Glossary - Resources

Physicalism

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:54:24 +0000

The idea that everything is physical. This is not to deny that there are other aspects to our world, like morals and bad jokes, but only that, ultimately, these are physical. In the past, physicalism was identified with materialism, but it became difficult to call certain supposed physical features of the world material (like the force binding particles in a nucleus together). Physicalism is a metaphysical notion, although it is often associated with the so-called scientific approach.

Deleuze

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:52:56 +0000

His early books were studies on Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Bergson. While they were monographs that tried to preserve the classical tradition, as much as an attempt to use them in new ways and go beyond them, they all were written from an angle entirely foreign to the "received exegetical wisdom."

Deleuze reads with an eye for heretical doctrines (Spinoza’s ontology of bodily affects/forces & Hume’s radical empiricism) which retain the power to provoke/disconcert. Also his study on Nietzsche instituted a love affair between Nietzsche and the French in the mid 20th century. Great heroes (Nietzsche and Spinoza) stand for counter tradition of skeptical, affirmative, nonsubjectcentered, instinctually driven "desiring-production" (see Ronald Bogue's "Deleuze & Guattari") Some insist that Deleuze’s philosophy should be seen as the revamped version of Bergsonism. Bergson rebelled against the Cartesian tradition with the claim that there was no distinction whatever between mind and body, and the monist conviction that all that exist was "movement of matter". Deleuze said as much, claiming that the body and the brain constituted a "material continuum", which was in contact with the external world and his conception of desire parallels Bergson’s "élan vital". In "Rhizome: Introduction", Deleuze (with Felix Guattari) compared the multiplying jungle of desire to the underground root system of a rhizome, like that of a couch-grass. Most models of knowledge are based on the tree model with a single root, which entails a foundationalist model, but Deleuze chose the metaphor of a rhizome that spread into all directions, forming an anarchic network where every point could be connected to any other point.

"Différence et repetition" (Deleuze’s doctoral dissertation) & "Logique du sens" come close to a full-scale programmatic statement of post-philosophy, antisystematic, ultranominalist or resolutely nontotalizing mode of thought. Deleuze focuses his philosophical energies on two well-worn topics: identity and time, as well as the nature of thought in the "Difference and Repetition". Immanence, a chief conceptual tool of Deleuze’s radical empiricism, refers to a philosophy of the empirical real or the flux of existence that lacks a transcendental level or some fundamental fissure. The ontological sense of the immanent is that there is only one substance. Ergo everything that exists must be reflected on the same level, the same rank, and analyzed by their relations instead of their “essences.” The other key conceptual tools are constructivism and excess. In the "Logic of Sense", Deleuze explored the boundaries of meaning and non-meaning with several readings on different texts by the Stoics, Plato and Lewis Carroll.

The collaboration with political theorist Felix Guattari, similar in spirit to late '60's antipsychiatry movement, resulted in two books "Anti-Oedipus" and "A Thousand Plateaus". Anti-Oedipus is a joint diatribe, a vast chaotic potpourri book that attacks Freudian psychoanalysis as well as the Lacanian poststructuralist adaptation for being the instrument of channeling/policing the flow of itinerant "molecular" desire which reinforces the "molar" prescriptions of the capitalist sociopolitical order. These attacks also established the 1970’s as the decade of the philosophy of desire. To be brief, Freudian psychoanalysis was heavily subject to the following criticism:

- for being excessively reductionist in its simplification of everything into a fundamental oedipal triangle
- for celebrating a conventional and repressive family structure
- for compelling multidimensional desire into constricted and restrictive canals.

The failure of psychoanalysis to recognize the many natures of desire leads to reductionism where multiplicity is reduced to unity and the proliferation of meaning is deciphered by oedipal complex

Instead of Freud’s theatrical vision of the unconscious and Lacan’s linguistic vision of an unconscious structured like language, Deleuze and Guattari proposed the metaphor of a factory containing "desiring machines". Guattari intended the idea of machine as the indication where desire begins production at the stage where there is "no question of a structure or a subject position or coordinates of references." The Anti-Oedipus begins by describing a desiring machine: an organ machine connected to a source machine that emits a flow. E.g., a breast is the machine that produces milk and the mouth is the machine connected to it. Many literary allusions are used to explain the function of these desiring machines, such as the following: "under the skin, the body is an overheated factory;" Kafka's writing machine from "In the penal Settlement"; Beckett's narrator's construction, the machine from "Molloy".

