Paradoxical Roots of “Social Construction”

science, science wars, social constructivism, social epistemology

David Kaiser reviews Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science by Mary Jo Nye.

Fifteen years ago, scientists, historians, and sociologists traded salvos in what was termed the “science wars.” Passions ran high; “social construction of science” became a battle cry. Critics like physicist Alan Sokal pointed an accusing finger at various humanists who had suggested that science was an inherently social phenomenon riven by rival interests rather than a rational pursuit of objective facts about the natural world. Some blamed the French sociologist Bruno Latour and his writings from the 1980s. Others highlighted members of the Edinburgh school of the sociology of scientif ic knowledge and their writings from the 1970s. Still others singled out Thomas Kuhn’s remarkably influential little treatise, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962.

Cognitive Enhancement

Andy Clark, cyborgs, extended cognitive systems, extended mind, externalism

An article from The Atlantic. Allen Buchanan interviewed about his recent book.

I think that any appeal to the notion of human nature, on either side of the enhancement debate, is tricky and problematic and has to be handled with care. Yes, in one sense we might say that it’s part of human nature to strive to improve our capacities. Humans have done this in the past by developing literacy and numeracy, and the institutions of science, and more recently we’ve done it with computers and the Internet. So, yes, if an alien were looking at humanity and asking “What is human nature?” one of the ingredients is going to be that these beings seem quite concerned with improving their capacities and they seem to have a knack for doing it.

On the other hand, sometimes people say that we shouldn’t engage with these technologies because we could somehow damage our nature or interfere with our nature, and in doing so they seem to have a kind of rosy pre-Darwinian view about human nature and about nature generally. They tend to think that an individual organism, a human being, is like the work of a master engineer—a delicately balanced, harmonious whole that’s the product of eons of exacting evolution.

Remembering Herbert Simon

bounded rationality, cognitive closure, cognitive science, complex adaptive systems, complexity, computational intelligence, consciousness, Deirdre McCloskey, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, Embedded, embodied cognition, extended cognitive systems, extended mind, externalism, herb gintis, Herbert Simon, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy, swarm, swarm behavior, swarm intelligence

Simon died this day in 2001. Check out these two books – Models of a Man (as with most edited books this is uneven, but there is still much to recommend it) and Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America, an excellent intellectual biography. Speaking of Simon, I have a paper coming out entitled “Mindscapes and Landscapes: Hayek and Simon on Cognitive Extension” to be found in a collection edited by Roger Frantz and Robert Leeson Hayek and Behavioural Economics” Vol 4 of Archival Insights into the Evolution of Economics with an introduction by non-other than Vernon Smith (whom I met in Tucson last May) and a host of other luminaries such as Herb Gintis, Deirdre McCloskey, Gerry Steele and others. Here is the abstract for my paper:

Hayek’s and Simon’s social externalism runs on a shared presupposition: mind is constrained in its computational capacity to detect, harvest, and assimilate “data” generated by the infinitely fine-grained and perpetually dynamic characteristic of experience in complex social environments. For Hayek, mind and sociality are co-evolved spontaneous orders, allowing little or no prospect of comprehensive explanation, trapped in a hermeneutically sealed, i.e. inescapably context bound, eco-system. For Simon, it is the simplicity of mind that is the bottleneck, overwhelmed by the ambient complexity of the environmental. Since on Simon’s account complexity is unidirectional, Simon is far more ebullient about the prospects of explanation. Hayek’s social externalism functions as a kind of distributed “extra-neural” memory store manifest as dynamic spontaneous orders. Simon’s organizational rule-governed externalism negotiates the “inner” world (the mind) with the “outer” world through a homeostatic interface that offloads the cognitive burden into the environment. Their respective externalisms may differ in detail but not in spirit in that it ameliorates their shared presupposition of cognitive constraint. Even though any “optimization talk” for Hayek and Simon is objectionable, knowledge acquisition can be represented by a contextualized stigmergic swarm optimization algorithm that gives due emphasis to both the individual and the environment. The key insight is that “perfect” knowledge is both unnecessary, impracticable and indeed irrelevant if one understands the mechanism at work in complex sociality, a stigmergic sociality that in effect augments or scaffolds cognition.

