Method

Anderson, Perry, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, New Left Books, 1974.

"Heckscher once commented that "countries of the second rank" had no right to expect their history to be generally studied. Arguing that "every historical study should lead either to the discovery of general laws or to the discernment of the mechanisms of a major evolution", he concluded that the development of such lands as Sweden was only of significance insofar as it adumbrated or conformed to a wider international pattern. The residue could effectively be neglected: "let us not complicate the tasks of science unnecessarily". p. 173; citing Annales, March, 1932, p. 127."

BATESON

Bateson, Gregory, Naven (2nd ed.), Stanford, 1958.

"I found that I could think of each bit of culture structurally; I could see it as in accordance with a consistent set of rules and formulations. Equally, I could see each bit as "pragmatic", either as satisfying the needs of individuals as contributing to the integration of the society. Again, I could see each bit ethologically as an expression of emotion.

This experiment may seem puerile, but to me it was very important, and I have recounted it at length because there may be some among my readers who tend to regard such items as "structure" as concrete parts which "interact" in culture, and who find, as I did, a difficulty in thinking of these things merely as labels merely for points of view adopted either by the scientist or by the natives. It is instructive too to perform the same experiment with such concepts as economics, kinship and land tenure; and even religion, language, and "sexual life" do not stand too surely as categories of behavior, but tend to resolve themselves into labels for points of view from which all behavior may be seen". p. 262

"If "ethos", "social structure", "economics", etc., are words in that language which describes how scientists arrange data, then these words cannot be used to "explain" phenomena, nor can there be "ethological" or "economic" categories of phenomena. People can be influenced, of course, by economic theories or by economic fallacies -- or by hunger -- but they cannot be influenced by "economics". "Economics" is a class of explanations, not itself an explanation of anything." p. 281

"It is this fact -- that the patterns of society as a major entity can by learning be introjected or conceptualized by the participant individuals -- that makes anthropology and indeed the whole of behavioral science peculiarly difficult. The scientist is not the only human being in the picture. His subjects are capable of all kinds of learning and conceptualization and even, like the scientist, are capable of errors of conceptualization". p. 292

"It is this rare possibility that is perhaps most fascinating in the whole field of learning genetics, and evolution. But, while in the most general terms it is possible to state with some rigor what sort of changes are here envisaged and to see the results of such progressive discontinuous change in, for example, the telencephalization of the mammalian brain, it is still totally impossible to make formal statements about the categories of parametric disturbances which will bring about these positive gains in complexity." p 302

Bateson, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Ballantine, 1972.

"Characteristically, the scientist confronts interactive systems -- in this case, an interaction between man and opium. He observes a change in the system -- and the man falls asleep. The scientist then explains the change by giving a name to a fictitious "cause", located in one or the other component of the interacting system. Either the opium contains a reified dormitive principle, or the man contains a reified need for sleep, an adormitosis, which is "expressed" in his response to opium....

The state of mind or habit of though which goes from data to dormitive hypothesis and back to data is self-reinforcing. There is, among all scientists, a high value set on prediction, and, indeed, to be able to predict phenomena is a fine thing. But prediction is a rather poor test of an hypothesis, and this is especially true of "dormitive hypotheses"." p. xx

"The nineteenth-century scientists (notably Freud) who tried to establish a bridge between behavioral data and the fundamentals of physical and biological science were, surely, correct on insisting upon the need for such a bridge but, I believe, wrong in choosing "energy" as the foundation for that bridge.

If mass and length are inappropriate for describing behavior, then energy is unlikely to be more appropriate. After all, energy is mass times velocity squared, and no behavioral scientist really insists that "psychic energy" is of these dimensions...." p. xxii

"[M]y critical comments about the metaphoric use of "energy" in the behavioral sciences add up to a rather simple accusation of many of my colleagues, that they have tried to build a bridge to the wrong half of the ancient dichotomy between form and substance. The conservation laws of matter and energy concern substance rather than form. But mental processes, ideas, communication, organization, differentiation, pattern, and so on, are matters of form rather than substance." p. xxv

"At this point, it is convenient to introduce the term "context marker". An organism responds to the "same" stimulus differently in differing contexts, and we must therefore ask about the source of the organism's information. From what percept does he know that Context A is different from Context B?

In many instances there may be no specific signal or label which will classify and differentiate the two contexts, and the organism will be forced to get his information from the actual congeries of events that make up the context in each case. But, certainly in human life and probably in that of many other organisms, there occur signals whose major function is to classify contexts....

An audience is watching Hamlet on the stage, and hears the hero discuss suicide in the context of his relationship to his dead father, Orpheus. The audience members do not immediately telephone the police, because they have received information about the context of Hamlet's context. They know that it is a "play" and have received this information from many "markers of context of context" -- the playbills, the seating arrangements, the curtain, etc. etc., The "King", on the other hand, when he lets his context be pricked by the "play within the play", is ignoring many "markers of context".

At the human level, a very diverse set of events falls within the category of "context markers". A few examples are here listed:

(a) The Pope's throne from which he makes announcements ex cathedra, which announcements are thereby endowed with a special order of validity.

(b) The placebo, by which the doctor sets the stage for a change in the patient's subjective experience.

(c) The shining object used by some hypnotists in "inducing trance".

(d) The air raid siren and the "all clear".

(e) The handshake of boxers before the fight.

(f.) The observances of etiquette." pp. 289-90

"Of especial interest in this connection is the relation between context and its content. A phoneme exists only in combination with other phonemes which make up a word. The word is the context of the phoneme. But the word exists as such -- only has "meaning" -- in the larger context of the utterance, which again has meaning only in a relationship.

This heierarchy of contexts within contexts is universal for the communicational (or "emic") aspect of phenomena and drives the scientist always to seek for explanation in the ever larger units. It may (perhaps) be true in physics that the explanation of the macroscopic is to be sought in the microscopic. The opposite is usually true in cybernetics; without context, there is no communication.

In accordance with the negative character of cybernetic explanation, "information" is quantified in negative terms. An event or object such as the letter K is a given position in the text of a message might have been any other of the limited set of 26 letters of the English language. The actual letter excludes (i.e. eliminates by restraint) 25 alternatives. In comparison with an English letter, a Chinese character would have excluded several thousand alternatives. We say, therefore, that the Chinese ideograph carries more information than the letter. The quantity of information is conveniently expressed as the log to the base 2 of the improbability of the actual event or object.

Probability, being a ratio between quantities which have similiar dimensions, is itself of zero dimensions. That is, the central explanatory quantity. information, is of zero dimensions. Quantities of real dimensions (mass, length, time) and their derivatives (force, energy, etc.) have no place in cybernetic explanation.

The status of energy is of special interest. In general in communicational systems, we deal with sequences which remember stimulus-and-response rather than cause-and-effect. When one billiard ball strikes another, there is an energy transfer such that the motion of the second ball is energized by the impact from the first. In communicational systems, on the other hand, the energy of the response is usually provided by the respondent. If I kick a dog, his immediate sequential behavior is energized by his metabolism, not by my kick." pp. 402-3

"But if we are asked: Where are such items of information as that: (a) "This is a message in English"; and (b) "In English, the letter K often follows the letter C, except where C begins a word"; we can only say that such information is not localized in any part of the text but is rather a statistical induction from the text as a whole (or perhaps from an aggregate of "similiar" texts.) This, after all, is meta-information and is of a basically different order -- of a different logical type -- from information that "The letter in this slot is ''K'.''

