Our Situation

I really enjoyed this class for giving the opportunity to explore the limits of what is constructed and what is real. We are to an extent distant from 'the real' but we also interact with the real world outside of ourselves. What is most fascinating about our situation is that we socially construct our world, not in the sense that we literally create it, but that we collectively decide in a complex litany of conscious and unconscious action in every moment our entire understanding of the world.

Our understanding is no doubt strongly influenced by the real world, but so much of the world we live in is constructed. Maybe, to give my metaphysical view of constructivism a moral value, if all the participants in a construct understood exactly what in the world is constructed we could all decide together what sort of world we want to construct.

A great project I hope someone undertakes is defining the limits of what is constructed and what is reality,

Marine Le Pen & Constructing an Enemy

We thought we had it bad in the US with conservatives vilifying 'Mexicans' and those who believe in illegal immigrants human rights. Marine Le Pen got almost 20 percent of the vote in France with her inflammatory anti-Muslim/anti-immigrant rhetoric. So how is it France has got itself in this mess?

I don't think it is at all unfair to use a dose of psychoanalysis here. What's changed in France? Economic conditions. The government is unable to force capital to play nicely in France and moreover new neoliberal policies instituted by previous governments has destroyed France's ability to weather the financial crisis. So then we have the Front National with it's old school right wing politics turning the issues around; it's not sacred France that has done wrong, it's the immigrants and the EU and everyone except the bankers and capitalists who actually caused this crisis.

In effect, Le Pen and her party are playing the old fascist game of point the finger at the Other, instead of Greedy Jews stealing from the Honest Christian [insert nationality here] it's Radical Fundamentalist Muslims (which are all of them) attacking the Sacred, Secular, and Free [insert nation here].

Q&A Nine Question Two

Q: Does feminism today need to critique the truth seeking mechanisms of a modern society ostensibly sympathetic with the aims of feminism?

A: Alright, that is a bit of a leading question, but really: in a society where no one would ever claim to hate or oppress women why do we need a special advocate for women's interests?

Like the mid-century Marxist/Feminists we've been discussing in class who described the 'Happy-Homemaker syndrome,' its clear that the face value of a word almost never reflects it's total function. It's absolutely silly to suggest that because everyone says they have the best interests of women taken to heart that they actually do, or that their understanding of the interests of women is at all acceptable.

It's sort of like a little child who is told to apologise after doing wrong. When you tell them they where not sincere they might say that they said the words. Like people who now have taken the interests of women to heart may have said the words, but there is still an undercurrent of reluctance and misunderstanding.

Q&A Nine Question One

Q: Can a critique of a social order be the creative foundation of the replacement of that order?

A: I doubt that it can be the foundation of a replacement or a paradigmatic shift in an order. A critique, or a certain understanding, of a situation is necessarily embedded within the event that a critique is evaluating, a critique seems like it would be fundamentally involved with the event thus limiting its purview to engaging with what is the nature of the event.

A critique may open up the space for a fundamental departure from that order, but this is a step to creativity not towards a unified theory of anything.

I realize I'm being quite vague here with almost all of the terms used; imagine them in a context such as feminism. Feminism has succeed in rallying troops to the cause but has failed to do away with the fundamental antagonisms that created feminist desire in the first place.

Divergent Epistemologies?

There may be come confusion about what constitutes a separate, feminist or other, epistemology. A feminist might try to understand the oppression of women through the way truth gathering and legitimizing mechanisms work in her society. A feminist as a person with unique understanding of the society she is studying and thus able to understand mechanisms as having latent capacities to oppress women.

This is the privileged epistemology state of understanding, the feminist is not in a privileged position because she (or he!) is a certain gender, but rather because they have the advantage of being able to attempt to find truth from a particular conceptual angle. Each different understanding could not be construed as separate epistemology, because many different ways of understanding may be complied in order to access the truth. They all also have to rely on the same fundamental rational operations that make all communication and thought intelligible.

The Ideological Neutrality of Critical Thinking

It seems tempting to view Critical Pedagogy (CP) as an ideologically biased form of Critical Thinking (CT), and even if we agree with the concept of an oppressive class structure existing in society, we still may prefer CT as the purer of the two. If we step back into a historicist's understanding of knowledge and ideology it CP might make some more sense.

CT would innately be committed to an understanding of the world at face value, at ideologies being accepted and rejected in each era based on the strength of their arguments alone and not on context. This is an incomplete view of the world. CT also inclines toward the prevalent atomisation of the consumer and laborer under capitalism, CT makes a more discerning consumer and a laborer more able to deal effectively with his exploitation, but that is the limit of the subjectification reached through CT.

