45 pieces on Knowledge, truth and invention published 3-1-2020

by Bart Nooteboom

23. From inside and outside published 21-8-2012

Now I start a series of items on the big question of knowledge and truth.

What comes from inside the human being and what from outside? The question arises in relation to all three of the true, the good and the beautiful. Here I focus on knowledge. Later I will consider morality and ethics.

Does the self produce its own knowledge? Does that come from innate ideas that are aligned beforehand with reality, by some gift of God? We find this for example with Descartes. Or is the brain a clean slate on which sensory perceptions inscribe themselves and form ideas, in a process of association? This we find with mostly English empiricist philosophers (starting with Locke). Or do we form and understand perceptions by pre-existing forms of thought, such as space, time and causality? The philosopher Kant proposed that, and ever since we are uncertain about our knowledge. Where Kant still assumed that there remains an objective reality, outside our ideas, though we cannot know it as such, subsequent idealists argued that if we cannot say anything about that the only relevant reality is that which is produced by ideas.

Who is right? Do ideas come from inside or outside? Do ideas form themselves from perceptions or vice versa? Is there anything like ‘sense data’ that serve as elementary ‘building blocks’ from which ideas are ‘constructed’? The difference is not so large as it may seem, if we look at how ideas and knowledge develop. Descartes already indicated that ideas are not available beforehand in developed form but in potency and arise or not depending on sensory triggers. Empiricists on their side grant that the process of association between sensory perceptions also creates ideas of a ‘higher’ level, in some sense, that affect our perception and interpretation.

Nowadays almost everybody thinks along the following lines. As a legacy from evolution we have the potential to produce forms of thought and ideas, but how that happens and what comes out depends on the circumstances of nature and culture in which people develop their ideas in the course of their lives. The mental forms according to which people perceive develop in interaction with reality, in the development of the human being in evolution and of the individual in its life. Ideas thus arise both from inside and outside, in interaction between what mentally we already had as potential and the realization of that dependent on the environment.

The fact that people construct their ideas implies, as Kant said, that we do not know the world as it is in itself. More precisely: we don’t know that either. We don’t know in how far and in what way we grasp the world correctly. We cannot descend from our minds to inspect how our knowledge is hooked on to the world. But we must take into account the

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possibility that we see the world wrong. Objectivity then is not pure, cognitively immediate perception, which is impossible, but openness to views of others.

24. Body and mind published 21-8-2012

A tenacious tradition in western thought, under the influence of Plato, religion and Descartes, is that body and soul are separate and thereby reason and passion, knowing and feeling are separate. For redemption and eternal life it is needed that the soul or mind is not inseparately tied to the perishable body. Also for true knowledge and for rationality the mind must transcend the body and matter. Only universal ideas, abstracted from chaotic, differentiated and mutable reality give certain and stable knowledge, such was the idea of Plato. Also for transparency of the self to the self the mind must stand apart from the body.

On the basis of neural science and social psychology we increasingly understand how and to what extent body and mind, and thinking and feeling are entangled. The embodiment of cognition not only robs us of the illusion of life after death, but also of a free, autonomous self that hovers, as it were, above the body and its limitations. Our self is chained to the body and that gives a feeling of being locked up, and a will to escape from the self. The self wants to escape from imprisonment in itself and for that directs itself to the other human being. That is a basic idea of Emmanuel Levinas (in his early work).

Because of embodiment of thought we should not only consider thought in the reflective, intellectual sense. We should also consider cognition in a wider sense, including perception, interpretation, sense making, feelings and emotions. We undergo, experience much without understanding. The greatest part of our mental activity is unconscious, and intuitive, unconscious ‘thought’ governs many of our choices, and often does it better than rational evaluation would have done. I discussed this earlier in a piece on free will.

A fundamental idea is that cognitive functions (perception, interpretation, explanation, valuation, judgment, language) build on feelings and underlying bodily functions. That idea is not new but becomes more tangible in terms of neural structures and processes. A second fundamental idea, which has by now been widely accepted, is that cognition arises from interaction with the environment, especially the social environment.

