Letter to Bruce Denner, psychologiest. Originally published to Yahoo's wittgenstein-dialognet, October 23, 2005. Some typos fixed. Links:
Hi Bruce -- Thanks for the overview and I'm glad you enjoy our dialog, which I do as well. I'll use this opportunity to provide some overview of my own. This switch to a new mode might help us understand each other better. A theme here of late has been the membranes, however porous, between the disciplines, and I've been exploring that. The confluence of philosophy, psychology, and anthropology is where I'm looking, and yes, those three feed into police work, but also into diplomacy and law. In law, we find people going to extraordinary lengths (using extraordinary grammar) to "nail it all down" such that there are no ambiguities later, e.g. when contract conditions come under review, or treaty conditions. This attempt to achieve clarity and agreement connects us to the concepts of rules and rule-based activities. What's cheating versus what's allowed? What's meaningful and what's nonsensical? As I see it, these questions put us smack in the middle of PI territory. Whereas one may try to convert the gist of the PI into rather bland and mundane summary observations -- e.g. "meaning is best understood as a move in a game" -- what I find in the PI is an approach to real world challenges e.g. "let's abstract this particular practice as a rule-based game and come up with a computer model." Thanks to Wittgenstein, philosophy has been freed from a quagmire of specialized language games played only behind the walls of the Ivory Tower. The new pragmatism we have gained challenges us to tackle obsolete, broken language games across the board, sometimes countering these 'dying worlds' with 'new ways of looking' which bring 'new meaning' into the picture, along with a new sense of possibility and engagement.[1] In my book, philosophy is about actually designing *new* language games to do real work in the real world (which, in practice, is what many philosophers have historically done). We don't just sit around trading platitudes about "reality" and "language."[2] We invent and implement.[3] Our philosophy is reflected in the quality of our output, in our marketing campaigns, in our methods of recruiting and cultivating new talent, in our curricula, in our internal processes and decision-making. Notice how the law's attempts to nail it all down have gotten awkward in so many dimensions. Small print scrolls by at extreme speed during TV ads, while voiceover technology makes the oral delivery incredibly fast ("some restrictions may apply, rates subject to change without notice blah blah"). Gigantic multi-volume sets of books define "tax law" and such. The game is too big, too twisted, too full of exceptions, for anyone to really grasp (including the police/monitors/referees in many cases, who are supposed to trap violations). The frustration level is very high all around, people are just fed up, and that translates into a lot of lawyer jokes.[4] I'd argue this is a core anthropological phenomenon in western civ: its legal boilerplate is unable to keep pace with the times. But that's no great tragedy, or needn't be. Humans have proved themselves highly adaptable over time. We just need to create some new institutions, keeping what works and discarding a lot of what doesn't. We've done it before, we can do it again. And philosophy can help, is helping even now. On another front, we have computer languages, protocols, standards. Look at the global success of tcp/ip, http, nntp, smtp, ftp (check wikipedia for background). In terms of "energy slaves," our Fuller School has a veritable army doing its bidding, getting work done.[5] Like lawyers, when software engineers talk about modeling APIs (programmer interfaces) as "contracts", they're often talking about patches of code. And yes this code cumulatively represents many volumes. But there's a key difference: it's *self-executing* i.e. instead of relying on relatively slow-moving law clerk interpreters to push paper, we're relying on high speed electronics to keep up. Instead of only human police trapping violations, we have robocops (e.g. packet sniffers). The two trends are related. Lawyers and their rule books are falling further and further behind even as software systems, full of embedded agreements and standards, push global transactions into high gear. Container shipping has become automated in high degree. Sure, we still have a lot of longstanding laws, rules, customs to attend to, but more and more they're being implemented on computer and executed at superhuman speeds. By this time you're probably wondering what all this has to do with philosophy as currently practiced in academia by "doctors of philosophy", e.g. in 1879 Hall at Princeton University (where I studied the writings of Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kierkegaard and so on...). Well, there's a long tradition of investing in logic, and philosophers at least since Leibniz have dreamed that some kind of logic engine could be developed that would play a role in human affairs. Dr. Vannevar Bush refers to Leibniz in his milestone essay 'As We May Think' (Atlantic Monthly, July 1945). That article was about his futuristic vision of the MEMEX and the mechanization of our collective memory. Today, we speak of hypermedia and order pizza on-line.[6] In sum, I see Wittgenstein's language game based philosophy as providing good training for those working on new language games. Google Earth for example. We need to work out relationships between protocols, human practices, dreams and desires. How will RFID fit in? What level of privacy should we expect? What kinds of transactions are unethical? What kinds of research? What is tasteful, in terms of lifestyle, versus ugly self-indulgence? These are questions of ethics and aesthetics, long the province of philosophers, but also of artists, architects and engineers. In my view philosophy is about *creating* meaning in our lives. We're not just sitting back and absorbing the meanings others have already created. A lot of the jabber philosophers invented and considered meaningful in the past, is by now out of date, just as a lot of our contemporary stuff will be of fading relevance to future generations. Even though we share many of the same concerns as our forbearers, post linguistic turn philosophy has a different look and feel (as manifest in 'Philosophical Investigations'). Kirby 4D Solutions [1] On Ludwig Wittgenstein's Contribution to a Pragmatic Philosophy by Kirby Urner April 3, 1997: http://www.grunch.net/synergetics/lw.html [2] PI 97: "...Whereas, of course, if the words 'language', 'experience', 'world', have a use, it must be as humble as that of the words 'table', 'lamp', 'door'." [3] "We invent, implement.": http://www.grunch.net/synergetics/gst1.html [4] Lawyer jokes: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=lawyer+jokes&btnG=Search [5] Re "energy slaves" in my blog: http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2004/09/futurism-ii.html http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2005/01/mornings-meditation-energy-slaves.html [6] Re history of hypermedia: http://www.hypernav.com/hn04_history/hist02_hyptxsys.html |
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