This matter of the localization of information has bedeviled communication theory and especially neurophysiology for many years and it is therefore interesting to consider how the matter looks if we start from redundancy, patterns, or form as the basic concept.

It is flatly obvious that no variable of zero dimensions can be truly located. "Information" and "form" resemble contrast, frequency, symmetry, correspondance, congruence, conformity, and the like in being of zero dimensions and therefore, not to be located. The contrast between this white paper and that black coffee is not somewhere between the paper and the coffee and, even if we bring the paper and the coffee into close juxtaposition, the contrast between them is not thereby located or pinched between them. Nor is the contrast located between the two objects and my eye. It is not even in my head; or, if it be, it must also be in your head.... In fact, information and form are not items which can be localized." pp. 408-9

"If we put Kant's insight together with that of Jung, we create a philosophy which asserts that there is an infinite number of differences in this piece of chalk but that only a few of these difference make a difference. This is the epistemological basis for information theory. The unit of information is difference. In fact, the unit of psychological input is difference.

The whole energy structure of the pleroma -- the forces and impacts of the hard sciences -- have flown out the window, so far as explanation within the creatura is concerned. After all, zero differs from one, and zero can therefore be the cause, which is not admissable in hard science. The letter which you did not write can precipiatate an angry reply, because zero can be one half of the necessary bit of information. Even sameness can be a cause, because sameness differs from difference." pp. 481-3

Bateson, Gregory, Mind and Nature, Dutton, 1979.

"Learning the contexts of life is a matter that has to be discussed. not internally, but as a matter of the external relationships between two creatures. And relationship is always a product of double description.....Relationship is not internal to the single person. It is nonesense to talk about "dependency" or "aggressiveness" or "pride", and so on. All such words have their roots in what happens between persons, not in some something-or-other inside a person." pp. 131-4

BLUMENBERG

Blumenberg, Hans, "An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric", in Baynes, Kenneth, Bohman, James, and McCarthy, Thomas (eds.), Philosophy: End or Transformation, MIT, 1987, pp. 429--458.

"The decisive difference lies in the dimension of time; science can wait, or is subject to the convention of being able to wait, whereas rhetoric -- if it can no longer be the ornatus of a truth -- presupposes, as a constitutive element of its situation, that the "creature of deficiency" is compelled to act..... To see oneself in the perspective of rhetoric means to be conscious both of being compelled to act and of the lack of norms in a finite situation. Everything that is not force here goes over to the side of rhetoric, and rhetoric implies the renunciation of force." p. 437

"The axiom of all rhetoric is the principle of insufficient reason.... It is a correlate of the anthropology of a creature who is deficient in essential respects. If man's world accorded with the optimism of the metaphysics of Leibniz, who thought that he could assign a sufficient reason even for the fact that anything exists at all, rather than nothing.... then there would be no rhetoric, because there would be neither the need nor the possibility of using it effectively." p. 447

BOULDING

Boulding, Kenneth, Beyond Economics, Michigan, 1970.

"The basic difficulty seems to be that whereas in areas of physical and biological systems we have accepted long ago the inadequacy of folk knowledge and the necessity of scientific knowledge, in the field of social systems we have not yet reached that point.... No one will deny that wisdom is better than folly, that is, good folk knowledge is better than bad folk knowledge..... We live in a day when even the best wisdom is not far from folly, and a major intellectual effort in the field of social systems is going to be necessary if our trust in wisdom in the face of the lack of knowledge is not to betray us." [Boulding overreaches and misses something important here].

BURKE

Burke, Kenneth, On Symbols and Society, Chicago, 1989.

"I have discussed elsewhere what an eye-opener the chapter "The Idea of Nothing" was to me, in Bergson's Creative Evolution. It jolted me into realizing that there are no negatives in nature, where everything is simply what it is and as it is. To look for negatives in nature would be as absurd as though you were to go hunting for the square root of minus-one. The negative is a function peculiar to symbol systems, just as the square root of minus-one is an implication of certain mathematical systems." p. 63

"Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must also function as a deflection of reality..... Here the idea of deflection I have in mind concerns simply the fact that any nomenclature necessarily directs the attention into some channels rather than others..... When I speak of "terministic screens" I have particularly in mind some photographs I once saw. They were different photographs of the same objects, the difference being that they were photographed with different color filters. Here something so "factual" as a photograph revealed notable distinctions in texture, and even in form, depending on which color filter was used for the documentary description of the event being recorded." pp. 115-6

"And the difference between a thing and a person is that the one merely moves, whereas the other acts. For the sake of argument, I'm even willing to grant that the distinction between things moving and persons acting is but an illusion. All I would claim is that, illusion or not, the human race cannot possibly get along with itself on the basis of any other intuition. The human animal, as we know it, emerges into personality by first mastering whatever tribal speech happens to be its particular symbolic environment." p. 124

"The term "rhetoric" is no substitute for "magic", "witchcraft", "socialization", "communication", and so on. The term "rhetoric" designates a function which is present in areas covered for those other terms. And we are only asking that this function be recognized for what it is: a linguistic function by nature as realistic as a proverb, though it may be quite far from the kind of realism found in strictly "scientific realism". For it is essentially a realism of the act: moral, persuasive -- and acts are not "true" or "false" that in the sense that propositions of "scientific realism" are." p. 189

"But returning to the pun as it figures in the citation from Locke, we might point up the pattern as sharply as possible by observing that the word "substance", used to designate what a thing is, derives from a word designating something that a thing is not. That is, though used to designate something within a thing, intrinsic to it, the word etymologically refers to something outside the thing, extrinsic to it. Or otherwise put: the word in its etymological origins would refer to an attribute of the thing's context, since that which supports or underlies a thing would be part of the thing's context. And a thing's context, being outside or beyond a thing, would be something that the thing is not."
p. 237 ["substance" <-- "sub + stand" = "stand under; foundation"]

CODE

Code, Murray, Order and Organism, SUNY, 1985.

"It is my contention that to do philosophy in a manner minimally compatible with the demands of commonsense realism is to be concerned primarily with whether or not one's conceptual apparatus provides sufficiently solid ground upon which to construct a plausible and adequate story, as opposed to an objectively true, complete, and final account. This entails the rejection of a common belief which is deeply ingrained in Western philosophy, that we will find in logic the ultimate underpinnings of rational philosophizing." pp. 98-99

"Whitehead's conception of perception conforms to the general tenet of holism that final truth is not attainable, at least not if the act of cognition is conceived as primarily embedded in the world as a dynamic entity. In the actual world, everything is just what it is, and the relations between things just what they are, but not everything can be understood all at once." pp. 200-1

One of the most notable casualties in the ranks of notions which have traditionally occupied the forefront of the quest for certain and secure knowledge is that of proof. Its importance cannot now be taken for granted. Indeed, Whitehead suggests that the human demand for proof merely illustrates how uncertain and tentative is human apprehension of the patterns of order in the world. This is because an act of understanding is the attempt to apprehend and coordinate a "succession of details of self-evidence" .... Thus proof is not essentially a procedure by which truth is established and understanding thereby granted. Rather, it is the process whereby the self-evident is disclosed to finite minds. It is thus a "feeble second-rate procedure"."p. 205

DALY / COBB

Daly, Herman, and Cobb, John, For the Common Good, Beacon, 1989.

