Oakeshott on Science as a Mode of Experience

michael oakeshott

Here is the intro to Byron’s essay from the Zygon symposium..

The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men . . . science and religion are genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure house. Neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other’s simultaneous use. And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality? —William James ([1902] 2002, 122)

But the comparative freedom of the artist springs not from any faculty of wakefulness (not from any opposition to the dream) but from his power to dream more profoundly; his genius is to dream that he is dreaming. And it is this that distinguishes him from the scientist, whose perverse genius is to dream that he is awake. The project of science . . . is to solve the mystery, to wake us from our dream, to destroy the myth: and were this project fully achieved, not only should we find ourselves awake in a profound darkness, but a dreadful insomnia would settle upon mankind, no less intolerable for being only a nightmare. —Michael Oakeshott ([1947] 1975, 160)

Despite the ominous language of the latter passage, we must not be misled into jumping to the wrong conclusion with regard to Michael Oakeshott’s overall verdict on science. Oakeshott had a rather favorable, if detached, appreciation of natural science. He employed, as indeed was fit given the general exposition of the subject matter of Experience and Its Modes (1933), a neutral way of positing science as one among the most prestigious of modes of experience. Nevertheless, the mood expressed in the quoted passage contrasting literature and science, casting the latter in an unfavorable light, is genuinely negative and genuinely Oakeshottian. It serves as a reminder, at this early stage of our discussion, of the need for stressing the interrelationships of areas exhibited within Oakeshott’s oeuvre, interrelationships that must be set as the interpretative key in any understanding of what he was trying to convey. Oakeshott did not care to pose as either an apologist for or a detractor of science, except to criticize aberrations of the scientific mode of experience he identified as scientism (as he did also in the case of analogous deformations of the other modes). It is such a scientism that is castigated in the dictum quoted at the start: a scientism that does not let other voices be heard, scientism as a “superstition about scientific enquiry” ([1947] 1993, 99), the “neo-Pelagian assumption” (p. 105).

Notwithstanding his judicious way of laying down the elements of the scientific mind, however, Oakeshott’s treatment of science is at some points ambiguous, not free of contradictions,2 and at times doctrinaire and repetitive. It is thus difficult, if not superficial, to catalogue it. His view may strike some contemporary readers as naive in certain respects, given significant postwar developments in the history and philosophy of science. His position may seem narrow or austere, given the proliferation of contemporary proposals in favor of subtler models of science or the recent radical reappraisal of experiments and their place in scientific practice or the more elaborate “theories of theories” in science currently discussed. To so judge Oakeshott, however, for failing to envisage where the course of intellectual fashion would be heading, merely by reading pages of his from the 1930s or even later, would certainly be an anachronism no less than an injustice committed against the fecundity and the relative complexity of his thought on science.

His views of science, although not intricate in their detail, are complex in their relationship to other areas of his thought. Given that contemporary developments themselves are ridden with internal tensions, Oakeshott’s views should not be judged as flat or unrefined as they may appear after a first reading. To be sure, philosophy of science has become enormously more sophisticated and is currently on a roller-coaster course of ever more diffuse and richer hybrids of historical, sociological, philosophical approaches or other interdisciplinary blends.

Oakeshott’s treatment of science is quite interesting when assessed from the point of view of his entire work, juxtaposed to what he has to say about religion, politics, and art. To hold that there is a distinctively Oakeshottian view of science as opposed to simply “Oakeshott’s views on science” is questionable. Interest is appreciably increased when his views on science are placed either in juxtaposition to other intellectual developments or in relation to his overall philosophical outlook. The latter holds both in relation to the negative side—his celebrated critique of what he takes as technical rationalism (“raisonnement” [1991, 25]) to be, that is, his rejection of any “scientific politics” or the wrong type of “philosophical politics,” as well as in relation to his more positive pronouncements regarding religion and art.