As infants develop, reaching for something develops in pointing and calling for something develops into a linguistic capability of reference. The construction of mental categories to a large extent is accompanied by proprioception (motor activities of groping and handling). Maxine Sheets-Johnstone showed the importance of movement, and the feeling and perception of movement (kinaesthetics) of the body in the development of cognition and meaning, in evolution and individual development. The grasp of intentions, goals, emotions of others are narrowly associated with the feeling of one’s own body and comparison of it, and its movement and gestures, with those of others. From that congruence between movement and feeling, bodily, kinetic attunement leads on to

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empathy of attuned emotions, in ‘emotional resonance’. We recognize emotions because we recognize the kinetic expression of them. That is important for trust, for example.

25. Forms of truth published 23-8-2012

Notions of truth correspond with ideas of knowledge. For the philosophical rationalist, such as Descartes, knowledge comes from innate ideas that are true because God infuses them. For the empiricist, such as Locke, something is true if it corresponds with reality, on the basis of objective sense data. For others such not already interpreted atoms of truth do not exist, and truth is coherence with a relevant body of knowledge. That can take the form of logical deduction from assumed premises, but also consistency or mutual reinforcement with things that are taken for true. That comes close to the notion of plausibility. There were ample conditions where it might have been refuted but was not. According to a related notion propagated by pragmatic philosophers, something is true if it is fruitful, i.e. contributes to successful practice, if it remains standing in action.

There is a well-known distinction between analytic truth by definition or logical deduction, and synthetic truths of fact. The strict distinction has been criticized because truths of fact are often dependent on definitions and hence analytic truth. They are also theoretically laden, i.e. are theory-based interpretations of phenomena.

An entirely different notion of truth concerns ‘truth to form’ as in ‘that is not a true work of art’. It can also refer to lack of authenticity, with falsehood referring to insincerity, false pretence, and the like, as in ‘you don’t truly mean that’. One might speak of moral truth, as true to moral precepts, as in ‘he is truly a good man’.

Traditionally, a clear distinction was made between the ‘is’, the descriptive and the ‘ought’, the normative. That also has become doubtful. Observations, and their theoretical interpretations, are routinely subjected to standards of methodology, which are normative. Descriptive statements are mostly intentional, i.e. are part of a project, directed towards a goal, an interest, as a result of which one looks in selected directions and ignores others. In other words, scientific theory is value laden, by both methodological norms and intentions. Many economists, for example, pay no attention to theories that are not mathematically formalized according to the prevailing fashion.

Much in our use of language is a form of action and a matter of effectiveness rather than a matter of truth or falsity. In his work on Doing things with words, Austin made a distinction between expressions that are locutionay statements, with propositional content, saying something about the world, and illocutionary expressions that are intended to affect someone, such as an order, request, accusation, and the like. Many statements are both at the same time. Earlier I used the example of my wife calling out ‘that is not a screwdriver’ as I use a knife to turn a screw. That has propositional content but the point of it is illocutionary.

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26. Pragmatism published 23-8-2012

Descartes began with radical doubt to arrive at the indubitable ‘I think therefore I am’. But there are many other things we cannot doubt. Nor can we prove everything. Between doubt and proof lies belief that we are prepared to act upon. Beliefs are temporary and fallible, but we adapt or transform them as we gain further experience, in the practice of our doing. That is the insight from American pragmatism, in the work of C.S. Peirce, Dewey, William James and G.H. Mead. The idea goes back further, to David Hume and the practical wisdom of Aristotle.

Pragmatism is a theory of meaning, knowledge and truth. The meaning of a word or expression lies in its implications for phenomena or actions. A proposition is meaningful if it explains: if something could not have happened unless the proposition is true. Once, it was meaningful to claim that God must exist as designer and creator, because it was otherwise inconceivable how complex forms of life could have arisen. Now, from evolution, we have an alternative explanation.

But how about a priori truths of logic and mathematics, then? Do they have implications for practical conduct? As the philosopher C.I. Lewis argued: yes and no. Internally, in deduction from a set of axioms or assumptions, truth is formal, ruled by the principle of non-contradiction. Deductions are valid given the assumptions. However, different systems of logic and math are judged by their contribution in constructing theories that help in our practical conduct.