"The shift proposed here.... is away from the ideal of a deductive science." p. 122

"We are proposing the dethroning of the disciplinary organization of knowledge. We are proposing in particular a non-disciplinary economics." p. 123

"Marshall stated, sincerely no doubt, that the dominant aim of economics was to "contribute to the solution of social problems".... Yet the relation of his work to that end was quite indirect. This is because he allowed his task to be determined for him by the discipline and not by the social problems. " p. 124

"[T]he organization of knowledge in the university is such as to work against its contribution to the broad human need for understanding.... It does not prevent members of university faculties from themselves using knowledge in ways that promote understanding. But it does work toward minimizing rather than maximizing those contributions." p 125

"Those shaped by the disciplinary organization of knowledge generally speak and act as if the disciplines additively covered the whole range of what is to be known. This assumes that the real world is made up additively of the elements and aspects into which it has been divided by the disciplines." p. 126

DEWDNEY

Dewdney, A. K., "Photovores", Scientific American, September, 1992.

"In fact, Tilden traces the development of his passion for lifelike mechanisms to a talk that Brooks gave in October 1989. Brooks described his notion of subsumption architecture. This view holds that complex behavior becomes possible in a robot only when there are simpler behaviors present that they may subsume." p. 42

FOUCAULT

Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge, Pantheon, 1980.

"What types of knowledge do you wish to disqualify in the very instant of your demand "Is it a science?" Which speaking, discoursing subjects -- which subjects of discourse and knowledge -- do you then want to diminish when you say "I who conduct this discourse am conducting a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist"?" pp. 84-5

"Effects of truth are produced in discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false" p. 118

FRIEDMAN

Friedman, Milton, Essays in Positive Economics, Chicago, 1953.

"Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical principle or normative judgements. As Keynes says, it deals with "what is" and not with "what ought to be". It's task is to provide a system of generalizations that can be used to make correct predictions about the consequences of any changes in circumstances," p.4

"I venture the judgement, however, that currently in the Western world, and especially in the United States, differences about economic policy among disinterested citizens derive primarily from different predictions about the economic consequences of taking action -- differences that can in principle be eliminated by the progress of positive economics -- rather than from fundamental differences in values, differences about which men can ultimately only fight." p. 5

"If this judgement is valid, it means that a consensus on "correct" economic policy depends much less on the progress of normative economics proper than on the progress of a positive economics yielding conclusions that are, and deserve to be, widely accepted." p. 6

"Viewed as a body of substantive hypotheses, theory is to be judged by its predictive power for the class of phenomena which it is intended to "explain". Only factual evidence can show whether it is "right" or "wrong", or better, tentatively "accepted" as valid or "rejected". As I shall argue at greater length below, the only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is the comparison of its predictions with experience." p. 8-9

"Misunderstandings about this apparently straightforward procedure centers on the phrase "the class if phenomena the hypothesis is designed to explain". The difficulty in the social sciences of getting new evidence for this class of phenomena and judging its conformity with the implications of the hypothesis makes it tempting to suppose that other, more readily available evidence is equally relevant to the validity of the hypothesis -- to suppose that the hypotheses have not only "implications" but also "assumptions" and that the conformity of these "assumptions" to "reality" is a test of the validity of the hypothesis different from or additional to the test by implications. This widely held view is fundamentally wrong and productive of much mischief.... Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)." p. 14

"For example, the difference in shape of the body can be said to make fifteen pounds per square inch significantly different from zero for a feather, but not for a compact ball dropped from a moderate distance." p. 19

"In seeking to make science as "objective" as possible, our aims should be to formulate the rules explicitly insofar as possible and continually to widen the range of phenomena for which it is possible to do so. But, no matter how successful we may be in this attempt, there will inevitably remain room for judgement in applying the rules. Each occurrence has some features particularly its own, not covered by explicit rules. The capacity to judge that these are or are not to be disregarded, that they should or should not affect what observable phenomena are to be identified with what entities in the model, is something that cannot be taught; it can be learned, but only by experience and exposure to the "right" scientific atmosphere, and not by rote. It is at this point that the "amateur" is separated from the "professional" in all sciences and that the thin line is drawn which distinguishes the "crackpot" from the scientist." p. 25

"A fundamental hypothesis of science is that appearances are deceptive and that there is a way of looking at or interpreting or organizing the evidence that will reveal superficially disconnected and diverse phenomena to be manifestations of more fundamental and relatively simple structure.... Any assertion that economic phenomena are varied and complex denies the tentative state of knowledge that alone makes scientific activity meaningful." p. 33

GARDNER

Gardner, Martin, The New Ambidextrous Universe, Freeman, 1990.

"Complex [imaginary] numbers, Penrose is convinced, have a powerful life of their own. They are as "real" as real numbers, and absolutely essential for understanding relativity theory, quantum mechanics, or any more fundamental theory that some day may include both theories".

HARTESHORNE / WHITEHEAD

Harteshorne, Charles, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, SUNY, 1983.

"In all his thought Kant expected laws to be absolute, rather than approximate or statistical. He was a Newtonian, subject to the limitations of the seventeenth-century view of science. Yet Kant knew that such ethical principle as "be helpful to others" cannot tell us specifically what to do. So he called them "imperfect duties". Creative freedom is thus subtly disparaged." p. 185

"There is nothing in logic to show that "every event has its necessary conditions" entails "every event has its sufficient conditions"." p. 301

Harteshorne, Charles, Creativity in American Philosophy, Paragon, 1984.

Harteshorne, Charles, Whitehead's Philosophy, Nebraska, 1972.

"Independence means asymmetrical contingency (or asymmetrical determinism"; the noninvolvement of the effect on the cause...." p.96

"Is there any freedom of indeterminacy in reality? Yes, and in all cases, since events never strictly depend upon or imply their precise successors. And here Whitehead furnishes perhaps the neatest, strongest argument for freedom ever proposed. The subject prehends not one but many prior activities..." p. 126

"Entailment is not necessarily (or normally) reversible." p. 157

"Whitehead's indeterminism is implicit in what has been said. If the new unity were deducible from the old, it would logically be no addition at all, and the degree of multiplicity would not be "increased". Any causal laws used for the deduction must be viewed as mere abstract aspects of the previous multiplicity; and in any case, how can a law prescribe just how a set of items is to be embraced in an equally new unitary item?" p. 163

"Each such entity prehensively sums up it predecessors (but not its successors). This asymmetrical organicity was first made into a formal, clearly stated category (so far as I know) in Process and Reality." p. 169.

"Causal conditions limit what can happen to a more or less narrow range of possibilities. Thus what happens is always more determinate than the conditions imply." p. 175

ILLICH

Illich, Ivan, Gender, Pantheon, 1982.

"[T]he researcher who wants to avoid the bias implicit in a central perspective ought to identify himself clearly as one engaged in research that is disciplined, critical, well-documented, and public, but emphatically non-scientific. Only non-scientific research that uses analogy, metaphor, and poetry can reach for gendered reality." p. 62

KELSEN

Kelsen, Hans, "Causality and Retribution" in What Is Justice?, California, 1960.

