Intelligibility and he Birth of Paradigm

"Paradigm" is a word that refers to the grand unifying ideas that underpin our understanding of a phenomenon - perhaps all phenomena. Paradigms shift slowly as the old "believers" die and a new generation is open to new ways of thinking.

"Understanding" in this case is mostly about language: about how we talk to each other. If two people  subscribe to the same paradigm what they say to each other is intelligible - it "makes sense". Challenges to the paradigm always come in the form of impertinent questions. Why impertinent? Because the question comes out of left field. It makes no sense.

A successful challenge to the paradigm expands and revises language itself, so that it becomes possible to speak in new ways that "make sense". In the new paradigm, the old language is no longer intelligible. For example, we don't expect to see references to "phlogiston" or the "luminous aether" in modern scientific journals because "we" no longer speak of fire as a substance and no longer think electromagnetic waves are waves in a substance.

Accordingly, we entertain a few "impertinent questions" in this blog, recognizing that, to many readers, such questions "make no sense". The challenge is not simply to convince the reader of a proposition that makes sense but doesn't seem "true", but to drag the reader into a new way of thinking and speaking. Extending language.

• One of the core questions asked in my blogs is "Assuming you need a brain to have a mind, is that all you need?" This challenges two paradigms - the religious claim that the "soul" is independent of the body and the skeptical one that claims that mind is an epiphenomenon of physical brain activity. For most readers, it's hard to imagine what a third alternative would look like.
• Another impertinent question asks if there is any reason to suspect that money measures value. The entire discipline of economics assumes that value is somehow measurable and that the best measure is money. I equate economics with astrology - a "science" based on fundamentally wrong assumptions about the way the world works. It's just a way for "economists" to talk to each other with words that they all agree "make sense". It's a paradigm.

MacIntyre and "Intelligibility"

Alisdair MacIntyre is a major reformer of modern philosophy, still kicking at the time of writing at the age of 87. He is particularly noted for his treatment of ethics in "After Virtue".

His ethical treatment of  economics are discussed here

Fore the purpose of this blog, his main contribution is the concept of "intelligibility". How do you regard one system of ethics as superior or "more advanced" than another? His answer is that, in an advanced system, "lesser" systems are at least "intelligible". For example, we can understand the idea of chopping off heads to make the sun rise every day even if we abhor it. On the other hand, "modern" ideas of tolerance, forgiveness and justice may not have made sense to the average Aztec.

I like this idea as an alternative to slugging away and trying to prove ourselves "right", which has resulted only in the exponential growth of philosophical papers nobody reads. We need to start with the more modest goal of just making sense to each other.
By the way, ethics is one of the fields of philosophy that escapes Bennetts wrath and he shares many of Bennett's complaints about the emptiness of modern philosophical discourse. It's at least potentially useful, which means I can imagine that a civil conversation between myself, MacIntyre and Bennett is at least imaginable.

A Good Place to Start

"I think, therefore I am". So began Descartes in his attempt to build a comprehensive picture of reality, starting with what he knew for sure. Like many philosophers, he pretended to mimic the newly-discovered certainty of Mathematics.  Descartes was barking up the wrong tree and his "axiom" instantly hit a dead end. Strangely enough, there are more than a few mystics, philosophers and neuroscientists who would doubt even Descarte's "axiom". The "self" may turn out to be an illusion.

In the Universe we happen to inhabit, there is no sure path from "simple" to "complex". We need to start somewhere else. That's good news, since it turns out that we all know a Hell of a lot more than we thought we did. As Descartes realized, it's all uncertain to some degree, but that need not stop us from exploring an uncertain world. After all, we don't have an option.

We learn very little about our minds by comparing them to the "minds" of chimpanzees, cats and frogs. If we assume that our minds are "nothing but" two pounds of meat on our shoulders, we succeed in explaining nothing while ignoring everything we know about our minds from first-hand experience.

I'd like to share with you some ideas that I have found helpful in the hope that you will too. My aim is to be intelligible, not necessarily "right" or "wrong" (that's up to you). This turns out to be a key policy for moving forward. Descartes was preoccupied with certainty. He wanted to find things that were absolutely true. Our goal is much more modest: to talk about the ideas we share, whether they are right or wrong. The most important aspect of ideas is that they are shared [4].

We will be wandering through a maze of connected ideas. Feel free to wander. There is no "start" or "end". My hope is that we will gain some valuable experience by wandering around together. Our journey starts where Descartes' left off: by understanding what Descartes meant (or should have meant) by "I and "think" [5].

Historically speaking, great advances are made not by answering the great questions but by realizing we were asking the wrong questions and we need to replace them by new, more productive lines of thought.  What we need is a way to conduct a dialogue that makes sense to all parties, together with a way to understand our differences, especially those differences that seem so important, heated and intractable.

I have worked on many other blogs. While I will probably update them from time to time, this blog continues and replaces two of them. I'll attempt to cross-link the blogs where that seems preferable to copying posts wholesale from one blog to another.

• Diary of a Christian Skeptic documents the long "spiritual" path I took from an early age to the present in search of answers to the "big questions". I no longer consider Christianity or any particular religion to be of central importance, but, being born in a "Christian" culture, I needed to fight my way through the assumptions of this culture that were woven into the my thought patterns from childhood.
• The Programmable Ape documents my struggle to understand social organizations as living things in their own right, together with the way we are "assimilated" into these organizations, often resulting in surrender of humanity to mechanical rules and non-human goals. The current blog will continue to expand this theme, making such concepts as "assimilation" more precise and useful while adding precision to the "dragon" concept itself." I don't think you can understand human organizations simply by understanding the human beings that make them up. It turns out that this is a special case of the futility of reductionism, of which I will have much to say.
• Zen of Value is a related blog - a "work in progress" that is devoted to the study of one meme: value. The "Mind" is a super computer between our ears that can instantly calculate value. Computers and economists work only with money, which is not the same thing at all.

Notes: (I will try to provide comments and important off-page links at the bottom of the topic, like this, to make it easier to verify the links are all working and to avoid too much clutter in he main text).

[1] A detailed biography is supplied [here]

[2] "Mind" is a central topic, introduced [here]
[3] Deleted
[4] This a radical transformation of the way we think of language. It is certainly not "like" a branch of Mathematics and not mainly concerned with "truth or falsehood" or even conveying "information" in the modern sense. Language events take place in the "Universe of Discourse" described by Hofstadter [here].
[5] Douglas Hofstadter helps us out by shedding a bright light on "I", the most important idea of all which turns out to tell us what "you" means and a lot about the "meaning of meaning".

I warmly welcome your comments.