Back in the good old days, it seemed perfectly clear that everything turned around us, both astronomically and otherwise. The moon, the sun, the planets and the stars were put in place to be the backdrop to a moral drama of which God was the audience and we were the heroes and villains. What we did or failed to do mattered to the whole scheme of things; it was what the whole scheme of things was for.
But then came Copernicus and the scientific world view, and it turned out that the universe is quite a lot bigger than we had supposed, and that we aren’t at the centre of it after all. Maybe there isn’t any centre; maybe it goes on and on in every direction for ever and ever. Where is God in all this, God only knows.
The moral seems to be that we had badly overestimated our role, which turns out to be pretty peripheral. Here we are, lost in the stars; and what does it matter to them what happens to us? Even if we did something worth reporting, we’d be long gone before the stars got the news.
Those of a angsty temperament who find this revised worldview not bearable are overcome by angst and dread contemplating this; they languish in existential loneliness.
Yet if the spiral nebula Andromeda isn’t very interested in me, so be it. I reciprocate: I have at most a theoretical interest in it. And I don’t much care if it doesn’t much care whether, stuck in traffic, What business is it of the spiral nebula Andromeda that I am stuck in this endless traffic tailback and I am burdting for a 'immy riddle' (piddle/pee) And anway, does the spiral nebula Andromeda have any idea of the price of petrol these days. Does it even care, no it doesn't.
But this isolationism of human kind is put to the rack by relativism.
What a Copernican astronomy taketh away, a relativist epistemology giveth back
What would [the] universe be like if we were not here to say something about it? Would there still be numbers, if there were no one to count them? Or scientific laws, if there were no words or numbers in which to express them? Would the universe even be vast, without the very fact of our nsignificance to give it scale?
Eh yes.. it would, actaully. The universe would still be just the size it is even if there weren’t astronomers to measure it. And water would still be H2O even if there weren’t chemists to analyse it.
Anyway, I didn’t make the universe; I wasn’t even there at the time.
It’s one question what’s the case, and another how we know what’s the case. Very often, we’re able to answer the first sort of question even though we can’t answer the second
In particular, we’re rarely in a position to say just what it is about our experience (or about anything else) that warrants our claim to know that a proposition is true. That being so, it’s not an argument against the proposition being true that we don’t know how we know that it is. The sun will rise tomorrow morning; I know that perfectly well. But figuring out how I could know it is, as Hume pointed out, a bit of a puzzle.
Our perception is saturated with inference that it is epistemologically reliable.
Understanding the structure of galaxies is one thing, understanding how we understand the structure of galaxies is quite another. There isn’t the slightest reason why the first should wait on the second and, in point of historical fact, it didn’t.
For example, nobody is really a solipsist about other minds; everybody knows that everybody else has beliefs and desires out of which they act, just as one does oneself. But it’s a serious question how one knows that other people have minds; and it’s not a question that psychologists are able to answer to anybody’s satisfaction. Is it an inference from, as one says, one’s own case? Or is it a kind of belief that one is simply born with? Or did one learn it at granny’s knee? (If so, where did granny learn it?)
Quite a lot of 20th-century anglophone philosophy made it a matter of principle to make this mistake. It turns out, at the limit of this sort of philosophical nuttiness, that it takes two to see a tree; you can’t see one unless there’s somebody around (actually or counterfactually) to interpret you as seeing one. But surely this is back to front? Surely it’s the seeing that warrants the interpretation, not the other way around? Stories are made to conform to the world, not vice versa ie the world conform to stories.
source Jerry Fodor and his review of
The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe by Michael Frayn
Faber, 505 pp, £20.00, September 2006, ISBN 0 571 23217 5
But then came Copernicus and the scientific world view, and it turned out that the universe is quite a lot bigger than we had supposed, and that we aren’t at the centre of it after all. Maybe there isn’t any centre; maybe it goes on and on in every direction for ever and ever. Where is God in all this, God only knows.
The moral seems to be that we had badly overestimated our role, which turns out to be pretty peripheral. Here we are, lost in the stars; and what does it matter to them what happens to us? Even if we did something worth reporting, we’d be long gone before the stars got the news.
Those of a angsty temperament who find this revised worldview not bearable are overcome by angst and dread contemplating this; they languish in existential loneliness.
Yet if the spiral nebula Andromeda isn’t very interested in me, so be it. I reciprocate: I have at most a theoretical interest in it. And I don’t much care if it doesn’t much care whether, stuck in traffic, What business is it of the spiral nebula Andromeda that I am stuck in this endless traffic tailback and I am burdting for a 'immy riddle' (piddle/pee) And anway, does the spiral nebula Andromeda have any idea of the price of petrol these days. Does it even care, no it doesn't.
But this isolationism of human kind is put to the rack by relativism.
What a Copernican astronomy taketh away, a relativist epistemology giveth back
Eh yes.. it would, actaully. The universe would still be just the size it is even if there weren’t astronomers to measure it. And water would still be H2O even if there weren’t chemists to analyse it.
Anyway, I didn’t make the universe; I wasn’t even there at the time.
It’s one question what’s the case, and another how we know what’s the case. Very often, we’re able to answer the first sort of question even though we can’t answer the second
In particular, we’re rarely in a position to say just what it is about our experience (or about anything else) that warrants our claim to know that a proposition is true. That being so, it’s not an argument against the proposition being true that we don’t know how we know that it is. The sun will rise tomorrow morning; I know that perfectly well. But figuring out how I could know it is, as Hume pointed out, a bit of a puzzle.
Our perception is saturated with inference that it is epistemologically reliable.
Understanding the structure of galaxies is one thing, understanding how we understand the structure of galaxies is quite another. There isn’t the slightest reason why the first should wait on the second and, in point of historical fact, it didn’t.
For example, nobody is really a solipsist about other minds; everybody knows that everybody else has beliefs and desires out of which they act, just as one does oneself. But it’s a serious question how one knows that other people have minds; and it’s not a question that psychologists are able to answer to anybody’s satisfaction. Is it an inference from, as one says, one’s own case? Or is it a kind of belief that one is simply born with? Or did one learn it at granny’s knee? (If so, where did granny learn it?)
Quite a lot of 20th-century anglophone philosophy made it a matter of principle to make this mistake. It turns out, at the limit of this sort of philosophical nuttiness, that it takes two to see a tree; you can’t see one unless there’s somebody around (actually or counterfactually) to interpret you as seeing one. But surely this is back to front? Surely it’s the seeing that warrants the interpretation, not the other way around? Stories are made to conform to the world, not vice versa ie the world conform to stories.
source Jerry Fodor and his review of
Faber, 505 pp, £20.00, September 2006, ISBN 0 571 23217 5
No comments:
Post a Comment