"The law of the arche here established a monarchia, and arche means not only "beginning" but also "government" or "rule". It is surely no accident that the philosophy of nature flourished at a time when the influence of oriental despotisms was gaining strength in Greece." p. 305

"Here for the first time in the thinking of mankind the notion of an immanent law which governs the whole of the universe is comprehended. But, though generalized, it is still essentially the law of retribution." p. 307

"And if in Demokritos, and elsewhere in the old natural philosophy, aitia means cause, one must not forget that this word originally mean "guilt"." p. 314

"The problematical character of the statement that the cause must be equal to the effect, and vice versa, is also evident in the related idea that a cause has only one effect and that an effect is traceable to only one cause.... "Cause and effect are", as Goethe said, "an indivisible phenomenon". That we nevertheless separate them from one another, even oppose them to one another, that we purposely isolate from the continuous chain of innumerable elements two alone as the cause and the effect which is imputable to the cause alone, is due to the age-old habit of interpreting nature according to the principle of retribution. This principle connects only one event, characterized as wrong, with another event, the punishment, likewise precisely determined and clearly separated chronologically from the first." p. 316

"If one sees the essence of the law of causality in the fact that it determines the future, even if only for a Laplacean intelligence, one confirms, perhaps unconsciously, the normative origin of the law of causality." p. 321

KLAMER

Klamer, Arjo, Conversations with Economists, Rowman and Allanheld, 1984.

(Robert Solow speaking): "I found that whenever Talcott Parsons.... talked about something concrete, like the way doctors deal with their patients, he was full of fascinating insights, but as soon as he began to generalize, even I, as an ignorant 18-year-old, found it too vague." p. 128

(Solow): "I think that that is one of the reasons why classical economics did so well: it is so technically sweet; it involves all those sophisticated techniques. Students have to learn something new that other people don't know." p, 144

LENNON

Lennon, Kathleen, Explaining Human Action, Duckworth, 1990

"Arguments which establish that mental (construed as intentional) kinds cannot be reduced to physical kinds do not necessarily rule out psycho-physical laws, and therefore do not necessarily rule out causal explanation at the intentional level." p. 104

"The causal explanatory theorist who is an anti-reductionist therefore accepts intentional kinds as natural kinds, but argues that natural kinds at one level of description need not be reducible to natural kinds at some other level, even where the further level may be ontologically more fundamental. A consequence of this position, is that if we were to abandon our psychological mode of classification we would both lose a way of capturing law-like generalizetions which transcend those expressible in purely physical vocabulary. Thereby we would lose a way of capturing some of the real structural features of the world." p. 122

MACINTIRE

MacIntire, Alisdair. After Virtue, Notre Dame, 1981

"But in every case the rise of the managerial expertise would have to be the same central theme, and such expertise, as we have already seen, has two sides to it: there is the aspiration to value neutrality and the claim to manipulative power." p. 83

MEYER

Meyer, Michel, Questions and Questioning, de Gruyter, 1988.

Meyer, Michel, From Logic to Rhetoric, John Benjamins, 1986.

Meyer, Michel, Of Problematology, Chicago, 1995.

Meyer, Michel, Rhetoric, Language, and Reason, Penn State, 1994.

Meyer, Michel, "Dialectic and Questioning: Socrates and Plato", American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 17, #4, Oct. 1980, pp. 281-9.

Meyer, Michel (ed.), De la Metaphysique a la Rhetorique, U. Bruxelles, 1986.

"In fact, questioning died with Socrates, not without reason we shall see, and philosophy turned into ontology.... Answers will be considered in themselves, as judgments.... The consequence was that to be an answer became an accidental and inessential feature of knowledge, while the property of being a judgment was the characteristic which was to count in the first place.... Ever since, discovery and progress in knowledge have been considered as a matter of logic and conclusive argumentation -- as if progress were not already taking place when the scientist raises the questions to be solved." p. 281-2

"Whence the new role of recollection: to shift the problem of the acquisition of knowledge from questioning to ontology. The problem of the acquisition of knowledge becomes that of the relationship between the sensible and the non-sensible, the latter being the Form." p. 289

"Science as a Questioning Process: A Prospect for a New Type of Rationality", Revue Internationale de Philosophie, vols. 131-2, 1980, pp. 48-89.

"Science is a questioning process, and if its language is to be described, it must be done in terms of answers and not statements." p. 53

""Science progresses by asking questions and then answering them, and even if we were to make the whole process the result of inspiration, it would not alter the fact that results, wherever and however they arise, are so in virtue of being answer to questions." p. 83

Meyer, Michel, "Problematology and Rhetoric", in Golden and Pilotta, pp. 119 -- 152.

"What is then a real question? A question that can be solved and eliminated thereafter. All those that cannot be solved are not real questions.....A question means a real problem if it has a solution, and the solution suppresses what is problematic. The question disappears once it is solved, as in science; when questions do not disappear, as in metaphysics, they do not represent real problems." p. 129 [not Meyer's own opinion]

"In other words, what is explicit, being an answer, raises the question of which question it is the answer to". p. 139

"The context contains the questions and the "out-of-the-question", if we can say so, which are the presuppositions of the question." p. 140

NELSON

Nelson, Megill, McCloskey (eds.), The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, Wisconsin, 1985.

Nelson, John, "Seven Rhetorics of Inquiry", in Nelson, et al, 1985).

"In part, therefore, my argument is also a plea to rethink relations between the academy and the polity. In particular it is a plea to put the postmodern university into a more direct and responsible contact with ethics and politics. In some respects it is a proposal to ethicize and politicize the human sciences. But mostly it is a recommendation to improve how the human sciences are already ethicized and politicized." pp. 409-410

"Forgetting how logics are artifacts of rhetorics, even the latest of modern epistomologies end in perplexity. At best, they generate ironies born of the modern quest for a scientific rationality that could be disembodied, unemotional, noncontextual, and apolitical -- but still could comprehend human beings". pp. 413-414

"Textbooks on method in the social sciences.... seldom acknowledge the manifold temptations to fraud, perhaps because modern methods and institutions are supposed to prevent all but the occasional cases that will swiftly be detected and set to aright. They neglect issues of ownership, profit, and proper uses of research. They fail to contemplate the possibility that whole schools or disciplines could become subtly corrupted. But worst, they do not even rcognize that the procedures and standards of disciplines are constructs of ethics."
p. 428

PERELMAN

Perelman, Chaim, and Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., The New Rhetoric, Notre Dame, 1969.

Only the existence of an argumentation that is neither compelling nor arbitrary can give meaning to human freedom, a state in which reasonable choice can be exercised..... It is because of the possibility off argumentation which provides reasons, but not compelling reasons, that it is possible to escape the dilemma: adherence to an objectively and universally valid truth, or recourse to suggestion and violence to secure acceptance of our opinions and decisions. p. 314

Perelman, Chaim, The New Rhetoric and the Humanities, D. Reidel, 1979.

Perelman, Chaim, Justice, Law, and Argument, D. Reidel, 1980.

www.johnjemerson.com/phil.perelman.htm

PRIGOGINE

Prigogine, Ilya, Order Out of Chaos, Bantam, 1984.