Concerning truth, somewhat misleadingly pragmatism has been attributed the view that something is true if it useful or satisfactory. That was more or less the standpoint of William James, but not of Peirce and Dewey. It is nonsense. Lies often work well but are nevertheless lies. Delusions can be satisfactory. However, truth is still meaningful as warranted assertability: we have good reasons for a belief, on the basis of its fruitfulness, its contribution to solving problems, and the ability to maintain it in critical debate. The warrant may be direct, in its contribution to practice, but also indirect, in its coherence with a system of thought that contributes to practical conduct.

In contrast with philosophical rationalism, the warrant of truth is taken from experience, but not the immediate, uninterpreted sense data of empiricism, but experience as mediated by cognition and sense making. Experience is not atomistic sense data but coherent, purposeful ‘things going on, things being done’.

Concerning knowledge, pragmatism is oriented towards action, and opposes the ‘spectator theory’ of knowledge as contemplation of eternal, immutable truths. It has emphasized problems and their solution: situations where an existing idea turns out not to work or not to fit and needs to be adapted or replaced. I add, however, that another source of new ideas lies in new opportunities: the idea does fit but alternative ideas turn out to also fit while being more fruitful, providing an opportunity for novel combinations with ideas one had.

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28. Realism? published 26-8-2012

The question still stands: do we know the world as it is? According to the empiricists we know it through elementary ‘sense data’. According to idealists it is all in the mind. I argued that we see and conceptualise the world according to mental categories that we develop in interaction with the world. That effect of the world on our thought yields a form of realism. However, this implies the assumption that the world exists. On what is that based?

We cannot prove that reality exists but we can hardly do other than make the assumption, as a ‘natural belief’, as the 18th century philosopher Hume already said. The philosopher Heidegger also argued that we cannot do other than think in terms of being, of a world that exists. It would be difficult to make sense of our life and the world without it. If the world does not exist, how could we have developed ideas to survive in it? But this argument is circular, assuming a world to survive in.

To believe in evolution we need to believe in a reality that forms a selection environment. Let us assume that this reality indeed consists of objects in space and time, things, animals and people that act. Especially those are salient for functioning and survival in the world. We would not have survived if we hadn’t formed a reasonably adequate mental representation and understanding of them. And that implies that we have an inclination to categorize in such terms of time and place, form, volume, matter, mass, place and movement. Those were of predominant importance to find food, hunt prey, and escape from the sabre-toothed tiger. As Gilbert Ryle indicated in 1949, ‘intelligence’ does not refer to some psychic object, but to a constellation of capabilities, inclinations and practices. All this does not prove that reality is indeed as postulated, but it does form a coherent argument. That view of reality, plus evolutionary theory, and an explanation of our survival and the consequences for our thought then form a coherent whole. That makes the assumption of external reality a warranted belief, even though we cannot prove it. Admittedly, it is like a house of cards: different elements supporting each other. Not strong perhaps, but still better than a single card.

29. Object bias published 26-8-2012

In their book Metaphors we live by, Lakoff and Johnson argued, in 1980, that apparently self-evident categories, even in what appears to be direct observation, are in fact metaphors rather than ‘literal descriptions’. In fact, literal description does not exist. An apparently literal description is always already a conceptualisation. We grasp our actions in the physical world, in which we have learned to survive, to construct meanings of abstract categories. ‘Up’, ‘upwards’ and ‘rising’ according to Lakoff and Johnson indicate something good, and ‘downwards’ and ‘falling’ something bad because when we are alive and well we stand up while we are prostrate when ill or sick.

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The basis for far-reaching metaphorization lies in ‘primary metaphors’ that build on proprioception (groping, grasping) and bodily survival. Think of our own movement in the world, the speed and direction of the sabre-toothed tiger, the shelter of a roof, a spear and its trajectory, the whereabouts of a lost child, the carrying of a burden. We would not have successfully evolved if we hadn’t been reasonably accurate with such categories. This yields a certain basic conceptualisation in our thought and language, in terms of things, including actors, their movement in time and space, distinction between subject and object, and their action, including causal action.