Why Ethics?

We want ethics for a number of reasons, first and foremost, we want society to function. Therefore, we need ethics only in light of wanting society to function. To me this seems like a sufficient enough foundation for ethics, from which we can extrapolate moral principles when confronting a situation involving moral action.

This puts me in a tough spot because I don't think this necessarily leads to animal rights or vegetarianism. 

Q&A Seven Question Two

Q:Is intuition a valid tool for investigating morality?

To clarify, I mean valid as in relevant and useful, not like the term used in logic.

My desire for universalisation on the one hand tends to support the usefulness of intuition and on the other really want to deny its usefulness. While there are moral claims that we can come to a near consensus on almost universally, it's still slippery. Where do these intuitions even come from? Where is the solid basis for morality?

My intuition (see what I did there?) is that these moral intuitions, that 'yuck' at the sight of a 'wrongness,' is a consequence of ingrained moral systems rather than some independent a priori sort of pointer to what morality is. Strangling mothers is a particularly bad crime because we agree that we should respect, love and protect our mothers.

Fundamentally, morality is only created out of consensus, and while I really want to banish relativism, I don't see how morality-as-consensus can be challenged. Maybe there is room to challenge another's moral beliefs not because they're 'wrong' but because it is consistent with your beliefs to challenge the others beliefs for not being consistent with your own.

Q&A Seven Question One

Q: How to prove or measure what moral status animals have?

Even if we give animals moral status it's very hard to tell what that status means on the ground and how much of a status they have in relation to the wants and needs of a presumably higher morally statused humanity. We need to clearly define what the origin of moral status is.

Most often the determiner is whether an animal can feel pain and pleasure. A more complex determiner which I prefer is whether an animal can value. What the process of valuing is is not very clear, but maybe it is simply preference and the active attempt to actualise that preference. Even if a dog does not have the ability to conceptualise 'value' it can still prefer certain things and thus give those things value.

This process of preferring cannot be done in degrees, the animal prefers or does not prefer. There is gradation though between humans through animals that are more or less capable of human-like cognitive function. We can determine the degree of moral status based on how much animals are like humans in sociability, conceptualization, ect., and only after the basic test of preference.

Q & A Five Question Two

How do we deal with time being infinitely divisible?

I'm really tempted to solve this simply by saying that time is not infinitely divisible. That it is infact divided into incredibly small discrete moments. If there are discrete moments then causal relations can't happen during insanely small periods of time.

According to the block theory, which is the most convincing by far, I think that time's smallest discrete units of measurement is the smallest amount of time that an action can happen in. This assumes that actions don't happen at a certain level of time, but it does seem that, at least on our scale of space-time, that all actions are limited in speed. Perceivable action can only happen in this certain limit of fastness and slowness, and assuming there was no limit we might see actions happening in an infinite variety of speeds.

The above idea does not really solve the problem of time being infinitely divisible, but it does mean that there is a level past which it is no longer useful to measure units of time, therefore creating at least some sort of stopgap basic unit of time.

Q & A Five Question One

How does determinism relate to the block theory of time?

It seems that if every action is the direct result of the action before it, and so on into the future and past of causal relationships, all things are determined to happen. This seems to fit in very nicely with the block theory of time. 

To use the block theory one might necessarily have to be a determinist, but simply viewing this theory of time using determinism one would see that causal relations have much to do with how time seems to work. A moment is a theoretical frozen unit of time with the result of all the causal relations before it and after it all the causes of that moment arrayed ahead in the future. Time more acts like a dimension of space, where you can specify a place in time the same way you can specify a point in space.

Free will does not seem to be compatible with the block theory. If free will or some other unforeseen randomness could be proved then we would have more ground to disregard this theory of time.

Last Post on Patriotism

You may have noticed looking at my blog; I am very engaged with patriotism. For some reason the irrationality of it bugs the heck out of me. I do not expect humans to be only rational beings and devoid of emotion in their decision making process, but why is this emotiv connection to one's country so persistent?

In the ideal world we would agree to abide by political structures out of our own volition, instead of needing an emotive fix. 

The Foundations of Patriotism

An interesting fact I just read (burried in the latest issue of the NY Review of Books) is that when asked if "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is in the US constitution, fifty percent of people said yes. The article then went on to make another relevant point that more than eighty percent of Americans believe the bible is either the literal or inspired word of God (at least thats what they say to these guys), but that percent of americans has not read the Bible.

