpret the label as supplying an argument for a - changeable - approach to things, somehow, independent of what, if we translate that in finding a perspective the agent is interpretable as human-like.

So it's already making an epistemological foundation: we've learnt something, of things, that humans are concerned in (why else do a thing?) and there are options because the thing(s) are straightforwardly detached from us yet have already shaped up something in our thoughts that gives that much perspective.

Epistemic (in/) justice is something we should have qualms about derogating. Rorty riffs on Michael Williams contra Davidson, and we can see this sort of stuff - whilst condemned as postmodern - has been vomitted up by passing acquitance - like a one-off bong session attendee - and snaffled up by some running dogs and hey presto the turds like Pinker and Peterson - has not been well examined. I'm not the best person for the job, either.
What we should be doing, if we aren't to get locked into a hybrid of legalistic metaphysics or psychiatry and evo-anything, is concentrate on the causal (pace Rorty) though not to a reduction by retrospection. Eliminating enough causal explanations to get to what is true about the agent's belief. There's nothing to knowledge on either side, only reaching an agreement that has causal description shared, translateable both ways.
We shouldn't have a culture of indignation about dissolving our claims to knowledge, eliminating the phrases of knowing isn't important. That'll happen, in theory. All I've ever had to say about empiricism is that the Praeger approach is best, because it never ends: observe the entity in the environment it takes on. David Deutsch didn't do that when referring to "Ancient Greeks" on empiricism. I don't get that anyone who has a belief in science, a claim to have some acquitance with history of theory and experiment could stick with the myth that there were such people so compartmentalised (it's a German thing?) except by the apostle Paul whose words in the bible are a sardonic entertainment to anyone who has read Aristotle and Plato via arabian or roman.

That we should take apart epistemic claims though always home in the agents is all that's said here. Latourian Actor Network Theory - I'm not much into making noise with STS (good luck, MC Hammer) - is of cause with Perspective Realism. Do people who "make" money only know how to be - by selection due to a reality independent of human attendance presumably? - with things that make money? The stuff has no mystery - except to Marxists? and Graeber's anthro-etymology is another matter. Soros, for example, figured he could be a moral conductor having been tutored by Popper. If ANT really describes how to get a grip on things, some Real(ism) thing, then it appears we got a grasp on a hallucination. We dream we know if we don't just let on that dreaming is all we really do. Epistemic Justice won't make a difference except to shift injustice around?

I'm only putting this down to make an easier way to argue in if I can later. The causal theme is a tricky one, beloved of analyticals. As is normativity. You get I don't do that, which is how I decided to start reading into philosophy with Rorty. In the twenty odd years I scrawled out arguments to test against his essays, I played with terminology. I couldn't have done that and stayed on my own case - in and out of physical illness, learning of the stupidity endemic and systematic in this democracy if an academic.
I've no ambition to become one.

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