"We believe that it is precisely this transition to a new description that makes this moment in the history of science so exciting. Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that it is a period like the time of the Greek atomists or the Renaissance, periods in which a new view of nature was being born." p. 2

""Primary" laws control the behavior of single particles, while "secondary" laws are applicable to collections of atoms or molecules. To insist on secondary laws is to emphasize that the description of elementary behavior is not sufficient for understanding a system as a whole." p.8

"One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is a flight from everyday life with its painful harshness and wretched dreariness, and from the fetters of one's own shifting desires. A person with a finer sensibility is driven to escape from personal existence and to the world of objective observing and understanding." p. 20

"One widely-studied example was the three-body problem, perhaps the most important problem in the history of dynamics. The moon's motion, influenced by both the earth and the sun, is one instance of this problem. Countless attempts were made to express it in the form of an integrable system until, at the end of the nineteenth century, Bruns and Poincare showed that this was impossible....Although this discovery was not clearly understood at the time, it implied the demise of the conviction that the dynamic world is homogeneous, reducible to the concept of integrable systems. Nature as an evolving, interactive multiplicity thus resists reduction to a timeless and universal scheme." p. 72

"What is remarkable that, despite their exceptional character, integrable systems dominated science until the 1950's, and they still constitute the main subject of most mechanics textbooks. Their great historical role and their undoubted pedagogical value are certainly a partial explanation of this paradoxical situation." p. 93

""Order through fluctuations" models introduce an unstable world where small causes can have large effects, but this world is not arbitrary." p. 206

Indeed, history began by concentrating mainly on human societies, after which attention was given to the temporal dimensions of life and geology. The incorporation of time into physics thus appears as the last stage of a progressive reinsertion of history into the natural and human sciences." p. 208

"For many years physicists remained reluctant to accept such a "historical" description of cosmic evolution.... The whole story appears as another irony of history. In a sense, against his will, Einstein has become the Darwin of physics. Darwin taught us that man is embedded in biological evolution; Einbstein has taught us that we are embedded in an evolving universe. Einstein's ideas led him to a new continent, as unexpected to him as America was to Columbus." p. 215

"Demonstrations of "impossibility" have a fundamental importance. They imply the discovery of an unexpected intrinsic structure of reality that dooms an intellectual enterprise to failure.... Thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum mechanics are all rooted in the discovery of impossibilities, limits to the ambitions of classical physics. Thus they marked the end of an exploration that had reached its limits. But we can now see these scientific innovations in a new light, not as an end but a beginning, as the opening up of new opportunities." p. 216

"All description thus implies a choice of the measurement device, a choice of the question asked." p. 224

"No single theoretical language articulating the variables to which a well-defined value can be attributed can exhaust the physical content of a system. Various possible languages and points of view about the system may be complementary. They all deal with the same reality, but it is impossible to reduce them all to one single description. The irreducible plurality of perspectives on the same reality expresses the impossibility of a divine point of view from which the whole of reality is visible.... the real lesson to be learned from the principle of complementarity, a lesson which can perhaps be transferred to other fields of knowledge, consists in emphasizing the wealth of reality, which overflows any single language, any single logical structure." p. 225

"Thus the paradox: the reversible Schroedinger equation can be tested only by irreversable measurements that the equation is by definition unable to describe.... Schroedinger's equation does not describe a separate level of reality; rather it presupposes the macroscopic world to which we belong." pp. 228-9

"Today we believe that the epoch of certainties and absolute oppositions is over. Physicists have no privilege whatever to any kind of extra-territoriality.... In his Themes" Merleau-Ponty also asserted that the "philosophic" discoveries of science, its basic conceptual transformations, are the result of negative discoveries, which provide the occasion and starting point for a reversal of point of view. Demonstrations of impossibility, whether in relativity, quantum mechanics, or thermodynamics, have shown us that nature cannot be described "from the outside" as if by a spectator. Description is dialogue, communication, and this communication is subject to constraints that demonstrate that we are macroscopic beings embedded in the physical world." p. 299

"Classical science denied becoming, natural diversity, both considered by Aristotle as attributes of the sublunar, inferior world. In this sense, classical science brought heaven to earth. However, this apparently was not the intention of the fathers of modern science. In challenging Aristotle's claim that mathematics ends where nature begins, they did not seek to discover the ummutable concealed beneath the changing, but rather to extend changing, corruptible nature to the boundaries of the universe. In his "Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems", Galileo is amazed at the notion that the world would be a nobler place if the great flood had left only a sea of ice behind, or if the world had the incorruptible hardness of jasper...." p. 305

"The questions we have investigated have led us to emphasize aspects that differ considerably from those to which Kuhn's description applies.... The past one hundred years have been marked by several crises that correspond closely to the description given by Kuhn -- none of which were sought by scientists. Examples are the discovery of the evolving universe. However, the recent history of science is also characterized by a series of problems that that are the consequences of deliberate and lucid questions asked by scientists who knew that the questions asked had both scientific and philosophic aspects." pp. 308-9

Prigogine, Ilya, Exploring Complexity, Freeman, 1989

"As noted by Norbert Weiner: in any world within which we can communicate, the direction of time is bound to be uniform and irreversible." p. 197

"Contrary to the molecules, the actors in a physico-chemical system, or even the ants or the members of other animal societies, human beings develop individual projects and desires. Some of these stem from anticipations about how the future might reasonably look and from guesses concerning the desires of other actors.... In other words, is past experience sufficient for predicting the future, or is a high degree of unpredictability of the future the essence of the human adventure, be it at the individual level of learning or at the collective level of history making? The developments outlined in the preceding chapters suggest that the answer to this question should lean toward the second alternative." p. 238

RICOEUR

Ricoeur, Paul, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Cambridge, 1980.

"Fiction and poetry intend being, not under the modality of being-given, but under the modality of power-to-be." p. 142

"Ultimately, what I appropriate is a proposed world. The latter is not behind the text, as a hidden intention would be, but in front of it, as that which the work unfolds, discovers, reveals. Henceforth, to understand is to understand oneself in front of the text." p. 143

"The most fundamental difficulty, however, has not yet been discussed. It concerns the impossibility of exercising a critique which would be absolutely radical -- impossible, because a radically critical consciousness would require total reflection." p. 238

"We belong to history before telling stories or writing history. The game of telling is included in the reality told. That is undoubtedly why, as we have already said, the word "history" preserves in many languages the rich ambiguity of designating both the course of recounted events and the narrative that we construct. For they belong together." p. 294

RORTY

Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, The Identities of Persons, California, 1976

Rorty, Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism, Minnesota, 1982.

"James, when he said that "the true is what is good by way of belief", was simply trying to debunk epistemology; he was not offering "a theory of truth"." p. 97

"What people do believe is that it would be good to hook up our own views about democracy, mathematics, physics, God, and everything else, into a coherent story about how everything hangs together. Getting such a synoptic view often does require us to change radically our views on particular subjects. But this holistic process of readjustment is just muddling through on a large scale." p. 168

Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, 1981.

"Physicalism is probably right in saying that we shall someday be able, "in principle", to predict every movement of a person's body (including those of his larnyx and his writing hand) by reference to microstructures within his body." p. 354

SABINI / SILVER

Sabini, John, and Silver, Maury, Moralities of Everyday Life, Oxford, 1982.

"In condemning another, one asserts that the other's behavior is in violation of what is taken to be a preexisting mutually-binding rule. The difficulty in this is that, as the labelling theorists suggest, such rules crystallize in the process of their application to particular people in particular circumstances." p. 43

"Kelley's model, then, isn't an adequate account for what it means for an evaluation to be a true or false. It's more like a rule of thumb for simple cases. But a rule of thumb can't show that when people seem to be assessing truth they are really locating causes. And convincing us that assessing an evaluation is really finding its cause is what he and like theorists must do if they are to convince us that evaluations, tout court, are reactions. And they can't." p. 215

"The notion that people respond to the meaning of something is only troubled by circularity if it is offered as a general principle; in any particular case the circle is broken as long as the objective but particular meaning is supplied from the details of the situation. Our approach relies on the shared assumptions of commonsense actors in particular situations instead of Kelley's, or any, general theory. Of course, we don't account for these particular assumptions -- because we can't." p. 226

SAHLINS

Sahlins, Marshall, Practical Reason and Culture, Chicago, 1976.