I do not think that, as far (and only as far) as my present theme is concerned, there is significant alteration in Oakeshott’s ideas that would warrant any logical inconsistency. What he has to say about science in his later work On Human Conduct (1975), or briefly in other places, does not constitute a major departure from that in Experience and Its Modes. Compared to his later works, such as “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” ([1959] 1991), which could be more readily reappropriated by contemporary thinkers within a political or social context, Experience and Its Modes is a work directly relevant to discussions of science. It is thus better suited to facilitate links with modern epistemological pursuits such as holism, the underdetermination thesis, the Duhem-Quine thesis, reductionism, the notion of scientific paradigms or conceptual schemes, unity of science, the (ir)relevance of ontological claims to morality, or scientific essentialism and the return of naturalism.

I offer a reconstruction of certain central theses of his so as to stress interrelationships within his overall scheme that both illuminate and cast a critical light on his position on science. I also draw lines of connection reaching to some major developments outside Oakeshott in order to see if his somewhat isolated status could be lessened but also in order to enrich our understanding of his work thanks to some light from these other sources. Suitably but consistently reconstructed, Oakeshott himself may be seen as a source of such light, too, cast on others.

One of my main claims is that Oakeshott reserves an elevated status for philosophy, as he conceives it. Philosophy is the logical ground of the modes of experience. Philosophy envelops the modes while, in turn, their analysis envelops one of them—science. There is in this a series of nested relations. Instead of following an order of exposition starting bluntly with what Oakeshott has to say about science in particular and in isolation and then trying to connect this with the rest, by ascending toward the more general, I do the reverse: I follow a logical order of nested relations moving from philosophy to modes to science. This is in congruence with what he says in On Human Conduct (1975, 10–11) where he invokes the notion of “conditional understanding”—that is, inquiry into a certain field, which rests on prior epistemological postulates or conditions—an equivalent to modes. This exhibits a structure of nested levels of ascending unconditionality, each level of conditional understanding moving higher up from studying a certain item to studying its postulates and on toward the next higher level of studying the conditions of the one immediately below (for example, from identifying a thunderstorm to studying it as an electromagnetic event; from recognizing a piece of paper as of a certain form to studying the geometrical properties of this form and onward to studying the postulates of geometry itself, and so forth). Yet, compared to the earlier Experience and Its Modes, in On Human Conduct we learn something crucial having to do with the unattainable position of philosophy: that there is no highest level of total unconditionality from which to inspect the scala of the lower ones, nor is there such one in relation to which each and every partial understanding is to be asserted. There is only a perpetual process.

A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 12

A Confederacy of Dunces

” . . . Some poor white from Mississippi told the dean that I was a propagandist for the Pope, which was patently untrue. I do not support the current Pope. He does not at all fit my conception of a good, authoritarian Pope. Actually, I am quite opposed to the relativism of modern Catholicism quite violently. However, the boldness of this ignorant lily-white redneck fundamentalist led my other students to form a committee to demand that I grade and return their accumulated essays and examinations. There was even a small demonstration outside the window of my office. It was rather dramatic. For being such simple, ignorant children, they managed it quite well. At the height of the demonstration I dumped all of the old papers – , ungraded, of course – out of the window and right onto the students’ heads. The college was too small to accept this act of defiance against the abyss of contemporary academia” (p. 45).

The socially extended mind

extended mind

Spot on Shaun!!! This is exactly what I’ve been banging on about over the past six years – very nice validation from a top-notch theorist. The fruits of my labour will be available in its full form next year as a book entitled Stigmergic Cognition.

Consciousness and the social mind

social cognition

Here is the intro to Phil’s piece.

Emotion is a hot topic, getting hotter all the time. The reasons for this enthusiasm are various, but the growth of neuroscientific interest in the area surely ranks high among them. The same goes for another hot topic: social cognition. Within the last two decades, two subfields of neuroscience have emerged: affective neuroscience, the study of the neural mechanisms underlying emotion and emotional feeling; and social neuroscience, the study of the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition. The parallel development of these new brain sciences is no accident. As Damasio (1994) makes clear, emotional and social functioning are deeply intertwined, since practical rationality is scaffolded by the ability to feel one’s way through the world, the social world included. This is now a familiar theme in cognitive science. Less familiar is the idea that the link between emotional and social functioning identified by Damasio forms part of a constellation of connections between consciousness (in the phenomenal, ‘what it’s like’ sense; see Nagel, 1974) and social cognition. In this paper, I try to identify some of these other connections, and to explore their implications for how we think about the conscious mind in general.