This is reflected in Chomsky’s universal grammar, where the basic elements of sentences are noun phrases and verb phrases. The basis for thought lies in things (including living things) that ‘do’ something. Those ‘things’ form the paradigmatic nouns and the ‘doing something’ forms the paradigmatic verb.

The object bias would suggest that we think in terms of distinct, discrete entities that appear in sequence in time, and that it does not come easily to us to see entities connected in a continuum, or in a field of force, or in an integrated process of duration, in which moments are not experienced as discrete but as integrated in a flow, as Henri Bergson proposed. We experience it but are unable to conceptualise it.

When we move a word from one sentence to another we are inclined to think that its meaning remains the same, as if we move a chair from one room to another, while in fact the meaning shifts. As if the legs drop off the chair or it changes colour. We think of communication as the transfer of meaning-things across a communication ‘channel’, while in fact in expression and interpretation meanings are transformed.

In sum, my thesis is that in our conceptualisations we have an object bias and an actor bias, a difficult to dodge inclination to see everything, including abstract, immaterial things as objects that have a location, move or do something. The grammatical notions of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ still carry intuitions of causal action while mostly there is no question of that. How does that conceptualisation do under current conditions, where abstractions, such as happiness, meaning, truth, morality, not to speak of democracy, identity, and so on, may now be crucial for human survival?

31. Invention published 2-9-2012

How does pragmatism work? How do ideas arise and change, from action? In an earlier work Learning and innovation in organizations and economies (2000), I proposed a ‘cycle of discovery’. The basic idea, which accords perfectly with pragmatism, is that knowledge develops by applying existing knowledge to new areas. That yields challenges and insights for change.

In a nutshell, the cycle is as follows. In generalization an existing mental scheme or practice is applied to novel contexts. Generalisation is needed for four reasons. First, to escape from the existing order in the present area of practice. Second, to obtain fresh

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insights into the limitations of existing practice. Third, to create pressure for change for the sake of survival. Fourth, to obtain insight into alternatives. Generalisation can be real, as in a new market for an existing product, a new field of application of a technology, or virtual, as in a computer simulation, laboratory experiment, or a thought experiment.

To survive in the new conditions the scheme is differentiated in an attempt to deal with them. For this one taps from existing repertoires of possibilities and capabilities learned from previous experience. If that does not yield survival, one tries to adopt elements of local practices that appear to be successful where one’s own practice fails, in reciprocation. This yields hybrids that allow experimentation with novel elements to explore their potential, while maintaining the basic logic or design principles of the old practice. One next obtains insight into the obstacles from the old architecture that prevent the full utilization of the potential that novel elements have now shown. This yields indications for more fundamental changes in the architecture, in accommodation. Next, the new architecture, with old and new elements, is still tentative, requiring much experimentation and subsidiary changes, and elimination of redundancies and inappropriate leftovers from old practice, in a process of consolidation. There is often competition between alternative designs, which mostly results in a dominant design. And next, to get away from that one again needs generalization, and the circle is closed.

One illustration is the following. Before in the car direction indicators with flashing lights were invented, direction was indicated by waving a hand, as on a bike. From signs at railways one learned that it could be done better with a mechanical hand, without needing an open top or window. In fact, those indicators at first did have the stylised shape of a little hand. The mechanical hand has all the disadvantages of moving parts: in getting stuck, breakage, stalling, rusting, and maintenance. But when also electrical light was inserted the leap was made to using a flashing light instead of moving parts. To distinguish it from basic lighting it had to flash.

Another illustration is that when in the construction of bridges the move was made from wood to iron, use was at first still made of ‘swallow tail’ connections that make sense for wood but not for iron, which can be welded.

35. The scripture of invention published 12-9-2012

The notion of scripts can be used to elaborate on the theory of invention discussed earlier (item 31). When self-service restaurants emerged, compared to service restaurants the order of nodes, and details of their functioning, were changed into entry, selection, paying, seating, eating, and leaving. If one does not know the script, and one enters and sits one will not get food. The altered sequence of activities has implications for the nodes. Selection is no longer done from a menu but by picking up items on display.