"So far as the concept or meaning is concerned, a word is referable not simply to the external world but first of all to its place in the language -- that is, to other related words. By its difference from these words is constructed its own valuation of the object, and in the system of such difference is a cultural construction of reality. No language is a mere nomenclature. None stands in a simple one-to-one correspondence of it own terms with "the" objective distinctions. Each bestows a certain value on the given distinctions and thereby constitutes the objective reality in another quality, specific to that society." p. 63

"Against this background, Boas' odyssey "from physics to ethnology" becomes significant as founding an opposition within which anthropology has cycled these many years. As George Stocking (1968) so well describes it, that was a journey of many years in which Boas passed from a monistic materialism to the discovery that "the seeing eye is the origin of tradition"; a journey of many stages in which he discovered that for man the organic does not follow from the inorganic, the subjective from the objective, the mind from the world -- and in the end, culture from nature. The first steps were taken within physics itself. In his dissertation on the color of seawater, Boas remarked on the difficulty of determining the relative intensity of lights that differed slightly in color. Quantitative variations in the object did not evoke corresponding variations in the subject. Boas was later to repeat this experiment at the linguistic level, when with Northwest Coats informants he discovered that sounds considered the same by speakers of one language might be heard as completely different by speakers of another, and vice versa as each perceived in the discourse of the other the distinctions appropriate to his own." p. 65

"The ecological functionalism puts culture in double jeopardy. It is threatened with liquidation because it cannot be specified as such by natural reasons, and because consideration of its specific quality would invite in reason of a different nature. The crisis then becomes ontological in its proportions. Culture is then exchanged for "behavior". Its concrete qualities are only the appearance of "bodily movements" whose wisdom is their bodily effect. Ontology thus recapitulates methodology. And anthropology loses its object. The properties of culture having been ignored in the practice of its explanation, it is presumed that these properties have no autonomy value as such -- which is a rationalization of the fact that the explanation cannot account for them...." p. 89

"All three types of practical reasoning have also in common an impoverished conception of human symboling. For all of them, the cultural scheme is the sign of other "realities", hence in the end obeisant in its own argument to other laws and logics. None of them have been able to exploit fully the anthropological discovery that the creation of meaning is the distinguishing and constituting characteristic of men -- the "human essence" of an older discourse -- such that by processes of differential valuation and signification, relations among men, as well as between themselves and nature, are organized." p. 102

"But then, Evans-Pritchard had already developed the essentials of a true cultural ecology in his work on Zande witchcraft (1937). Why, he asked there, do essentially rational people like the Azande, who know that their garden was lost to trampling elephants or their house to fire, nevertheless blame their neighbors and kinsmen and take appropriate magical actions of defense or retaliation. The answer he came to was that the social effect did not follow from the natural cause. Although it may be a property of fire to burn a house, it is not the property of fire to burn your house. Or again, the answer might be brought specifically to the cultural level: it is not the nature of fire to burn a house; fire only burns wood. Once incorporated into the human realm, the action of nature is no longer a mere empirical fact but a social meaning. And between the property of fire to burn wood and a man's loss of property, there is no commensurate relation." p. 114

It would seem, however, that the main problem of "reductionism" besetting modern structuralism has consisted in a mode of discourse which, by giving mind all the powers of "law" and "limitation", has rather placed culture in a position of submission and dependence. The whole vocabulary of "underlying" laws of the mind accords all force of constraint to the mental side, to which the cultural can only respond, as if the first were the active element and the latter only passive. Perhaps it could be better said that the structure of the mind are not so much the imperative of culture as its implements."" pp. 122-3

"The error was to surrender this reason to various practicalities and then be forced to decide how one set of requirements is reflected in the relations devoted to another -- the economic to the social, the social to the ideational, the ideational to the economic. But it follows that a retotalization is not effected merely by considering material goods, for example, in the context of social relations. The unity of the cultural order is constituted by a third and common term, meaning.... As a specific corollary: no cultural form can ever be read from a set of "material forces", as if the cultural were the dependent variable of an inescapable practical logic. The positivist explanation of given cultural practices as necessary effects of some material circumstance -- such as a particular technique of production, a degree of productivity or productive diversity, an insufficiency of protein or a scarcity of manure -- all such scientific propositions are false." p. 206

"Or to look at it the other way around, selection as a "limit of viability" is a negative determination, stipulating only what cannot be done, but licensing indiscriminately (selecting for) anything that is possible. So far as the definite properties of the cultural order are conceived, the laws of nature are indeterminate. For all their facticity and objectivity, the laws of nature stand to the order of culture as the abstract to the concrete: as the realm of possibility to the realm of necessity, as the given potentialies to the one realization, as survival to the actual being." p. 209

"[I]n Western culture the economy is the main site of cultural production. For us the production of goods is at the same time the privileged mode of symbolic production." p. 211

Sahlins, Marshal, Islands of History, Chicago, 1985.

"And because signs are engaged by interests in projects, thus in temporal relations of implication (not simply simultaneous relations of contrast), their values are risked, so to speak, syntagmatically as well as paradigmatically. Such interested uses are not imperfect merely, by relation to Platonic cum cultural ideals, but potentially inventive. We have seen how Hawaiian chiefs were able to recognize their traditional mana in the fancy goods of European merchants, as opposed to the coarser stuff or domestic utilities. The goods offered in trade were factored according to the chiefs' self-conceptions. By an interested metaphor on celestial brilliance, whose logic was motivated in the traditional culture -- as discovered, however, in the existing situation by a certain intentionality -- the meaning of mana was changed." p. 151

SHOTTER

Shotter, John, "Social Accountability and Self Specification" (in Gergen and Davis.)

"I shall not, however, propose any new theories; in fact, my approach will be an implicit argument for the repudiation of theories in any attempt to understand the workings of everyday social life." p. 167

"The different constraining and enabling influences upon us of our different ways of talking, of our different modes of accountability, can only be appreciated by us comparing and contrasting them from the different positions of involvement in them that we can have within our social ecology -- and that is what I shall try to do. There is no Archimedean point to be had." p. 168

"This "double" or reflexive concern is crucial, for, while other scientists do not have evaluations or interpretations placed upon them by their own subject matter, social scientists do. While social scientists may claim third-person, external observer status for themselves in their conduct of their studies, (the position of uninvolved outsiders), such claims cannot be sustained. The nature of moral entailments in social life are such that it just is not up to individuals to assert their own moral statusses: part of what it is to have such a status is that it is conferred upon one by others." p. 169

"Reports assume in those to whom they are addressed a capacity to understand them; they leave the addressees untouched, unmoved in their being (they motivate no particular action upon their part). Tellings, on the contrary.... work as indicators of future action; they are used to produce changes in people's behavior; they tell them something, not of something. Rather than an epistemological device, they have an ontological function." p. 169

"Thus as tellings, our ways of talking about ourselves can work, not only to relate us in certain ways to other people, but to constitute or structure our being as living in this or that relation to others." p. 170

"I want to argue that there is no such things as a "self" within people to be investigated. And that if we feel a necessity to refer to an "inner self" in explaining people's conduct, that is because, in formulating and accounting for our experiences in a way that makes sense within our current dominant social order (an individualistic and scientific order), only talk from a third-person, external-observer point of view is officially authorized." p. 171

"This view as to the power of scientific modes of investigation is clearly partial and limited, however. For the conduct of science rests upon the prior possession by all of us of a much more basic form of knowledge -- let me call it simply "practical common sense" knowledge" -- in terms of which scientific activities themselves are conducted and in terms of which they must make sense". p. 174