The last collaborative work, "What is Philosophy", very different from the iconoclastic books of the 70's, attempts to answer the title by stating that, contra the traditional models of contemplation, reflection or communication, philosophy is a discipline that creates concepts. The entire history of philosophy contains "signed concepts" (e.g., Descartes' cogito or Leibniz' monads) because philosophers are "friends of concepts." Science, in this respect, generates propositions and functions, whereas art is composed of words, color or sounds that "capture and encode sensory perceptions."

Mackenzie insists that there is a strain of continuity throughout Deleuze's works where he constantly emphasizes creativity within all domains, and a rejection of philosophy as mere contemplation.

Popper

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:51:48 +0000

Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery has been called one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century. Popper discussed the problem of induction (how to justify inductive inferences) and the demarcation problem; that is, the question of how we decide which theories are scientific and which are not. In the early chapters he considered and criticised the idea that science proceeds by using the experimental results of particular tests to make general conclusions about laws (induction), moving on later in the book to propose his alternative (and solution to the demarcation problem); falsification. According to Popper, what makes a theory scientific is that it can be wrong: we can specify an experiment that, if unsuccessful, would lead us to reject the theory. In Conjectures and Refutations, a more accessible work for a general audience, several essays by Popper expanedd upon his thinking. By making bold conjectures - "sticking our necks out" - and in turn trying to refute - "falsify" - them, our knowledge of the world grows.

Lakatos

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:51:00 +0000

Long recognised as having an importance belied by the comparatively small number of works he produced, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes was the contribution of Imre Lakatos to problems of theory change and demarcation criteria considered by Kuhn, Feyerabend and others. A veritable masterpiece of historical scholarship and philosophical theory, he suggested that theories should not be considered via dichotomies like confirmed or refuted, scientific or non-scientific, but instead as part of research programmes that could be thought of as degenerating or advancing as a whole. In this way, he hoped to account for the history of theories like atomism that had been proposed and rejected repeatedly over time.

Kuhn

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:50:11 +0000

Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is perhaps the best-known work in HPS. One of the first to apply a study of history to problems within the philosophy of science, Kuhn looked at the possibility of giving a rational account of theory change; that is, why have some theories replaced others over time? Some philosophers thought (and think) that we can explain theory change in a progressive way by saying that theories are supplanted by better ones (whether that means more parsimonious, truthlike, instrumentally successful, or any of the other proposed ways to demarcate between theories). Kuhn demonstrated that social factors have an important role to play in analysing the history and philosophy of science, using the term "paradigm" to refer to the way in which commonly held concepts, theories and practices can become entrenched, such that a theory being "better" than the alternatives is not enough to immediately overturn the investment of time, effort, conviction, and so on, that has been put into the orthodoxy.

Kuhn's work led to the development of the field of SSK (the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge) and a general broadening of the philosophy of science to include all those factors (aesthetic, social, thematic, political, rhetorical) that had traditionally been ignored or had their importance minimised. It helped that he was already known as the author of The Copernican Revolution, acknowledged as a masterpiece within the history of science. This account of the rise and development of Heliocentrism forever replaced the mythical of reason against dogmatism with a sophisticated appreciation of how theory, experiment, theology, society and politics interacted. The significance of Kuhn remains this legacy of the sheer complexity of scientific practice.

Feyerabend

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:49:22 +0000

One of the least understood and most frequently maligned books in the philosophy of science is Paul K. Feyerabend's Against Method. Employing the historical method, Feyerabend showed that all forms of the so-called "scientific method" had been violated—usually on several occasions—by scientists in the past when coming up with and developing their theories. This meant that a rigid insistence on the methods suggested by scientists and philosophers of science alike would have resulted in the early death of many theories we now consider important. He asked the inevitable question: should scientists get rid of the restrictive ideas on scientific method or should the scientists of old have abandoned their theories? The only "method" that could take account of the history of science would be "anything goes", which is no method at all. By means of this reductio ad absurdum, he arrived at the now-standard conclusion that there is no such thing as scientific method.