In the item on invention I employed a cycle of generalization, differentiation, reciprocation, accommodation and consolidation. They can each be clarified in terms of scripts. In generalization, i.e. application in a novel environment, an existing script is fed

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into a new superscript. In differentiation, script structure and nodes are preserved but in one or more nodes a different selection of subscripts is made from existing repertoires. In reciprocation one borrows subscripts or entire nodes from other, outside scripts observed in the novel environment. In accommodation, one tries to eliminate obstacles in existing script structure for realizing the potential or efficient use of new nodes, by changing the order of nodes or the nature of their connections. When in this way a new script emerges many secondary changes are needed, in modification of nodes and their repertoires of subscripts, in the process of consolidation.

The logic also indicates hat there are different levels of novelty: a new selection of subscripts from an existing repertoire, or addition to the repertoire, or a whole new node with its repertoire, or architectural change of network structure. In invention one should also look at the superscript of the user into which the invention has to fit. What changes of that script would the user have to make? The more radical that change, the more difficult it will be to have the innovation accepted.

Cognitively, scripts may be embodied in neural networks. Gerald Edelman’s ‘neural Darwinism’ seems a viable view of how embodied cognition could work, in terms of neural networks. They arise more or less by chance, in diverse, parallel and sometimes rival networks that compete (hence ‘Darwinism’) for reinforcement, according to the frequency, speed and continuity with which they are triggered, yielding easier passage of the thresholds (synapses) between neurons and a greater density of connections with other neuronal groups. New groups can arise from combinations between existing ones. The simultaneous ‘firing’ of neurons can lead to novel connections: ‘firing yields wiring’.

In sum, scripts serve to identify and make sense of perception but are also affected by it, in ‘novel combinations’, yielding novel concepts. I don’t think this process is well characterized by the empiricist phrasing of ‘elementary sense data used as building blocks in the construction of ideas’. All this is hardly described adequately by the phrase that ‘sense data build ideas’. However, the process of assimilating perceptions into scripts does contribute to the change, transformation or breakdown of scripts.

57. The value of difference

Differences in knowledge, perception, emotion, feeling, views, ethics and culture, which I have called cognitive distance in my scientific work, are bothersome, because they are a source of misunderstanding and prejudice and make collaboration difficult. On the other hand they are also interesting as a source of learning. The challenge is to find partners with optimal difference: sufficient to be able to tell or show each other something new but not so much that one cannot understand each other or cannot deal with each other. Empirical (econometric) research (that I did with associates) shows that such optimal difference yields economic advantage through improved performance in innovation. The ability to work together with people who think differently yields economic advantage. That

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yields hope for diversity and tolerance, because if those were economically disadvantageous they would hardly be viable.

The ability to collaborate has a cognitive component in the narrow meaning of intellectual understanding (absorptive capacity), and a cognitive component in the wider, also affective sense of ethics and morality, of views on good and bad. One should not only understand each other but also have empathy for each other.

The complement of absorptive capacity, the other side of the coin, is the ability to help others understand one, with the use of illuminating examples or metaphors that help them to absorb one’s thought into theirs. One can develop both types of ability, for absorption and for communication, by accumulating knowledge and experience in collaboration with people who think differently. This enables relationships at larger cognitive distance, offering a higher degree of learning and innovation. The positive effect of that has also been demonstrated in empirical research.

One can also make use of go-betweens that help to bridge cognitive distance, preventing or eliminating misunderstandings, clarify views and habits, and take away suspicion.

To the extent that relationships last longer and are exclusive, i.e. closed off from relationships with other, more distant parties, cognitive distance will in due course decline. One becomes so familiar with each other that one begins to see, think and act in the same way. That is convenient, in fast and easy agreement, but it can also yield intellectual incest and lack of learning and renewal. However, long lasting relationships can retain their cognitive vitality when parties also maintain relationships with different others that can feed the relationship with fresh ideas and perspectives.

In communities, the advantage of strong local connections is that they enable close cooperation, with social control, reputation effects and mutual trust, but they can also lead to rigidity and stagnation. Isolated, cohesive groups are in danger of losing the impulse of novel ideas and experience, and to prevent that from happening bridges should be built to connect with other groups. And for that one must overcome the inclination to distrust outsiders.

This analysis serves to give more substance to the claim from evolutionary theory of the economy (see item 30) that variety matters for innovation. Variety is not only needed for selection to work, but also to generate novelty and produce new variety.

