Saturday, March 2, 2013

Ethan Watters — There's Such a Thing as "Human Nature," Right?

Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics—and hoping to change the way human behavior and culture is understood.
AlterNet
There's Such a Thing as "Human Nature," Right?
Ethan Watters | Pacific Standard

Here's a comment I made at FB on a similar matter.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein attempted to elucidate in his later philosophical works on on the logic of ordinary language, in particular Philosophical Investigations, language use is embedded in context. Human beings are part of that context and therefore cannot stand outside it and observe it. We have to observe it from inside and attempt to see to the best our ability now language operates in expression.

When we look at ordinary language use, we find a lot of things going on at once, which technical uses seek to simplify, in that while rich, ordinary language is not always precise. But technical languages are not rich enough to convey emotion, either. So there is a trade off between "matter and manner," logic and rhetoric, reason and emotion, for instance.

One of the most striking aspects of investigating language is that logic analysis reveals many things that are not usually noticed but which are extremely relevant. E.g., the way one uses ordinary language reveals that certain expressions that appear to be descriptive are actually playing a foundational role as norms, such as basic criteria, often ontological, epistemological, ethical and even esthetic.

In this way, one's use of language reveals a "worldview" or "world picture (Weltbild) that characterizes a "form of life" (Lebensform) as shared context. Thus, we could say that ordinary language has hidden assumptions embedded in it and just because they are shared even by large numbers doesn't guarantee their ontological or epistemological status.

Historically, many of these norms and criteria have been disproved or replaced for other reasons. Very often the scientific understanding of the time contributes significantly to a world view that later changes, as when the earth-centric view was switched for a heliocentric view, and the predominantly religious world view gave way to the chiefly scientific one. Historically the popular world view of a large number of fairly well educated members of a group also lags the state of the art scientific opinion, although there there may be significant disagreement among experts, e.g., the interpretation of QM is hardly a settled matter because it is not scientific but metaphysical.

Wittgenstein regarded the proper role of philosophy to be logical critique. Thus, philosophy becomes properly a logical exercise in determining the assumptions underlying a world view by examining the type of role they play in the "language games" in which they figure as rules. One could compare this to the institutional approach in economics and the cultural approach in sociology v. the "natural" approach that assumes.

In this sense Phil is correct about being wary of the use of science, e.g., in the case of evolutionary theory to justify eugenics, or social Darwinism in political economy. But that is a different issue from a theory as an explanatory and predictive instrument.

What Phil is really more concerned with is how the scientific community functions as a social and political institution and on what basis. To presume it is just science may not be true to the facts. The ability to use knowledge yields power, and there are many ways to use knowledge. Neoclassical economics is used to justify neoliberalism in political economy, for instance, but neoclassical economics is based on neoliberal assumptions that economics as a "science" does not justify, modeling assumptions not being treated as theoretical hypotheses. So the reasoning is circular.




5 comments:

Matt Franko said...

I view a concept such as 'the invisible hand' as unscientific, but that means I also have to look at Darwin's 'natural selection' as unscientific.... To be logically consistent.

Rsp

JKH said...

Tom, ever come across this sort of thing, intersecting indirectly with Wittgenstein or whoever, in some way?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorial_grammar

I once took a course in this from Lambek – the key guy in the article. “He is noted, among other things, for the Lambek calculus, an effort to capture mathematical aspects of natural language syntax in logical form and a work that has been very influential in computational linguistics.”

Unknown said...

JKH, have you read this Levy Institute ebook?

"Beyond the Minsky Moment"

http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/?docid=1520

Andy Blatchford said...

Excellent debate.

Tom Hickey said...

JKH Tom, ever come across this sort of thing, intersecting indirectly with Wittgenstein or whoever, in some way?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorial_grammar

I once took a course in this from Lambek – the key guy in the article. “He is noted, among other things, for the Lambek calculus, an effort to capture mathematical aspects of natural language syntax in logical form and a work that has been very influential in computational linguistics.”


Lambek approach can be viewed as a variant of Chomsky's in the approach to linguistics that seeks to elaborate a formalized minimalist meta-language as a general account of how language use operation through what Chomsky called "depth grammar."

Wittenstein also distinguished between surface and "depth grammar" in Philosophical Investigations. But Wittgenstein's meaning and approach is quite different from the linguistic approach that Chomsky initiated.

LW's later works make this clear, at least as clear as one can make Wittgenstein out, since there is no unanimity on interpretation of his work. Moreover, Wittgenstein dismissed altogether the possibility of interpreting him in that he was not saying anything subject to interpretation and was just giving examples designed to elucidate the logic of ordinary language, and he denied that logic can be used to describe itself, since it is the basis of description. So the impossibility can be likened to trying to use a function as an argument of itself. That is a nonsense, like dividing by zero.

He held that if one sees how the logic is operating one can detect and avoid moves that result in nonsense. So his work has been compared to Zen koans, and there is some truth to this. If one sees what is being elucidated, one is released from the delusory spell of language, so to speak, that is, thinking that it is doing something it is not.

Wittgenstein's later work is a repudiation of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as either a metaphysical work or a theory of language as it had erroneous been taken as. The TLP was offered as an articulation of an approach to the propositional calculus that address issues raised by Frege, and Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica. Here is an interesting statement by Russell about LW's affect on his work. The basic issue is meaning and truth. Previously, meaning and truth were taken to be philosophical issues, e.g., theory of knowledge. LW showed that they are instead logical.

The TLP is a logical investigation of general description in science, suggested by the intro to Herz's Principles of Mechanics. LW was trained as an engineer, had no training in philosophy, and read little of the historical works. He was interested in the foundations of logic and math and confined his interest largely to that.

He was displeased by what he considered to be a misunderstanding of his work by the Vienna Circle on one hand (LW was Viennese) and the British savants at Cambridge, where he taught. Issues in his earlier work were pointed out to him by colleagues Frank Ramsey and Peiro Sraffa though. This set him on a new course, and he acknowledged their influence on his later thought, which was a reaction to his earlier formalism and aimed as elucidating ordinary language use in its richness.