DeMan

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:48:41 +0000

- Contra traditional definition, rhetoric does not have a persuasive function for it is the study of tropes and figures
- Language is inherently figural, which is distinct (as well as in conflict with) from the literal/grammatical/referential meaning
- Due to the figural characteristic of language and its attendant chains of supplements, it is an autonomous structure that cannot be paraphrased or interpreted entirely. Therefore language always contains the element of ambiguity or undecidability.
- To seek for the literal meaning of the text is to obscure the figural nature of the text and mislead the reader.
- The analysis of the relationship between the figural and the literal meaning is deconstruction, which is not to establish an absolute, perfect, or ultimate meaning but to prove there is and can be no final meaning.
- Deconstruction, for DeMan, is not a method applicable to texts, for it "explores and unfolds ambiguities" already present within the text.
- For the critic and the reader, blindness and insight are both inescapable and inseparable: insightful only because meanings in the text are identified, but by doing so, they become blind to the figural meanings and submit to an "aesthetic ideology.
- In the essay "Criticism and Crisis", DeMan explains that fiction is not myth because it names itself as fiction. Those who assert the demystification of fiction/poetic text are being mystified by it since they are incontrovertibly blinded by their own activity and the literal/referential dimensions that conceal the figural aspect.

Baudrillard

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:47:49 +0000

French social theorist, commentator of postmodernity Jean Baudrillard moved from a Marxist-infected critical commentator of the affluent consumer society to an ambiguous position that can be seen either as either bleakly lucid perception that there is no escape from the society of the spectacle or as a horrified fascination with the shallowness of a postmodernist society where the sign has become a simulacrum that signifies nothing.

Influences: Baudrillard's early works on consumer society ("System of objects" and "La société de consommation: ses mythes, ses structures") are influenced by several trends in sociology (Guy Debord's "society of spectacle" to Mcluhan's "medium is the message") and philosophy (Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism to Barthes of mythologies and Fashion System)

His early work ("System of objects, Consumer Society" and "For a Critique of the political economy of the sign") consists of social theory, semiotics, and psychoanalysis. The first two works analyses the system of objects in a consumer society, and the latter, on the relationship btw the consumer society and semiotics. Baudrillard borrowed from semiotics an analysis how objects are encoded in a system of signs & significance that constitutes contemporary media and consumer societies. This inception of a theoretical concentration in semiological studies, Marxian political economy, and sociology of the consumer society led to a constant occupation with a system of objects and signs that encode our life.

For Baudrillard the consumer society is dominated by a system of object signs, which are consumer goods and gadgets that circulate endlessly and constitute an order of signification similar to the signs of Saussure's linguistic system. The use value of these object-signs is less important than the ability to signify the status of the consumer. While the possession of a car may allow one to go places, it also signifies membership of a social group.

Since the importance of economic production is in decline in a postindustrial society, consumption is actually the glue that binds society together. This sketch of society resembles George Perec's depiction in his novel "Things" where a rich couple live entirely off the stuff they buy and consume.

Baudrillard lays out the most sustained exposition of his later theory in "Symbolic Exchange and Death", a complete abandonment of the quasi-Marxist framework of his early work. An encompassing analysis that juxtaposes Saussure, Mauss theory of the gift relationship and Freud, Baudrillard insist that the era of postmodernity is characterized by the replacement of signs by simulacra and the reality of "hyperreality". The game of seduction replaces consumption where nothing real is ever at stake, as well as a simulation where sexuality itself is submerged and absorbed into a vacuous hyperreal pornography that is far more 'real' than any authentic sexual encounter can ever be. In "Seductions", thanks to postmodernity the masquerade of sex is now the reality of sex. Production and labor are no longer relevant, and the aspiration of political change is little more than the yearning of nostalgia for an era of signification representative of the bygone industrial age.

The Basic message of late Baudrillard:

- The subject is dominated by the object
- The prime mover in the social order is consumption
- Media-propagated ideals and images increasingly form our behavior, language, perceptual experience
- Therefore, we live in "hyperreality", a world of signs far removed from any external reality that may help us to keep account of what we take to be signified. In hyperreality the real and the "televisual" merge, and fantasy has institutionally replaced reality. Baudrillard's example, the imaginary Disneyland is a construct calculatingly created to indoctrinate people the reality of America as a hyperreal simulacrum of itself.

Since historical and causal context are lost, then the real distinctions (the social or economic that images represent) also disappear, and political life as well.

Bataille

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:46:40 +0000

Philosopher, novelist, influenced postructuralism (Foucault, Derrida, Barthes) his writings on eroticism influenced Lacan's work on sexuality and "jouissance". The concentration on the human realization of the inevitability of death is indebted to Kojève's reading of Hegel, despite Bataille's rejection of the "end of History" thesis as an absurdity. Bat was also the member of the first generation of the French writers to take Nietzsche seriously.