What is this tendency to make out texts that we don't even read to be sacred? Why are people so attached to the ideal of a nation? After all a nation is just a convenient legal fiction, why attach so much emotive importance?

Unanswerable Questions

It may be that philosophy's sisyphean task is to try and answer unanswerable questions. Maybe this is where it's vitality comes from, providing endless challenge to the most curious human minds. By failing to directly answer 'the big questions' a fertile and creative intellectual realm where humans can strive to be 'better' (whatever that is).

I cannot see that the philosophy of time is one of these places. Ok, at least the portion of it trying to describe the nature of time. We only can access our experience of time and whatever the reality of it is seems to be irrelevant. Furthermore, I don't think we can access any evidence on weather time is this way or that, because we are limited by our subjective view of the universe.

A Note from Banksy

"People who enjoy waving flags don't deserve to have one"

I disagree with this statement but I think I agree with Banksy's general frustration with those who do wave flags. Patriots are not up for a rational discussion of patriotism in the same way a religious person is not up for a rational discussion of their beliefs. This is perfectly fine, and I would hope people have the right to be unreasonable as long as it isn't harming anyone else. In this case however it does seem to be causing harm.

While moral imperatives are supposed to be universal it often seems that our moral obligation to others stops at our boarders for the arbitrary reasons of closeness and legal proximity. Though cultural relativism is in vogue, it is still the case that justice is universal for many things that are not culturally specific. Murder is murder, rape is rape, ect. And while patriots seem to value the lives within their nation more than others, it is a moral imperative to break down these artificial barriers to moral action.

Often American interests are put ahead of the interests of other nations full of people who are and should be considered equal in value to any other human citizen. A particularly strong example of this is the United States continuous physical and diplomatic interventions in Latin America. These interventions often happen to the detriment of democracy and human rights in that region. Here is an (admittedly bias) cronological list of US interventions in Latin America.

Q&A Four Question Two

• If you dislike America so much why don't you leave? [finding an appropriate philosophical response to this question]
  
  
  This question seems to tie into weather patriotism is a specific gradation in love of place. Patriotism seems to be a special love or favor of a place to the detriment of other places. Which is a more extreme form of attachment to  a place than simply liking it more than other places, but not letting that get in the way of moral judgments.
  
   This is the place that I am from, and though I do not agree with the polities actions that does not man that there is not a nonpolitical culture that I am involved in.
  
  Even more practically, moving is a bit of a hassle.
  
  

Q&A Four Question One

• Is patriotism necessary to maintain a nation state?
  
  
  Patriotism is historically tied to the concept of the nation state. When the land in Europe was owned based on inheritance there was clearly no or little concept of national sovereignty  For example the crown of Spain gained a significant part of the Netherlands through inheritance  and the resistance to this was largely religious, and unlike you may see today, Dutch nationalists did not raise a fit. It would seem that patriotism is integral to the survival of the nation-state because patriotism occurs everywhere this sort of concept of governance occurs.
  
  
  Fundamentally I do not think patriotism is necessary.  There are other groups that we function as part of just fine without fanatical devotion. These groups include states (as in Massachusetts), universities, businesses, and non-profit organisations.

Q&A Three Question Two

Why is anti-empiricism at the root of all totalitarianism (assuming this is so)? Is totalitarianism therefore impossible because our discourse is based on empiricism?

I know that the author does eventually argue that empiricism can also be a totalitarian ideology, but I don't believe that this is really consistent. If empiricism is free dialogue based on the available facts of a situation then totalitarianism can only happen when that dialogue breaks down, because the dialog must necessarily be discussing the facts of the situation which includes that totalitarianism is a negative force that does not create a space where rational dialog can be had.

Q&A Three Question One

Why is there two ideologies at all? Why not just one that is right? (try avoiding sociological/psychological reasons) 

Avoiding sociological reasons are hard. It's really tempting to believe from a empiricist/naturalist point of view that supernaturalism is a view held by people of weak intellectually or emotional strengths. That these people are physiologically inclined to endorse supernaturalism as an emotional palliative because they cannot deal with empirically based reality.

Much more charitably, I think supernaturalism may better explain certain emotional ('spiritual') states that empiricism just doesn't seem to jell with in the mind. These may be intuitive and subjective states, but because of the limits placed on investigation based on empiricism we cannot, using that ideology, investigate certain aspects of mental experience. This might be where the supernaturalist approach is satisfying and rewarding in ways the empiricist cannot take part in.

