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.

Incommensurable systems and value calculi

Incommensurable systems exist when there is no common measure. Human beings with different genetic makeup, different databases and different histories are to a significant degree incommensurable systems. Yet we communicate. We participate in markets. How is this done?
There are two parts to this phenomenon - coincidence and value calculi. When two incommensurable systems coincide they 'agree' on some aspect of existence. Such coincidence is the precondition for the generation of brokered values, the marketplace, and the creation of an accepted value calculus which represents the values so generated on a relative scale.
Language is a value calculus. So is money. They exist not as common measures but as the representation of values brokered in marketplaces, whether the university or Wall street.
These values are generated in transactions between incommensurable systems which have achieved significant ad hoc coincidence. These transactions describe a market which the value calculus orders.
These concepts are simple yet powerful in their comprehensive scope, in their coherent structure and their universal utility.
Do well and be well.
'Chances Basil Brylcreem' on http://www.amazon.com/books

Instrumentalism and Postmodernism

J.M. here. The single question dividing postmodernism and postmodernist philosophy from the rest of creation is that of instrumentalism.
Instrumentalists believe, in a vast oversimplification, that we do not know reality. We only know our perceptions of it. Taken to the Nth degree, this fairly undeniable fact, tempered with inherited cognitive predispositions, gives rise to the radical position that human thought and reality are incommensurable in the terms of Thomas S. Kuhn. Given his explanation of and exceptions to incommensurability such a position is tenable with only one constraint, probability.
Is a construct a model or a flight of fancy? Is it possible to say something about reality when that reality is disjunct from human thought? The history of observable fact is a picaresque journal of events exhibiting probability constraints. The narrative of thought conserving these observations is punctuated by moments of extreme re-invention of systems of thought. It is not a grand narrative, as documented by Kuhn himself, but, in his words, an evolution and speciation. Any attempt at convergence across disciplines results in that one constraint, probability.
Any attempt at thought in terms of explanation and/or prediction, which is why we think large thoughts, must, in order to conserve the events of our individual lives, reference probability.
Can the occult constructions common to postmodernism and the bizarre constructions of paranoid minds have validity in philosophical argument? Only if they exist as an exception to an expectation of probability within the laws of probability.
'Tunneling', the well known phenomenon predicted by the probabilities of quantum mechanics has been described as 'spooky' by sober physicists. That is case enough to argue that reality really is disjunct from human thought and we cannot 'know' reality and that truth is a probability variable and the occult, as explanation, is simply a reflection of these facts.
Any system of thought that has a significant degree of coincidence with observable facts is explanatory and predictive of that incommensurable reality. If it references probability even as exception then it has validity in postmodern philosophy. We are not talking about Truth as the end result of a Grand Narrative. We are talking, to continue Kuhn's metaphor, of adaptive versus maladaptive behavior. It is not for us to 'say' what is true. It is for us to 'do' what is true.
Do well and be well.
'Chances Basil Brylcreem' on http://www.amazon.com/books