In his early work published in the "Documents journal", Bataille expressed and developed a deep concern with excess and a "base materialism" that celebrated everything foreign to the aspiration towards human ideals.

The central theme binding Bataille's thoroughly disparate and discrete writings comes from Durkheim's sociology as well as Mauss' concept of the gift relationship. The essential character of society is the sacred which establishes cohesion and delineates the limits of individual behavior. The sacred implies the self sacrificial relationship btw the individual and the collectivity. Aztec civilization exemplified this sort of human sacrifice. Also the sacred is the forbidden element that exists at the margins of society, for no society is capable of existing without a delimiting concept. For Bat the presence of the sacred is manifest in extreme emotion as well as pointless activity found within play, non-reproductive sexuality, body exhalations or anything that a rational/homogeneous society would like to expel. In festivals of waste and expenditure such as the Native American culture of the potlatch where wealth is deliberately destroyed/wasted or taboos are transgressed, the sacred becomes apparent. The notion of excess is elementary to Bataille's view of a general economy based upon the intentional production of nonutilitarian goods such as luxuries or spectacular displays of wealth and weapons systems. Bataille's notion of "General economy" is where expenditure (waste, sacrifice, or destruction) is considered more fundamental than the economies of production & utilities. E.g., the sun freely expands energy without receiving anything in return. If people intend to be free (from imperatives of capitalism) they should pursue a "general economy" of expenditure (giving, sacrifice or destruction) then they will escape the determination of existing imperatives of utility. For Bataille, people are beings of excess; full of exorbitant energy, fantasies, need, drives, & heterogeneous desires.

Bataille was continually concerned with value, thought it was found within the excess that lacerates individuals and opens channels of communication. By defining value as expenditure instead of accumulation, Bataille introduced the era of the death of the subject. Individuals must transgress the limits imposed by subjectivity in order to escape isolation, and communicate.

Bataille's prewar philosophy consists of short essays, some collected in "Visions of Excess": its central idea is that "'base matter' disrupts rational subjectivity by attesting to the continuity in which individuals lose themselves.

"Inner Experience", (a lengthy philosophy treatise) "Guilty" and "On Nietzsche" compile Bataille's "Summa Atheologica", which analyzes the play of the isolation and the dissolution of being in the terms of excess (laughter, tears, eroticism, death, sacrifice, poetry). "Accursed Share" (Bataille took this as his most important work) is systematic account of the social and economic implications of expenditure.

"Erotism: Death and Sensuality and Tears of Eros" focuses on excesses of death & sex. Human experience is the experience of limits as well as the recognition that death is the absolute limit. This recognition creates an anguish of being that is soothed through eroticism and reaffirming of life forces. Eroticism itself is also an experience of limits for it leads to the dissolution of identity found within the 'little death' of the orgasm. Bataille's erotica contains this recurrent theme, despite being dismissed as pornography. The excessively violent images of sexual degradation in the "Story of the Eye" are often derided with laughter and rejection as grotesque, but Bataille defends against such objections in a prefatory note to Madame Edwarda where he cautions the reader: "if you laugh, its because you're afraid."

Masochism and sadism are celebrated in terms of sexuality as ways of feeling "more human" and degradation and humiliation are considered as a profoundly human experience. This concentration on the ignoble offended Breton and caused problems between bat and the more orthodox members of surrealism. Bataille's writings on surrealism (criticism of the ideal aspiration signified by the 'sur' prefix as supra or higher) are collected in English within the "Absence of Myth".

Owen Barfield

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:45:35 +0000

Owen Barfield was a British philosopher, philologist, author, poet, and critic. He was a life-long student of language, the development of which he argued is concommitant with the evolution of consciousness.

Bachelard

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:40:18 +0000

French epistemologist and philosopher of science. There are two Gaston Bachelards: the severe philosopher of science who lays out the philosophy of concepts and "epistemological breaks," and the self-indulgent literary theorist who reverted to phenomenology (the very subject he already criticized in his work on science, no less).

Gaston Bachelard I

Bachelard's works on the philosophy of science ("Essai sur la Connaissance Approchee, New Scientific Spirit, The Philosophy of No: a new philosophy of the new scientific mind", and "Rational Materialism") emerged from studies of relativistic and quantum revolutions, given his background in mathematics and physics.