A Romp Through Philosophy of Mind

Identity Theory, philosophy of mind, physicalism

Here is the delightful Marianne Talbot (thrown out of school at 15 for “truancy and disruption”) presenting four podcasts:

Part 1: Identity Theory and Why it Won’t Work

Part 2: Non-Reductive Physicalisms and the Problems they Face

Part 3: If Physicalism won’t work, what is the alternative?

Part 4: Are we asking the wrong questions?

New EPISTEME url update

episteme, epistemology, social epistemology

I want to bring your attention to the primary EPISTEME url.

No longer will the extentions eu.com/us.com be valid.

Here is Cambridge University Press’ EPISTEME page.

A Disposition of Delight

aesthetics, companion to michael oakeshott, conservatism, elizabeth corey, liberal education, liberalism, philosophy of history, philosophy of social science, poetry, political philosophy, rationalism, rationalism in politics, rationality

My chum and the new president of the Michael Oakeshott Association, Elizabeth Corey, has just had this article published in First Things. Since this article is by subscription, I will only post a couple of extracts that caught my eye. Elizabeth is an excellent scholar whose chapter entitled “The Religious Sensibility of Michael Oakeshott” will be appearing in Paul and my edited book A Companion to Michael Oakeshott – see here for the table of contents. Anyway, here are the two extracts from Elizabeth’s article:

This disposition of delight can be detected throughout Oakeshott’s corpus—in his notion of the poetic character of experience, his love of conversation, his fondness for all activities that might he pursued as ends in themselves: friendship, liberal learning, poetry, and fishing, among many others.

Oakeshott’s insight into the conservative disposition is actually quite simple. It is that in responding to the excesses of contemporary liberalism and progressivism, as well as to Rationalism when it appears among conservatives, we ought not to compete on Rationalist terms, as if yet another mission statement or manifesto or policy could save us. The work of conservatives is above all to identify, preserve, and enjoy, and in doing so rejuvenate, those good traditions and institutions that remain, especially those activities that may appear pointless and wasteful from the perspective of those who want only to maximize utility: the life-giving activities and pleasures of poetry, liberal learning, conversation, friendship, and love.

Seeing What You Mean

Alva Noë, brain science, cognition, cognitive science, Embedded, embodied cognition, embodiment, emotion, empathy, extended mind, externalism, neural correlates, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, situated cognition, speech

Brief Alva Noë article.

Knowledge Has Always Been Networked

constructing the world, constructivism, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, Heidegger, internet, Marshall McLuhan, network theory, networks, social cognition, social connectionism, social constructivism, social epistemology, social facts, social networking, social ontology, social reality

Here is a rather scathing review of David Weinberger’s Too Big To Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room.

The renaissance of Marshall McLuhan in the era of the Web is disappointing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its rather dull obviousness. There is little surprise that the quotable, evidence-free, technology-obsessed Canadian English professor would thrive in a technology-obsessed era where pithy quotes about the deep meaning of digital devices too often stands in for evidence. McLuhan, of course, was the master theorist of the medium; beyond the over-used “medium is the message,” McLuhan’s major insight was to argue that socio-technological systems — such as the media — operate on a grand scale, largely independent of the day-to-day interest us mere mortals might have in their actual content. McLuhan’s primary flaw, on the other hand, was to decouple this understanding of socio-technical system from any relationship to economics, politics, or society. As leading communications theorist James Carey put it, “McLuhan sees the principal effect [of communication technology] as impacting sensory organization and thought. McLuhan has much to say about perception and thought but little to say about institutions.”

German philosopher Martin Heidegger is less quoted in Silicon Valley than Marshall McLuhan, and not just because he was a Nazi. McLuhan and Heidegger are equally poor writers, but whereas McLuhan’s inscrutable prose has led to him being more read than he ought to be, unintelligibility has had the opposite outcome for Heidegger. A dazzlingly complex philosopher — probably the greatest of the 20th century — the most important aspect of Heidegger’s thought for our purposes is his understanding that human beings (or rather “Dasein,” “being-in-the-world”) are always thrown into a particular context, existing within already existing language structures and pre-determined meanings. In other words, the world is like the web, and we, Dasein, live inside the links.