"This illustrates another way in which our approach to our own self-understanding through theories is deficient: they lead to fragmentation, not integration. Currently, there is a near chaos of different theories about ourselves all clamoring for survival. Could an all-encompassing theory be devised to encompass them all? No. For it is in the nature of what theories are that, even if they were all "good" theories (in the sense of producing, when applied, the results they predict), they still could not be combined into one good theory. For as Marie Jahoda.... has pointed out, "each contains an extra theoretical element: the choice of the basic question the theory is meant to illuminate."" p. 176

"It is here that the difference between theories and accounts becomes acute: accounts may depict the value choices involved; theories suppress them, that is, they are rendered "rationally invisible".... As Winch points out, theories do not express their own principles of ordering; they do not, so to speak, apply themselves.... The main drift of what I have been arguing is this: that in our attempts to understand ourselves we have been somewhat blind (rationally blind) to the fact that in our everyday lives we are embedded within a social order which, morally, we must continually reproduce in all the mundane activities we perform from our place, position, or status within it. This blindness has been induced in us by the necessity to account for all our experiences in terms both intelligible and legitimate within our current social order, an order which is both individualistic and scientistic. As a result, we have concentrated far too much attention upon the isolated individual studied from the point of view of an uninvolved observer." pp. 176-7

"[A] discourse works to reconstitute in its conduct, both a certain social order and a corresponding psychological makeup in those who are conducting it, that prevents them from fully describing the nature of the world in which they operate. For the nature of a discourse is not, primarily, to represent a world, but to coordinate diverse social action." p. 179

"The strangeness of the hermeneutical process is that the situation or context in which things come to be seen as the things they are, is articulated at the same time as the entities within it acquire their identity; the two develop together. As such, it is an originary process, a process in which the "whatness" of a situation is appreciated -- the construction of an initial grasp upon a circumstance prior to any critical reflection on it, and in which critical reflection can be grounded." p. 183

SPENCER-BROWN

Spencer-Brown, George, Laws of Form, Dutton, 1979.

"All we have to show is that the self-referential paradoxes, discarded with the theory of types, are no worse than similiar self-referential paradoxes, which are considered quite acceptable, in the ordinary theory of equations.

The most famous such paradox in logic is the statements "This statement is false".....

"Of course, as everyone knows, the paradox in this case [the square root of minus one] is resolved by introducing a fourth class of number, called imaginary, so we can say that the roots of the equation above are plus or minus i, where i is a new kind of unity that consists of the square root of minus one.

What we do in Chapter 11 is extend the concept to Boolean algebras, which means that a valid argument may contain not just three classes of statement, but four: true, false, meaningless, and imaginary. The implications of this, in the fields of logic, philosophy, mathematics, and even physics, are profound.

What is fascinating about the imaginary Boolean values, once we admit them, is the light they apparently shed on our concepts of matter and time. It is, I guess, in the nature of us all to wonder why the ubniverse appears just the way it does. Why, for example, does it not appear more symettircal? Well, if you will be kind enough, and patient enough, to bear with me through the argument as it develops itself, in this text, you will I think see, even though we begin it as symmetrical as we know how, that it becomes, of its own accord, less and less so as we proceed." p. xv-xvi.

"It is the theme of this book that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart." p. xxix

"There can be no disctinction without a motive, and there can be no motive unless contents are seen to differ in value.

If a content is of a value, a name can be taken to indicate this value.

Thus the calling of the name can be identified with the value of the content." p. L

"It may be helpful at this stage to realize that the primary form of mathematical communication is not description, but injunction. In this respect it is comparable with practical art forms like cookery, in which the taste of a cake, though indescribable, can be conveyed to the reader in the form of a set of injunctions called a recipe." p. 77

"In a proof we are dealing in terms which are outside of the calculus, and thus are not amenable to its instructions. In any attempt to render such proofs themselves subject to instruction, we succeed only at the cost of making another calculus, inside of which the original calculus is cradled, and outside of which we shall again see forms which are amenable to proof but not demonstration.....A demonstration, we remember, occurs inside a calculus, a proof outside. The boundary between them is thus a shared boundary, and is what is approached, in one or the other direction, according to whether we are demonstrating a consequence or proving a theorem." p. 93-4

"Even the analogy of seeking something cannot, in this case, be quite right. For what we find, eventually, is something we have known, and may well have been consciously aware of, all along..... In discovering a proof,we must do something subtler than search. We must come to see the relevance, in respect to whatever statment it is that we wish to justify, of some fact in full view, and of which, therefore, we are already constantly aware. Whereas we may know how to undertake the search for something we can not see, the subtlety of the technique of trying to "find" something which we already can see may more easily escape our efforts" p. 95

"If the weakness of present-day science is that it centers around existence, the weakness of present-day logic is that it centres around truth.... to experience the world clearly, we must abandon existence to truth, truth to indication, indication to form, and form to void...." p. 101

"Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way to be able) to see itself.... But in order to do so, evidently, it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, what it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world undoubtedly is it self (i.e. is indisticnt from itself) but, in any attempt to see itself as object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and thus false to, itself. In this condition it wi;; always partly elude itself." p. 105

"To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of his great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unforld, and they will do so in a measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in his respect of their revelation.....

To know and arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity,Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what one needs to know." p. 110

STRENG

Streng, Frederick, Emptiness, Abingdon, 1967.

For Nagarjuna the pursuit after final answers regarding the nature of Ultimate Reality was sophistry.... For him, these "final answers" were not to be found because there were no essential self-determined questions. Since there were no "one to one" correlations between concepts and their supposed referents, the inquiry into the nature of things is endless." p. 87

TOULMIN

Toulmin, Stephen, The Uses of Argument, Cambridge, 1958.

"This inquiry has, I hope, illustrated one thing: namely, the virtues of the parallel between procedures of rational assessment and legal procedures -- what I called earlier the jurisprudential analogy." pp. 41-2

"The only real way out of these epistemological difficulties is (I say) giving up the analytic ideal. Analytic criteria, whether of conclusiveness, demonstrativeness, necessity, certainty, validity, or justification, are beside the point when we are dealing with substantial arguments. At this point the question of relevance, which we put aside earlier, is inescapable. Certainly substantial arguments often involve type-transitions in the passage from data and backing to conclusions: all this means is that we must judge each field of substantial arguments by its own relevant standards. The fundamental error in epistemology is to treat this type-jump as a logical gulf. The demand that all claims to knowledge should be justified analytically, and the rejection of all those which cannot be so justified, are the first temptations to which this error leads; and the next step is to set out, in the hope of remedying the situation, on the weary trail that leads by way of transcendentalism and phenomenalism either to skepticism or pragmatism. Give up the idea that a substantial step in argument represents a logical gulf, and both logic and theory of knowledge can then turn to more fruitful problems." p. 234

"No doubt, if our intellect and senses were sharper, less of our predictions would in fact prove mistaken; but however much sharper they became, we would be as far as ever from getting away from the "liability" in question. Let our intellectual and sensory equipments be perfect, the future will remain the future and the present the present -- only in a timeless universe would there be no possibility of reconsidering our judgements in the light of later events." p. 238 (?Discovery of Time?)

Toulmin, Stephen, Cosmopolis, The Free Press (Macmillan), 1990.