Bachelard’s study of the rise of scientific objectivity emphasized discontinuity in science, anticipating some of the insights of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn: science develops through a series of discontinuous changes called epistemological breaks, which overcomes epistemological obstacles (the methodological and conceptual features of common sense or outdated science block the path of inquiry), a non-continuous history of science where concepts emerge from earlier concepts through a process of correction and rectification. This sort of history traces the emergence of these concepts and reconstructs the breaks that made it possible. Therefore, there is no such thing as an "earlier version" of a modern concept, but a different conceptual framework that defines the different objects of knowledge that may be evaluated in the light of later developments. E.g., the term 'electricity' is used within the physics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, but the transforming configuration of knowledge meant the concept of electricity also changed dramatically.

However, despite these revolutionary discontinuities Bachelard still believed in scientific progress. Even though each scientific framework rejects its predecessor as fundamentally flawed, the earlier framework may contain permanent achievements that are preserved as special cases within the subsequent frameworks (e.g., Newton’s laws of motions are special limit-cases of relativity).

Bachelard thought the majority of philosophy should be rejected, given that they depend on outmoded scientific philosophy and that modern science cannot, nor ought it, be restricted to one single doctrine (whether it is idealism, realism or even positivism). The only scientific philosophy of the philosophy of physics is, for Bachelard, a "philosophy of No", which denies allegiance to any doctrine and advocates an 'openness' that coheres with the 'open-ended' and 'unfinished quality' of scientific progress itself. The negation is necessary because the scientific attitude must be flexible and adaptable in order to revamp his or her entire framework of reality. There is no destruction, because the philosophy of no actually consolidates what it supersedes.

Bachelard based his philosophy of science on "non-Cartesian epistemology", (against the demand knowledge must be founded on the incorrigible intuitions of first principles) since all knowledge claims are subject to revision and open to new evidence. Particularly, Bachelard rejects naive realism that determines reality within the terms of the given of ordinary sense experience that ignores ontological constructs of scientific concepts/instrumentation. Nor did Bachelard endorse idealism, but instead, an "applied rationalism" that acknowledges the dynamic role of reason in the constituting objects of knowledge, while agreeing that any constituting act of reason must be directed towards an already (antecedently) given object. Both mathematics and the empirical world are complimentary: math should not be seen as the mere language of physical laws, nor should it be taken as an frozen system of ideas, for it is ‘committed,’ and the empirical world shouldn’t be merely a chaos of discrete quanta of data. The investigator does not passively discover the scientific hypotheses and facts, for he creates them: his rational powers and the physical world both construct a holistic reality beyond the naively empirical one.

Gaston Bachelard II

Despite denying the objective reality of the perceptual or imaginative worlds, Bachelard took the time to analyze their subjective and poetic significance. Bachelard's reputation owes more to his studies of poetic language, daydream, phenomenology and their application to instances in the history of science than his work on "anti-positivism" and "epistemological ruptures." The second Bachelard produced works ("L'Eau et les reves, Water and Dreams: an essay on the imagination of matter, La Terre et les rêveries du repos, La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté") on archetypal dreams and daydreams associated with the themes of water as repose, air as movement, and earth as will power/work and rest. Bachelard proposed a "law of four elements" where all images are related to earth/air/fire/water (Empedocles' fundamental forms of matter).

Bachelard thought the projection of subjective values/interests in the experience of physical world were impediments to knowledge. In his "Le Nouvel espirit scientifique", what Bachelard described as the "psychoanalysis of knowledge" explained how the rise of objective/quantified science required depersonalization, abstraction, emotional restraint, and taciturnity. Not to discredit subjectivity, though, Bachelard thought highly of reverie and saw it as the source of great poetry, abject sentimentality, and imaginary physical theories. In the works on both reason and imagination, the creative role of the mind plays a crucial part. In art, "the subject projects his dream upon things," and in science, "above the subject, beyond the immediate object... is the project." He understood the condition of scientific productivity was an affective engagement with things.