The plan of the paper goes like this. In the first part, I argue that a wide swath of consciousness is a product of the social mind, as it arises from cognitive operations dedicated to processing information about the domain of persons. I begin by describing two phenomena that have attracted considerable attention in the empirical literature. The first is social pain: the affect associated with the perception of actual or potential damage to one’s interpersonal relations. The second phenomenon of interest is affective contagion: the tendency for emotions, moods, and other affective states to spread from person to person as a consequence of social perception. Neuroscientific investigation of these phenomena suggests that affective consciousness depends on perception of the social world in much the same way that it depends on perception of the body. It appears, in short, that consciousness is a ‘socially embodied’ capacity, in two senses of the term (articulated below). In the second part of the paper I look at the flip side of this thematic coin. Here I argue that the distinctive sociality of our species, especially its moral dimension, rests heavily on our ability to represent the conscious states of others. In closing, I try to connect the two main claims of the paper – the claim that consciousness is essentially social, and the claim that thinking about consciousness is socially essential – by showing how they jointly point to a kind of circular causal-mechanistic nexus between consciousness and social mindedness.

Jazz as conversation

Louis Armstrong

Jesse Norman, a prominent Oakeshottian, has this article in The Independent on “Pops'” autobiography which I too have recently read. The conceptual overlap between Jazz and the Oakeshott notion of conversation is uncannily similar. I couldn’t express my reaction to “Pops'” autobiography any better than Jesse:

The book is peopled by a vast Runyonesque array of hoodlums and heroes, the dialogue crackles like a bush fire, and the whole is borne along on a huge billow of brio and good humour. Louis has his own ethical code, but he never preaches.

Alongside the jokes and japes, he makes you feel his moments of pain and frustration and anger – and his awesome capacity for hard work. Forget jazz; this book gives Louis Armstrong good claim to be considered one of the great American prose stylists in his own right.

Here are my previous posts to Pops. The featured photo is of me handling one of Pops’ trumpets. One of the most memorable experiences in recent memory. Thanks to Ricky Riccardi for making this happen (buy his biography of Pops – it’s a great read).

Oakeshott on the Character of Religious Experience: Need There be a Conflict Between Science and Religion?

oakeshott

Here is the intro from Tim Fuller’s essay from Zygon.

Michael Oakeshott rarely acknowledged specific intellectual debts. In Experience and Its Modes (1933), however, he cited as major influences on his thinking G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893). Oakeshott was invoking the tradition of Hegelian/British idealism, knowing that he was swimming against the tide of philosophic fashion. What did he get from this philosophic tradition? Human experience is our world: “Experiencing and what is experienced are, taken separately, meaningless abstractions. . . . The character of what is experienced is, in the strictest sense, correlative to the manner in which it is experienced. These two abstractions stand to one another in the most complete interdependence; they compose a single whole” (Oakeshott 1933, 9). For Oakeshott “there is nothing whatever which is not experience,” and “there can be no experience which does not involve thought or judgment” (1933, 251).

A number of things follow, for Oakeshott. He sought to understand arguments by uncovering the assumptions or postulates on the basis of which each party to an argument seeks a coherent understanding of experience, thereby clarifying how each makes sense of its experience. He pursued not refutation or advocacy but rather descriptions that show the assumptions at work to support conclusions reached on each side; he preferred to turn debate toward conversation and to treat arguments as conversational gambits. Talk is interminable so long as there are human beings. The aim of the philosophic inquirer is to understand better the voices offering accounts of what is already given in experience. The philosopher does not resolve disputes but gives an account of why they are the way they are, and also why from the perspective of each participant the alternatives may seem mistaken or irrelevant. He did not think that victories inevitably deepen insight or that defeats reveal lack of insight. The philosophic quest is for experience as a whole “unmodified.” “Thinking,” he said, “is not a professional matter. . . . It is something we may engage in without putting ourselves in competition; it is something independent of the futile effort to convince or persuade” (1933, 7).

