Radical Instrumentalism

First, let me make a mea culpa. I am being fast and loose with the concept of instrumentalism. Postmodernists as a group push the limit of that concept. Instrumentalism is a philosophical doctrine within empiricism that judges a theory by its explanatory power. It is only a step from that to the radical instrumentalism that Dewey himself decried of an epistemology that states that we do not 'know' reality, only our perception of it.

Throw in modified Kantian 'hardwired' concepts, once again fast and loose, and you have my position in which I am borrowing a term from a rigorous empiricist and expanding and modifying it to 'explain' phenomena. Would Dewey object? Absolutely. He drew the line at such epistemological exercise. It is only with Kuhn that the boundary of pragmatism is extended beyond empiricism into the mechanics of mind and the limits of the possible.

Would Dewey understand? Absolutely. As we move to the convergence of Information Theory there is no question that pragmatism has been altered out of all recognition by an organic evolution of truth. He would be dismayed at the lack of a general purpose which he equated with meaning but he would accept individual purpose as meaningful which is the art of postmodernism.

Do good and be well.

Language, Thought and Reality (revisited)

Benjamin Lee Whorf once wrote an important little book of linguistic studies titled, 'Language, Thought and Reality'. It ranks with the work of Dewey and Kuhn as seminal American thought. However, Whorf wrote instrumentalism somewhat out of the picture in his study of how language and reality influence each other. In fact, language and thought are interactive but significantly not the same thing. Thought is influenced by our perception of reality and subject to critical failure driving aberrant cognition when that thought and that perception are demonstrably incommensurable, i.e. when there is a low degree of coincidence.

Faced with three disjunct systems, one is forced onto a central dichotomy, thought and reality which are arguably incommensurate , and an information calculus, language, which is, as Wordsworth brilliantly put it, 'the language of the sense', disjunct from both but relational to both which is identical to perception. Perceptions, the senses, are not thought and neither, as simple experiments show, are they reality. Language, however abstract, is rooted in perception and reflective of the interaction between whatever is 'out there' and cognition. It informs both our thought and our perception of reality and there is the genius of Whorf.

Do good and be well.