Abstract
There is a double puzzle that Thomas Kuhn collects in certain wellknown remarks in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that compellingly links the theory of science and the theory of human inquiry — in effect, the theory of cognizing agents, of selves, of persons. One may doubt that Kuhn has formed an entirely coherent picture of the sciences, but there can be no question that he has completely neglected the analysis of what a human being must be like in order to live and work in the world he posits. Kuhn’s linking these two issues remains instructive, nevertheless. For he grasps its paradoxical features in a way that does not really depend on the validity of his own account of the historicized sciences; and what he does say about the sciences is quite compatible with (indeed, it memorably instantiates) a number of very large doctrines that the entire sweep of Western philosophy may fairly now be said to be converging upon. These include at least: (a) the rejection of all forms of cognitive transparency and privilege; (b) the indissoluble unity of realist and idealist elements in any plausible theory of the sciences; (c) the conceptual symbiosis of cognizing self and cognized world; and (d) the matched historicity of self, science, and world.1 Doctrines (a)—(d) dissolve any hierarchical advantage that might otherwise be assigned so-called naturalistic and phenomenological theories vis-à-vis one another and fix at the same time the sense in which theories of either sort could incorporate so-called deconstructive or poststructuralist exposés of their own pretensions regarding any form of cognitive transparency.
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Notes
These issues are taken up in Joseph Margolis, Science without Unity: Reconciling the Natural and Human Sciences (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), Chs. 3–4.
See Joseph Margolis, Pragmatism without Foundations: Reconciling Realism and Relativism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions., 2nd ed. enl. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 118.
Ibid., p. 121.
Ibid., p. 120.
Ibid., pp. 126–127.
Ibid., p. 195; italics added.
Ibid., p. 193.
Ibid., p. 195.
Ibid., p. 200.
The point is essentially missed by Donald Davidson. “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). The mistake is of the greatest importance.
The detailed argument is given in Science without Unity.
See Clyde Kluckhohn et al., “Values and Value-Orientation in the Theory of Action,” Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils (eds.), Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1951); and Florence Kluckhohn and Fred L. Strodbeck. Variations in Value Orientations (Evanston: Row, Peterson, 1981).
This may be taken to be part of the force of W.V. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953). Quine’s explicit remarks on this issue may be found in his Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 11–12, 59–61.
See Isaac Levi, The Enterprise of Knowledge (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980), p. 375. Levi’s own theory of knowledge and inquiry attempts to preserve a measure of methodological invariance while admitting our dependence, contextually, on a changing corpus of knowledge. It also entails a very curious view of “epistemological infallibility.” Chs. 1–3, for instance at pp. 67–68: also p. 13. See, also, the exchange on Isaac Levi’s “Truth, Fallibility and the Growth of Knowledge,” involving Israel Scheider and Avishai Margalit, in Robert S. Cohen and Marx Wartofsky (eds.), Language, Logic and Method (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983).
For a specimen version of inductivism, see Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Reduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938); see, also, Karl R. Popper, Realism and the Aim of Science, ed. W.W. Bartley, III (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983). Part I, Ch. 1. For a specimen of extensionalism, see Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984); see, also, Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (Cambridge University Press, 1975), Ch. 12. Some specimens of the programs in question are examined in some depth in Pragmatism without Foundations and Science without Unity.
See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak Chakravorty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
See W.V. Quine, The Roots of Reference (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1974), pp. 20–24.
See, for example, Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), § 54; and Roderick M. Chisholm, The First Person (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), Ch. 7.
See Moritz Schlick, “The Foundation of Knowledge,” trans. David Rynin, in A.J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism, (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. 1959). Schlick excludes the possibility of error associated with protocol sentences (under Otto Neurath’s barrage) by insisting that we are capable of cognizing “the absolute fixed points” of empirical science — given by what Schlick came to call an “observation statement” (as opposed to a “genuine protocol statement”), “always of the form ‘Here now so and so’. because in a certain sense they cannot be written down at all.” pp. 221, 223, 225.
The most subtle contemporary exploration of this question designed to salvage what can be salvaged from the Cartesian cogito may well be that of Roderick M. Chisholm. First Person (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1981), p. 90. See, also, Hector-Neri Castañeda, “He: A Study in the Logic of Self-Consciousness,” Ratio, VIII (1966); Elizabeth Anscombe, “The First Person,” in Samuel Guttenplan (ed.). Mind and Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).
The argument is given in Pragmatism without Foundations, Ch. 10. Cf. also, Alvin I. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).
See Science without Unity, Ch. 3.
See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vols. 1 and 2, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, 1985).
Apart from Gadamer, one may mention Taylor’s and Maclntyre’s views as specimens of traditionalism. See, for instance, Charles Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” in Richard Rorty et al. (eds.), Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1984).
See Paul K. Feyerabend, Against Method (London: New Left Books, 1975).
Marjorie Grene, “The Paradoxes of Historicity,” in Brice R. Wachterhauser, Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986) pp. 168–169.
Ibid, p. 169. Cf. Marjorie Grene, The Understanding of Nature (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974).
For an account of the “incarnate,” see Science without Unity, Ch. 9; Joseph Margolis, Culture and Cultural Entities (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), Ch. 1.
See Pragmatism without Foundations, Ch. 11.
For a fuller sense of the use of the term “Intentional” =df “cultural”, see Science without Unity, Chs. 7, 9.
See N. Tinbergen, A Study of Instinct, with a new introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); and Culture and Cultural Entities, Ch. 3.
See David Premack, Gavagail (Cambridge: MIT Press 1986).
Donald Davidson, “Agency,” Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980); Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1973.
See for instance Stephen P. Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983); also, Science without Unity, Ch. 5.
The latter theme is pursued most systematically by Danto. See his Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); and The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). I have examined Danto’s account in “Ontology Down and Out in Art and Science,” forthcoming in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Cf., also; Joseph Margolis, Art and Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1980).
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Margolis, J. (1989). The Technological Self. In: Byrne, E.F., Pitt, J.C. (eds) Technological Transformation. Philosophy and Technology, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2597-7_1
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