To be precise, "psychoanalysis" in Bachelard’s vocabulary does not invoke the Freudian analyses of sublimated drives but the disclosure of archetypes (Jung’s studies on alchemy influencing the interpretation of early chemical theories/practice of alchemy) that inspired the study of reverie, or daydreaming. Inasmuch a daydream is beyond the dreamer's control, there is a flicker of consciousness in daydreaming that generates poetic images as the daydreamer discovers an ideal world. The poetic image yields a sense of wonder and discloses an imaginary world of delight as well as universal archetypes, and allows us to read or listen to a poem as if we were hearing words for the first time. This poetic image is an expression of the basic human characteristic of 'imagining.' According to Bachelard, daydreaming is the function of Jung's "anima" (the female principle of repose) that allows us to reach the sleeping waters that lie within us when we are deep in reverie.

In "La Psychanalyse du feu", the study of eighteenth century experiments with fire, Bachelard showed how the phenomenology of fire as the painful/dangerous/soothing/purifying/destructive/symbol of life and passion determined scientific discourse. The other studies on air, water, earth also as the subject of scientific inquiry have been deconstituted, being dreamt by eighteenth century. The books on imagination and poetic imagery analyze the significance of archetypal images.

Utilitarianism

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:36:02 +0000

A form of consequentialism that judges actions by their utility. Act utilitarianism attempted to measure the pleasure against the pain involved in an act (hence the name); in more recent times, the measure was the anticipated benefit to society or some similar concept. Rule utilitarianism considers instead whether the implementation of an action as a rule would be beneficial to society. Killing someone, for example, would be catastrophic for society if turned into a rule.

Epistemology

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:35:08 +0000

The theory of knowledge. Derives from the Greek epistéme ("knowledge" or "science") and logos ("speech" or "discourse"). Epistemology asks questions such as "what is knowledge?", "how do we know anything?", "how can we sure our knowledge is reliable?" and "what are the limits of what we can know?"

Metaphysics

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:28:44 +0000

Taking its name from the work of Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher, metaphysics literally means "after the physics"; legend has it that the Alexandrian librarians christened the writings thus because they followed his Physical Treaties. Since then metaphysics has come to be split into two sub-fields: Ontology is the study of existence, asking what there is, what it means to exist and what kind of things there are. Cosmology is the study of the nature of the universe (or cosmos, as the name suggests). It asks questions about what is possible, such as time travel and parallel or alternate universes.

Deconstruction

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:25:13 +0000

Associated with Derrida and the so-called Yale school of Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller and Geoffrey Hartman. Deconstructionism has had more of an impact on philosophy and literary theory in Continental Europe, but its influence has been felt widely. It can be traced back to Nietzsche but the problem with explaining or understanding it is that its proponents often insist that there is no deconstructionist method; that is, it is not just another systematic approach to be applied that can be defined by explicit steps or principles. However, the "deconstructionist approach" tends to involve close reading, looking for presuppositions that the author relies on implicitly but does not argue for or explain, and locating multiple interpretations of texts, particularly those that may contradict or be entirely opposed to others, rather than allowing one reading of the text to be privileged. It also asks what the text does not include or describe; i.e. what has been explicitly or implicitly excluded from it in order to make the points or arguments therein.

Abduction

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:23:03 +0000

An abductive inference takes the form:

P1: X;
P2: A proposition like "If Y then X" can explain X;
C: Therefore, probably Y.

This is the Aristotelian form, which is typically amended slightly for use in science:

P1: Data D;
P2: Hypothesis H explains D;
P3: H is the best explanation of D;
C: Therefore, probably H.

This holds trivially if P3 is replaced by "H is the only explanation of D" and discounting other factors to render this probable or characterising what makes H the best explanation is usually what is at issue in science. Abduction is sometimes called "inference to the best explanation" and was favoured by J.S. Mill.

Hinge Propositions

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:21:25 +0000

Hinge propositions are those that are neither true nor false but instead cannot coherently be doubted by anyone. For example, it is not possible to ask "does reality exist?" without assuming that it does. Such propositions cannot be called true because it was never possible for them to be false.

In his On Certainty, Wittgenstein wrote about what came to be called hinge propositions as follows:

Quote

... the questions that we raise and our doubts depend upon the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.

That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted.
But it isn't that the situation is like this: We just can't investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put. (§341-3)

Postmodernism

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:09:50 +0000

Defined by Jean-François Lyotard as "incredulity toward metanarratives", or those narratives and theories that propose to explain everything. Metanarratives can and are used to translate other narratives into their own form, subsuming them as they must if they are to explain all other accounts in their own terms. Postmodernism is at least skeptical of this tendency, if not outright "incredulous" at the very possibility of finding one story that explains the world and all others.