Oakeshott was of a stoic disposition, disinclined to engage in quixotic ventures to change the world or set it right, whatever that might mean. He once remarked to me that Don Quixote was the prototype of the modern rationalist, that Cervantes’ great work was both the anticipation and the critique of modern rationalism. Oakeshott did not always attain detachment, but his disposition was to do so. He saluted Montaigne, who had seen that reasoning is the faculty that makes us human but also produces the ordeal of consciousness that makes us problematic for ourselves. We self-conscious beings impose snares and traps on ourselves and then have to figure out how to deal with them. We continually interpret—well or ill—the world. Our reason leads into difficulties and then to contrivances to escape them. There is no reliable definition of progress. Thus Oakeshott identified himself as a skeptic: one who would “do better if he only knew how” ([1951] 1991, 44).

He recognized as unending the task of comprehending the whole of experience. Given that, grasping the order of reality would ever elude us. We usually settle for abridgements—interpretations of experience through which visions of order from various perspectives may be attained. Some of these interpretations (arrests in thought) get sufficiently elaborated—even equipped with a method of inquiry that may be taught and learned—to turn into modes of experience. A mode is a powerful human invention (although its emergence may take a long time) for making sense of the world to its adherents, binding together individuals in associations that explore the world from their chosen modal perspectives. Each of these modes makes sense in its own terms but can at most achieve the appearance of universality by marginalizing experiences that threaten the coherence (and thus the satisfaction) of the understanding its adherents have come to defend. The coherence of each is abstract—that is, abstracted from the whole it seeks to understand. Imperial tendencies lurk among the adherents of each of these modes, tempting claims of methodological competence to assess critically the alternative modes and experience as a whole; each mode will tend to explain all of experience in terms of its own assumptions.

In Experience and Its Modes (1933) Oakeshott discussed the “historical,” “scientific,” and “practical” modes of experience. He thought they currently “represent the main arrests or modifications in experience,” coexisting as abstractions from the whole of experience, attempting, each in its own way, to abate the mystery of human self-understanding (p. 84). The historical mode knows experience as past experience; the scientific mode knows it as stable, quantitative relationships; the practical mode lives by the tension between what is and what ought to be.

As long as a mode remains content within itself it remains coherent to itself. When it steps out into other realms it begins to confront its own abstractness:

It belongs to the nature of an abstract world of experience to be self-contained, sovereign and to lie beyond the interference of any other world of experience, so long as it confines itself within the limits which constitute its character. Of course, if it oversteps itself, an abstract world of experience immediately becomes vulnerable, and of course, in the end, it must overstep itself, demand to be judged as embodying a complete assertion of reality: but so long as it remains faithful to its own explicit character, even the concrete totality of experience itself cannot compete with it on its own ground. History, Science, and Practice, as such, and each within its own world, are beyond the relevant interference of philosophic thought. (p. 332)

In short, as long as a mode enters no dialectical engagement with other modes, or with a philosophic inquirer, it is protected from subversion by excluding what it wants to consider extraneous.

The Dynamically Extended Mind – A Minimal Modeling Case Study

extended mind, externalism

This from Froese, Gershenson, and Rosenblueth.

The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A prominent critique of this claim holds that when some part of the world is coupled to a cognitive system this does not necessarily entail that the part is also constitutive of that cognitive system. This critique is known as the “coupling-constitution fallacy”. In this paper we respond to this reductionist challenge by using an evolutionary robotics approach to create a minimal model of two acoustically coupled agents. We demonstrate how the interaction process as a whole has properties that cannot be reduced to the contributions of the isolated agents. We also show that the neural dynamics of the coupled agents has formal properties that are inherently impossible for those neural networks in isolation. By keeping the complexity of the model to an absolute minimum, we are able to illustrate how the coupling-constitution fallacy is in fact based on an inadequate understanding of the constitutive role of nonlinear interactions in dynamical systems theory.

A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 11

A Confederacy of DuncesWrite a comment

“Employers sense in me a denial of their values” (p. 44).

Check out the lovely work of Matt Dawson, the artist behind the featured image.