3Quarks has a well written post by Gimbel & Suilebhan to mark the centenary of the Erlangen Conference organized by Reichenbach & Carnap which, the authors aver, was when Analytical Philosophy got off the ground.
My impression is that Russell and Moore's 'rebellion against Kant and Hegel' in 1898 (after Russell published his critique of Reimann) was the traditional founding date for analytical philosophy in this country. Sadly, it was foredoomed to be nonsense. Consider what Russel wrote of Reimann's 'vicious disjunction'- viz. the uncritical assumption that a metrical coordinate system can be set up independently of any axioms as to space-measurement.
What's wrong with this assumption? Metrical coordinate systems are useful. People have been using them for thousands of years. Geometry needn't be Euclidean and axioms are merely assumptions of an ad hoc or heuristic sort.
Riemann has failed to observe, what I have endeavoured to prove in the next chapter, that, unless space had a strictly constant measure of curvature,
It will be sent to bed without any supper. Time on the other hand will be allowed to stay up late and watch the late Victorian equivalent of Netflix.
Geometry would become impossible; also that the absence of constant measure of curvature involves absolute position, which is an absurdity.
No. It only involves an arbitrary choice of meridian- e.g. Greenwich. Analytical philosophy, or game theoretic approaches seeking to de-Kant ethics ends up as ipse dixit hand waving. On the other hand, maybe there is a Godelian 'absolute proof' in which case God exists. Boy, is Richard Dawkins fucked!
There is nothing bad in itself in arbitrary 'uncorrelated asymmetries' dictating eusocial 'bourgeois strategies'. But for the long Nineteenth Century, arbitrariness came to be seen as declasse or despotic. Moreover, the charge of psychologism is hurtful to posh and very clever people. Women and the working classes had psychology. Dons, more especially those in line to inherit an Earldom, might have a philosophy- if they were that way inclined. Karl Pearson, seeking, it seems to me, to reconcile Kant to Darwin by saving the laws of nature by asserting the evolutionary inevitability of a truly perceptive observer, directly influenced Einstein. But it was 'zero knowledge' verification- e.g. an astronomical observation- not some a priori desiderata which enabled Physics to go forward.
Ultimately, as we would now recognize, the basis of statistical mechanics is not mechanical. It is statistical merely. Causality is Granger Causality or correlation. There is no 'genidentity' or 'ultimate fact of nature' or 'atomic proposition' or way of 'carving up the world according to its joints'. Analysis, standard or non-standard or completely bonkers, may be useful but it may also be a waste of time.
Turning to the Erlanger Conference itself, our authors write-The two-day schedule was divided; on the first day, attendees examined questions concerning the foundation of mathematics and logic,
we now know both can be given good enough 'univalent foundations' for any useful purpose. But, it is likely that there will be not 'more monks than Reason' but 'more systems of mathematics than there can be mathematicians'.
and on the second, they considered physics and scientific reasoning.
Physics burgeoned when the money for its burgeoning became available thanks to the useful tech it produced. The authors draw attention to Reichenbach's skill at getting rich people to pay for the Erlangen conference.
To everyone’s surprise, both days were quite contentious, with a range of views on the different questions. Believing that scientific reasoning ought to be the basis for life did not guarantee that careful thinkers would agree on the basis of scientific thinking.
The basis of life is economic. Reasoning or emoting or praying either has survival value or it doesn't. Stuff which helps us survive tends to get reinforced.
What emerged from the conference wasn’t a unified platform, but rather the structure of an ongoing project.
That project was a waste of time. CS Pierce and LEJ Brouwer were important. Kurt Lewin, in his own field, was useful. But Carnap and Reichenbach added little value though, no doubt, they chronicled the death pangs of mechanistic or idealistic epistemologies of a categorical type. There can be no Scientistic 'Religion of Man' or 'Natural Law' (though the Maharishi did found a political party with that name).
Attendees agreed that they would need to be able to distinguish between questions that had answers that must be true and those that might be true.
the former are Hilbert calculi while the latter are Gentzen type sequent calculi.
They would need to understand how to approach questions of necessary truth—those of mathematics, for example—and those that are contingent, like science.