Sympathy

I am a realist. There does not seem to be any reason to doubt that there is an outside world that we have some contact with. Where I sympathize with Idealism and Constructivism is in understanding the mind. At least those who try to address the problem of the minds connection to reality because they recognize how tenuous that connection is.

The mind is not a rational thing, it is in fact a confusing mix of emotion, knowledge, instinct and a goodly number of other things. We do in fact often fail to interact with the world correctly, but this is not because our senses are not reliable. It is in fact our minds ourselves that are the impediment to the rational conscious mind interacting with the outside world.

In my opinion it is far more scary to admit that our minds are not completely under our control, and I sympathize with idealists who may be trying to find the less frightening route in describing our relationship with reality.

Q&A Two Question Two

How Radical can we be without totally denying the existence/relevance of an outside world?

Von Glassersfeld sounds a lot like a metaphysical realist when you get down to it. If we accept his theories on the basis that he is describing a reality where the mind exists in the world but has a very hard time accessing it, then we may be getting somewhere plausible.

At the very least we need to admit that at some time the mind existed in interaction with the world. If not a mind would never have the initial materials to develop the world from. More fundamentally, if the mind didn't exist in the world then where did the mind come from?

We have to admit the existence of something analogous to the subconscious as well, or else the universe would only be the way that we consciously chose it to be, which is rather painfully not the case.

Q&A Two Question One

Is there any use to being a Radical Constructivist? Where can we get working off this theory?


Like a skeptic, the radical constructivist backs themselves into a corner when it comes to knowing anything about the world. If you can't verify an outside reality, then how can we rationally discuss anything?

On this basis alone it seems that RD should be rejected, the same way that skepticism in the end must be rejected. Though the possibility of RD's truth must constantly lurk in the background like the boogeyman, there is no way to approach the veracity of RD's claims, and thus nothing interesting or useful that we can do with it.

RD also fails to tell us why we should be so skeptical about realism. Realism seems intuitively true, and while the nature of realist metaphysics makes it impossible for us to verify from inside and outside our minds weather or not we are actually accessing reality through our senses, there doesn't seem to be any good reason to seriously doubt it.

Suprising Response to von Glasersfeld

I did not expect he would go off on mystics like that. I sense some kernel of truth that mystics and the like perceive some very important realities but we are not able to access their perceptions because of the limits imposed on us by the subjectivity of those perceptions. I can see how it is frustrating to be stuck in this position, but I also do not see how it justifies taking up RD.

Q&A Question Two

If we need others to share our aesthetic judgment because, “They ought to share it on pain of making a judgment which is incorrect or inappropriate [. . .] we don't want them to make incorrect judgments.” Why do we care if they make the wrong aesthetic judgments? (If we accept this as true it seems that aesthetic judgment is not objective but totally conditional on social coercion, therefore making the 'wrongness' of anyones judgment impossible.)

To address this we need to assume several things. Mostly that the action of experiencing beauty is a fundamentally subjective activity. This activity can be influenced and changed by normalization caused by social externalities to the subject experiencing beauty. For example, a person's experience of beauty in a piece of music will be affected by her social condition.

The drive to correct others seems to be fueled by the misperception that the experience of beauty is objective, or atleast the same between all individuals. While there does seem to be some basic agreement over what is beautiful, once we realize that there is no reason to legislate on the experience itself there seems like no reason to force our judgments on others. For some reason people still try to force their aesthetic judgments on others. 

I'm not arguing that reality is relative to each person's judgments and thus their judgments should not be subjected to reason. I am arguing that some areas of human experience, such as the experience of the aesthetic, can not effectively be regulated on the basis of reason.

Q&A Question One

Is the experience of beauty largely the same between individuals before we add in social/normative aesthetic judgments?

Judgments of beauty appear to be similar before aesthetic judgment are normalized by social processes. For instance, flowers are often considered beautiful independently across varied cultures (Native American Cultures, Persia, China). These cultures presumably are not all incidentally socializing their members to judge that flowers are beautiful. Therefore there is some natural consensus that flowers are in some way beautiful, and this consensus may apply to many other things that are generally considered beautiful.

We cannot certainly determine that the natural experience of beauty is largely the same between people, but it seems likely that there are some innate criteria that people agree on when they consider something beautiful, and these things are not socially transmitted.

Initial Thoughts

Very excited about the topic of this class. It's very basic in some ways and opens up to many interesting vistas.

My first thought about constructivism is who is doing the constructing? It seems to me that a constructivist would tend to believe in a definable and non-deterministic human self.