KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA31 (van Fraassen / Feyerabend)

Commentary 7

SCIENCE, ABUNDANCE, AND ABSTRACTION
by Ernst von Glasersfeld
November 2000, posted 5 December 2000

<1>
On the first pages of his introduction to CONQUEST OF ABUNDANCE, Paul Feyerabend describes a paradoxical aspect of the general attitude towards science. He quotes Jacques Monod and comments: "The destruction caused by the progress of science cannot be described more clearly. But, of course, the progress of science is supposed to be something positive and eminently humane. The questions are thus to what extent this destruction helped humanity (or a privileged part of it), how much damage was done, and what is the balance ?" (PF, 1999. p.6).

At the center of the turmoil about the presidential election in the United States lies a somewhat similar paradox. Elections are the pillar of democracy because they manifest "the will of the people". No election, some pundits tell us, is quite perfect and most are marred by flaws and irregularities. But we have to put up with these distortions of "the will of the people", because any mistrust of elections is bound to undermine democracy.

Both cases reflect a general but unfortunate trend: MEANS that have worked well tend to become ENDS in themselves. If science is to benefit humanity, we should try to make its progress less destructive; and if democracy is desirable, this is no reason why the will of the people should not be recorded in the best possible way.

PF does not explicitly say this, but as he has frequently assured us that he is not an ENEMY of science, I think he came to see that scientific knowledge was neither the only nor perhaps the most important thing to be pursued.

<2>
THE POSSIBILITY OF NON-SCIENTIFIC APPROACHES TO THE WORLD

Years ago, PF was widely criticized for his expression "anything goes" (PF, 1975, p.23). The critics chose to interpret the phrase as a general maxim, disregarding that PF was speaking of scientific hypotheses and that the context made clear that the "goes" was intended to refer to approaches that had never been seriously tested for viability.

Perhaps earlier, but certainly since FAREWELL TO REASON (1987), PF expanded his philosophical focus beyond the domain of science and became more and more interested in exploring a philosophy of thinking and living that might counteract the maniacal preoccupation with technological progress and scientific knowledge. He hoped to bring about a change of view, by exposing the arbitrariness of the conceptual restrictions the scientific orientation has imposed in order to reduce, simplify, and make more manageable specific domains of experience. A demonstration of the hollowness of the claim of "objectivity" would, he thought, liberate humans to be human in a living space that was far greater and richer than the area admitted by the scientific dogma.

PF was keenly aware of the arts, including music and the theatre, and it may have been the phenomenon of artistic experience that first convinced him that there are ways of participating in the world that lie outside the rational, scientific domain.

His last book was to be a further and more explicit plea for conceptual liberation. He quotes Baxandall (PF, 1999, p.27-28) and comments: " ... language is not the only "conspiracy" ... a conspiracy-free experience that can be arranged «into manageable parcels» does not exist" (p.28).

<3>
LANGUAGE AND OTHER "CONSPIRACIES"

PF agrees with Baxandall that language imposes a specific structure on parcels of experience. But he adds that this is not the only "conspiracy". He mentions music, money, and caricatures as moving "attention away from the concrete" and imprinting "stable stereotypes on the continuum of facial expression". (p.28).

In my view, the "imprinting of stable stereotypes" is not confined to caricatures. The drive to configure experience so as to enable the subject to repeat at least some pleasant events and to avoid some unpleasant ones, begins during the child's first year, months before its conceptual development comes under the domination of language. Other living creatures, too, arrange experience into manageable parcels WITHOUT language. Birds, for instance, "abstract" the location of their nest from the visual chaos of whatever they "see" as landscape, just as I can "abstract" a heap in the forest as a landmark, without ever giving it a name.

<4>
THE AMBIGUITY OF "ABSTRACTION"

Herbert Muller makes a relevant point: "But the word "abstraction" can be misleading. Structuration does not mean taking something away from "objects", as one might infer from the word "abs-trahere". On the contrary: we are dealing here with an aspect of the dynamics of the concept-tools that are constructed and added by us, ... " (TA31, C3 <14>). In this context, it is useful to remember Piaget's notion of reflective abstraction, which is indeed taking something away from objects and events - but this something is not the sensory material they involve. Instead it is the experiencer's pattern of operating that PRODUCED the object or event in the first place, which is "abstracted" as a pattern in order to be applied elsewhere in the pursuit of some purpose.

<5>
THE SUBJECTIVITY OF PHENOMENA

From this constructivist perspective, there can be no such thing as a phenomenon without an observer. Phenomena are appearances and appearances need someone to whom they appear. It is therefore rather misleading, if Preston writes that, according to PF's view, the "search for reality" in Western civilisation "has a strong negative component: it does not accept phenomena AS THEY ARE, but changes them. These changes involve simplifications, in which the particulars and relations which distinguish things one from another are removed by abstraction. But what remains is then called "real", and regarded as more important than the original totality!" (TA31,C1,<7>, my emphasis).

I think one can interpret PF as thinking of "the original totality" as something very like what Herbert Muller calls "the unstructured" and I, following Kant, "the manifold". In other words, it can be seen as the chaotic raw material on which the human observer "imprints" patterns of coordination and thus forms stereotypic concepts of things, relations, processes, and events.

<6>
NO EXPERIENCE WITHOUT AN EXPERIENCER

The second half of PF's comment is not nearly as transparent. From my constructivist point of view, I can make the somewhat snooty remark that it makes no sense to say that experience exists or does not exist. Experience is HAD by a subject, who may or may not remember it. But this is not what really concerns me. My question is: can I HAVE experience that is "conspiracy-free", i.e., unstructured? William James spoke of "one big blooming buzzing Confusion ... that is the baby's universe; and the universe of all of us is still to a great extent such a Confusion, potentially resolvable, and demanding to be resolved, but not yet actually resolved, into parts" (James, 1892/1966, p.29). James goes on to say that the unstructured confusion may be considered sensory experience, but wherever structuring takes place, it becomes perceptual or conceptual experience.

In his commentary on CONQUEST OF ABUNDANCE, Herbert Muller writes: "The only way to deal with chaos, or unstructured experience, is to structure it" (HM TA31, C3, 11). This, I think, agrees with James, because if the unstructured were in no way accessible to experience, we could not begin to structure it. But the situation is more complicated. The Gestalt-psychologists of the 1920s/30s showed convincingly that our visual system quite often triggers the firing of sensory "receptors", when specific sensory elements required to complete a known canonic percept have not been spontaneously produced. Thus, not only the perceptual but also the sensory may be subject to the structuring conspiracy; if this is so, it is unlikely that we can ever get a reliable answer to the question WHAT MIGHT BE THE CAUSE OF SENSATIONS - which is one way of formulating the question about ontological reality.

PF seems to have come to this conclusion by several paths, all of which led him to a recognition that there are definite boundaries of reason. Consequently he came to suggest that in the quest for balance in the world in which we find ourselves living, it is unwise to put all our eggs into the scientific basket.

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REFERENCES

Feyerabend, P. (1975) Against method. London: Verso.

Feyerabend, P. (1987) Farewell to reason. London/New York: Verso.

Feyerabend, P. (1999) Conquest of abundance. Chicago/ London: U.of Chicago

Press.

James, W. (1892) Psychology (Briefer Course). New York: Collier, 1962.

Monod, J. (1972) Chance and necessity. New York: Vintage.

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Ernst von Glasersfeld