Why? This is just ipse dixit hand waving. If some says 'because you have affirmed X, you must necessarily also affirm Y' you tell them to go fuck themselves. The fact is, if X is a term in natural language it is likely to be intensional or epistemic to some degree and thus its extension is not well defined. Thus 'restricted comprehension' or a type theory is required to avoid cascading intensional fallacies or silly paradoxes which are merely semantic.
That project became what we now know as analytic philosophy. It was launched as both an intellectual movement to understand the world in terms of observation and rationality,
which had been happening all over the world for tens of thousands of years.
without recourse to spiritual metaphysics,
Nothing wrong with the occasional recourse to strong spirits or even poetic or mystical intoxication. What matters is whether what you are doing is useful. Who cares if Ramanujam got his theorem from some nice Hindu Goddess?
and as a political movement opposed to hypernationalism.
Imperialism, on the other hand, was just fine and dandy coz darkies are closer to monkeys than to proper human beings.
If we believe in science, analytic philosophers asserted, we will make more rational choices in terms of policy and personal behavior and create a better society for all.
Sadly, such 'better societies' tend to be boring and stupid.
We see echoes of what happened in Erlangen today in the fight over global warming and vaccines.
No we don't. Erlangen was about constructing a new logic which would construct a unified system of reality. This was because the old logic had been encouraging systems of reality to scratch each others' eyes out though, if they got drunk at a speakeasy, they ended up bumping uglies.
Meanwhile the pragmatic- i.e. money grubbing- Americans were taking an interest in 'mathematical philosophy'- i.e. what new vistas relativity and QMT were opening up. Many of the Berlin and Vienna Circles did end up emigrating and, no doubt, they were diligent scholars and inspiring teachers. But their political and moral influence was nil. Pragmatic money making mattered. Logical empiricism did not, even if the thing wasn't an oxymoron. Any way, Frege- it turns out- was a raving anti-Semite and proto-Nazi. 'Logic's lost genius'- Gentzen- was a Hitlerite moron.
Those of us who take science seriously, who make it the basis of a worldview, should think back 100 years to that gathering in Erlangen as a historic, foundational moment.
No. Either you can have science- which is pretty darn useful- or you can have hand waving guys who are a bit Sciencey or Mathsy but who are merely adding noise to signal. My point is, even a drunken Socioproctologist can sound Mathsy. This isn't because of the fourteen dimensional turbulent interaction of the post-Kristevan Chora. It is because of the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbour's cat.
If there is indeed a Religion of Man,
There are plenty such. Christ was a man as was Buddha and Confucius. There are great Religions, highly Humanitarian Religions, named after them. A lot of people feel they are complementary rather than competing. In Hinduism, we distinguish 'matam' (doctrine) from 'vigyan' (Science). This is like Reichenbach's realization, around the time of Erlangen, that observational equivalence means only a semantic difference. But we don't know this will continue to hold. Still it is good to know that posh dudes wot write for 3Quarks are just as 'Hindutva' as this old fart.
which we might now call a Religion of Humanity, Erlangen is where it was born.
So, Analytic Philosophy is actually a Religion. Cool. We can go on pilgrimage to Erlangen and hope that our sins against Science will be forgiven us. That way, we may be gain entrance to Cantor's Paradise or get reborn as an inaccessible Cardinal. Into that Heaven of boredom, may my enemies awake!
For me, Erlangen was about smart dudes like Reichenbach not focussing on something useful- which Kurt Lewin actually did- but instead going in for 'second order' work- i.e. clearing the ground for first order work or agitating for more first order work to be done. But the former can crowd out the latter. There is endless clearing of the ground and proposals for more solid foundations. There is no actual construction.
Worse yet is the notion that philosophers must exercise 'analytic control' over 'the products of the scientific machine'. This is hubris, a Satanic 'non serviam', and this is where Reichenbach falls.
Sherlock Holmes, the ultimate logical empiricist, famously did not know that the Earth revolved around the Sun. But he could identify the murderer by examining the cigar ash left in an ashtray. On the other hand, Holmes was fictional. But a Religion need not object to having fictional Saints.
No comments:
Post a Comment