"[O]ne aim of the 17th-century philosophers was to frame all questions in terms that rendered them independent of context; while our own procedure will be the opposite -- to recontextualize the questions these philosophers took the most pride in decontexting." p. 21

"The "modern" focus on the written, the universal, the general, and the timeless -- which monopolized the work of most philosophers after 1960 -- is being broadened to include once again the oral, the particular, the local, and the timely." p. 186

"Yet, one might argue, these practical debates are, by now, not "applied philosophy" but philosophy itself." p. 190

"Claims to certainty, for instance, are at home within abstract theories, and so open to consensus, but all abstraction involves omission, turning a blind eye to elements in experience which do not lie within the scope of a given theory, and so guaranteeing the rigor of its formal implications.... The axioms of Modernity assumed that the surface complexity of nature and humanity distracts us from an underlying order, which is inrinsically simple and permanent. By now, however, physical scientists recognize as well as anyone that natural phenomena in fact embody an "intrinsically simple" order only to a limited degree; novel theories of physical, biological, or social disorder (or "chaos") allow us to balance the intellectual books." pp. 200-1

Toulmin, Stephen, and Goodfield, Jane, The Discovery of Time, Harper and Row, 1965.

"Both Aristotle and Plato toyed with [the hypothesis that] once every few thousand years, the sun moon, and planets returned to the same relative positions, and began to follow again the same cycle of configurations; and so perhaps the cycle of political fortunes also had its own definite period, keeping the recurring cycles of political change in step with the movement of the heavens. If that were so (Aristotle remarked) then he himself was living before the fall of Troy as much as after it; since, when the wheel of fortune had turned through another cycle, the Trojan war would be reenacted and Troy would fall again. " p. 54

"The physical sciences had stood aside from the historical revolution which had transformed the rest of natural science, taking it as axiomatic that certain aspects of the world remained fixed and permanent throughout all other natural changes; and though by the mid-twentieth-century, the list of these timeless enitities -- or "eternal principles" as the Greeks had called them -- is much shorter than it was in 1700, the existence of unchanging physical laws, at least, is still recognized as one enduring aspect of the natural world.

During the eighteenth century, the orthodox picture of physical Nature was that stated by Isaac Newton at the end of the Opticks. This involved permanent features of five different kinds.... During the twentieth century, the list of changeless physical entities has drastically shortened.... Newton's original five categories have thus been cut down to one: the fixed Laws of Nature.... The outstanding question now is, whether the Laws of Nature themselves -- the last ahistorical features of the physicist's world-picture -- will in their turn prove to be subject to the laws of time...." p. 247-250

VARELA

Varela, Francisco, Principles of Biological Autonomy, North Holand, 1979.

"The relations that define a machine [here = "life form"!] as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interactions and transformations that it may undergo as such a unity, we call the organization of the machine. The actual relations that hold between the components that integrate a concrete machine in a given space we call its structure." p. 9

"In fact, the dominance of control views in contemporary systems theory makes it closer to a theory of system components that to one of systems as unities (totalities)." p. 90

"The wholeness of a living system is, in everyday encounters, construed as unpredictability. The more difficult it is to reduce a system to simple input / output control. the more likely it is that we will deem it alive." p. 103

Varela, Francisco; Thompson, Evan; Rosch, Eleanor, The Embodied Mind, MIT, 1993.

"Here, however, we come upon an interesting difference between Western rationalism and the rationalism embedded in the Abidharma. In the latter, the designation of basic elements as ultimate reality, we are told, was not an assertion that the basic elements were ontological entities in the sense of being substantially existent. Surely this is an interesting case study -- we have here a philosophical system, a reductive system, in which reductive base elements are postulated as ultimate realities but in which those reductive realities are not given ontological status in the usual sense. How can that be? Emergents, of course, do not have the status of ontological entities (substances). Might we have a system here in which the basic elements are themselves emergents?.....

The relationship between consciousness and mental factors [in Abidharma] seems remarkably similiar the the relationship between Minskian agencies and agents. The contemporary Tibetan scholar Geshen Rabten puts it thus: "The term 'primary mind' denotes the totality of a sensory or a mental state composed of a variety of mental factors. A primary mind is like a hand whereas the mental factors are like the individual fingers, the palm and so forth. The character of the primary mind is thus determined by its constituent mental factors.' A hand is an agency of which the fingers, palm, etc., are agents; it is also an agent of the body. These are different levels of description; neither agent nor agency could exist without the other. Like the hand, we could call the primary mind an emergent." p. 118

"It should be noted that such histories of coupling [histories of living forms in relation to their environment] are not optimal; they are simply viable. This difference implies a corresponding difference in what is required of a cognitive system in its structural coupling. If this coupling were to be optimal, the interactions of the system would be (more or less) prescribed. For continuing to be viable, however, the system must simply facilitate the continued integrity of the system (ontogeny) or its lineage (phylogeny). Thus once again we have a logic that is proscriptive rather than prescriptive; any action taken by the system is permitted as long as it does not violate the constraint of having to maintain the system and/or its lineage. Yet another way to express this idea would by to say that cognition as embodied action is always toward something that is missing; on the one hand, there is always the next step for the system in its perceptually-guided action; on the other hand, the actions of the system are always directed toward situations that have yet to become actual." p. 205

"How do I know when a cognitive system is functioning adequately? When it becomes part of an ongoing existing world (as the young of every species do) or shapes a new one (as happens in evolutionary history)....

"Much that appears [in this answer] has hitherto been absent from cognitive science -- not just from cognitivism but from present-day, state-of-the-art connectionism. The most significant innovation is that since representations no longer play a central role, the role of the environment as a source of input recedes into the background. It now enters into explanations only when systems undergo breakdowns or suffers events which cannot be satisfied by their structures...." p. 206

WHITE

White, James Boyd, "Rhetoric and Law" in Nelson, et. al.

"The third aspect of legal rhetoric is what might be called its ethical or communal character, or its socially constitutive nature. Every time one speaks as a lawyer, one establishes for the moment a character -- an ethical identity, or what the Greeks called an ethos -- for oneself, for one's audience, and for those one talks about, and proposes a relationship among them..... The law is an art of persuasion that creates the objects of its persuasion, for it constitutes both the community and the culture it commends." pp. 303-4

"It is the true nature of the law to constitute a "we" and to establish a conversation by which that "we" can determine what our "wants" are and should be. Our motives and values are not on this view to be taken to be exogenous to the system (as they are taken to be exogenous to the economic system) but are in fact its subject. The law..... is a process by which we make ourselves by making our language". p. 311

White, James Boyd, The Legal Imagination (abridged ed.), Chicago, 1985.

"One could describe institutions as separate ways of organizing experience through language (different language systems, if you will), each of which defines experience and people in its particular way. One might speak of the institution as a game set up on a permanent basis; and a simple definition of roles is typical of institutions, as it is of games. Each institution seems to use its own particular labels without regard for other possible ways of talking about people.,,,

The institutional way of talking about people is not simply a matter of the use of excessively abstract characteristics such as the social security number; sometimes, in fact, the institution's concern is with a very wide range of capabilities and experience, as in the Navy's idea of a good officer or the corporations's idea of a good president.....

The ordinary person comes to see that the official institutional views of mankind are impossible, and does not take them with complete seriousness. Yet he does not entirely reject them, and one might say that the important ingredient of maturity is the ability to live with institutions without ending up sounding like one." p. 165

WHITEHEAD

Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, The Free Press, 1978.

""Creativity" is the principle of novelty. An actual entity is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the "many" that it unifies." p. 21

""Becoming" is the transfer of coherence into coherence.... "Determination" is analysable into "definiteness" and "position", where definiteness is the illustration of select universal objects, and "position" is a relative status in a universe of actual entities." p. 25

"But eternal objects, and propositions, and some more complex sorts of contrasts, involve indecision in their own natures ." p. 29

END

.jjmrsnx