I wrote here recently about the old issue of the two tables. There is the commonly-perceived solid wood object, on the one hand, and the sciency object of empty space with some whizzing electrical charges, on the other.
As I said then, there are three ways of reconciling the two tables. One of them is the pragmatic way. The perceived table is a real thing, part of the world in which we live. The sciency table is a pragmatically useful model.
BUT ... let us make the situation more complicated. What about the two skies? In the manifest world there is a dome-like presence above me. I clearly see it as having that shape. And I assign it predicates, "The sky is blue." Even the ubiquitous sentence "it is raining," which never has an antecedent for its pronoun, can be taken to refer to this sky.
What is the sciency equivalent? What do we say when we say the sky is blue? We say, perhaps, that our eyes, looking upward, come into contact with light waves of the blue part of the spectrum, because that is the part of the spectrum that various airy molecules give off. We say that the the blueness seems to be a definite distance away and to have a dome-like shape, because certain apes found it practical to develop the habit of seeing THINGS, and the blueness diffused by the atmosphere can only take thing-form in that manner.
Or we might say something like that. But it isn't at all easy to say what we mean in a non-manifest science-guided way when we say that the sky is blue.
We are, I suspect, simply assigning a free-floating predicate. The sky is blueing. And least it isn't raining.
What does all this do to our general understanding of the relationship between the manifest and the scientific worlds I discussed last week? To begin: we cannot see the "manifest" world as one, and that one as real in an non-problematic sense. The manifest world ranges from solid ground to blue sky above. We are tempted to see solid ground as quintessentially real and the blue sky dome as quintessentially ephemeral -- the latter is not even a pragmatic postulation but an aesthetic convention.
Perhaps the reality of the scientific world occupies a similar spectrum, and together two lines allow for a grid. Or perhaps I should get out and take a walk.
I think of discussions of such things as thought experiments, which themselves are, after Dennett, tools for thinking. Thinking about thinking might be considered infinite regress. But if it assists in attaining more productive thought, I'll go for it.
ReplyDeleteA figure who has been cartooning for at least twenty-five years, has been ostracized for racism. I think this is just wrong. Scott Adams' Dilbert character was popular in office bureaucracies, both public and private. His character poked fun at himself and all things bureaucratic and, thereby, dysfunctional. Never, in my time within that chaotic world, did I read anything remotely racist in Adams' strip. His approach was equal opportunity towards all idiocy. Because he recognized it when he saw it, sort of like the Supreme Court justice who saw pornography the same way. Now Adams has spoken of real world issues...has spoken his mind on a sensitive matter:race. I don't know why he said what he said., unless he is just, plain, sick and tired of patronizing black people. Sick and tired of top-toeing around political correctness, for fear of being labelled a racist. Pundits expressed the expected shame-shame response. Well, of course, those toadies don't want to lose their jobs! Adams is likely to throw up a single-fingered salute and move to, say, Ecuador. If I could, I would. If, and only if, I had enough time left for it to matter. I don't and it won't. I'd guess neither of us would want to be governor of Florida. But I do not know Mr. Adams.
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DeleteThere is a lot that might be said about this. I have enjoyed Dilbert for years, although recently I was disappointed to see that Scott had written one of my favorite characters out of it -- Tina, the technical writer with a brittle ego.
ReplyDeleteI think Adams had gotten a rather big head, as a persona outside of the world of Dilbert, by 2016 and all the back-and-forth about whether he favored Trump or HRC during that year was exhibitionist.
Adams' latest comments came in response to a Rasmussen poll that employed a phrase often used by rightwing trolls. The phrase is "is it okay to be white?" The phase is deliberately designed to excite over-reaction, which in turn can be used to prove that anti-white racism is the problem. The phrase is, in short, an agitprop trick that long plotted in 4Chan and other delightful places.
Perhaps the black respondents who gave the answers that worried Adams were aware of the history of the expression. He doesn't seem to have been, so he rushed into the sort of overreaction that its inventors have always dreamed of. Here is a further discussion in SLATE: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/02/dilbert-scott-adams-racist-rant-black-hate-explained.html
There is much more that might be said, but this is not a great place for saying it.