[FRIAM] flattening -isms

Sun Nov 17 14:27:39 EST 2019

Thanks, Glen, and Dave, 

Well, I should have conceded this point long ago:  of course I am a
==>methodological <== pluralist.  There are many ways to skin a cat.  

Years ago I participated in a longrunning forum on Research Gate on
Philosophy of Science run by an Iranian intellectual who was putting some of
the great texts of western science into Persian so they would be more widely
read in Iran.  My colleagues in this forum were mostly an odd lot of
physicists.  What struck me about them was how many of them held the view
that reality was beyond experience: i.e., that our experience provided clues
to reality, but the thing itself was beyond experience.  I never could
convince them that that their belief in a reality beyond experience had to
be based on . experience.  So, why not be monists, and talk about
organizations of experience.  Ultimately, it was their dualism that
confirmed me in my monism. 

I am serious about your forcing me to become an "of" monist.  Everything is
relations; it's relations all the way down.  So the turtles are themselves
relations. <https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/189399.Clifford_Geertz>
To the inevitable "what about the first relation: what was that a relation
of?" I will only say, "The limiting case is never a particularly interesting
one; I will worry about it when I have explained all the others."  (I do not
understand the complexity theorists' passion for explaining "first life",
for instance, or psychologists who tie themselves in knots over the "dawn"
of consciousness."  To worry so intensely over origins when there is so much
other work to be done is an implicit caving to Christian theology.  We
pragmatists, we begin in the middle. 

So you force me to admit that even if I declare my allegiance to "of"
monism, I have immediately to admit that there are different kinds of
"of's".  So EVERY monist is a pluralist at the next level up.  So why am I
suddenly stuck on the monist origin story?  Ach.  Hoist by my own petard.  

By the way, speaking of etymology, to be hoist by one's own petard is to be
ejected from one's own saddle by the force of one's own fart.  Look it up. 

By the way, speaking of Clifford Geertz, here is the original quote: 

"There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about
an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform
which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of
a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave),
what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib,
after that it is turtles all the way down" 
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures
<https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1166845> .

By the way, Geertz is probably the locus classicus of the relativism I
deplore.  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen?C
Sent: Sunday, November 17, 2019 10:25 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flattening -isms

My guess is you're a methodological pluralist just like the rest of us.

The trick is that monism is moot. Even *if* all things are somehow
organizations of experience, to be pragmatic, you have to be able to
*generate* 2 seemingly different things (like your experience vs. my
experience) by different organizations (or timelines, or historical
ephemerides, or iterations, or embeddings, or whatever). And so even if
there is only 1 stuff, there must be different ways of organizing the stuff.
So, there's, literally, no point in making a big stink about the 1 stuff.
Multiplicities will *always* creep in. So, monism is one of: tautological,
false, or useless, perhaps all three!

Worst case, if we can't *show* (i.e. actually *do* it) how the 1 stuff is
differently organized into different things and are only left with the
different things, then reality may as well *be* pluralist because saying
it's not is pure fideism/imputation/speculation and does no explanatory or
predictive work.

String theory and loop quantum gravity are *trying* to show how to construct
multiple stuff from singular stuff. So, they're setting the bar pretty high.
If you want to be a monist, why not work on those?

On 11/17/19 8:42 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:> Gosh.  So Stuff of Stuff and
plain old stuff are different stuffs?  So Nick

> Thompson is a dualist?

> 

> Damn!

> 

> Perhaps to maintain my monism I  have to become an "of" monist.  It's
"of's"

> all the way down.

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