104. Truth as argumentation published 29-7-2013

The philosopher Kant made a distinction between the realm of knowledge and truth concerning the world and the realm of ethics. This corresponds with the distinction between causes, which operate in the world, and reasons, which belong to ethics. As part of the physical world, the self is constituted by causes, as part of the ethical world by reasons.

This brings Kant into great problems. One problem concerns the issue of free will, which I discussed in item 5 of this blog, and I will not repeat my position here. In viewing the self as part of the world Kant sees its actions as governed deterministically by causes (in

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the brain). In the view of the self as a moral agent, however, the self (the transcendental subject) is free and fully responsible for its actions. This separation of realms, I think, is not very helpful, and I don’t see how it can be tenable.

According to Kant, and I agree, in our knowledge of the world there can be no certainty in any correspondence theory of truth, according to which elements of knowledge, either rationalist Cartesian a-priori ideas, or empiricist elementary sense data correspond, somehow, with elements of reality. We cannot know the world as it is in itself, or rather, we cannot know whether or in what way we do. We cannot do other than apply categories that are part of language and cognition, right or wrong, to form perception and understanding.

In item 28 I adopted an evolutionary perspective. There I accept that reality exists even if we cannot objectively know it. Then there is realism in our conceptualization of objects and agents in time and space: If it were not in some sense adequate to reality we would not have survived in evolution.

According to Kant, in the ethical realm, outside the realm of causality in the world, we can achieve certainty, in rational ethical judgement, as in the categorical imperative. Earlier in this blog, in items 17 and 95, I accepted that imperative as a guideline, but subject to conditions, not as an absolute universal.

In my discussion of forms of truth (item 25) and pragmatism (item 26) I proposed to use the notion of truth as warranted assertability. This is wider than pragmatism in its traditional form: an assertion is adequate if it ‘works’ in practical application including debate, i.e. stands up to logic and facts.

I now propose that it applies to both knowledge of the world and ethics. We can never be sure about either. I add that while the distinction between causes and reasons makes sense, in our cognition reasons are causes that we are aware of, in contrast with drives that operate outside our consciousness.

In knowledge of the world the warrant for assertions lies in both logic (and mathematics) and empirical observations. With Kant I accept that observations are constituted cognitively, so that facts are theory laden. However, they still form a basis, albeit not an absolute and sometimes a somewhat shaky one, in that facts are more intersubjectively and temporally stable than the theories they are used for to test. Warranted assertability is never certain and always provisional, as pragmatism claims.

Morality is based on warranted assertability in arguments concerning the good life and ways to promote it. I can say this because I follow Aristotelian virtue ethics, not Kant’s rationalistic, universalistic, deontological duty ethics.

106. Relativism published 12-8-2013

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The philosopher Jacques Derrida initiated the notion of deconstruction. Here, constructions of language, in science or narrative, are analyzed, taken apart, for their possible, possibly hidden, and possibly multiple meanings. A text has no unique, best or final interpretation. There is no single, unambiguous meaning, given in ‘what the author really intended’. Authors may themselves admit that what they intended is ambiguous, multiple, paradoxical, or hidden. That arises most of all in poetry. Interpretations depend on the context and on who interprets.

Readers develop their own interpretations, though those are not unrelated to what the author may have intended. This is in line with the theory of language that I proposed in this blog (in items 32-37). There I argued that reference, i.e. that what a story is about, is identified on the basis of sense, the way in which one identifies things on the basis of a repertoire, formed in personal experience, of what one knows and associates with what is talked about. Identification is achieved in combination with the context, which triggers selection from the repertoire of sense. In dialogue, different ways of making sense by different people are put up for discussion. This may lead to convergence or divergence of views. And the discussion will contribute to the development of one’s repertoires of sense making. Discussion alters the way one looks at the world.

Some people seem to interpret deconstruction as implying that theory of meaning should drop the notion of reference.

This idea has been inspired, in part, by Ferdinand de Saussure, who claimed that meaning is structural: derived from the position of a word or expression in a totality of language or discourse. ‘A word means what other words don’t mean’. Thereby language becomes self-referential. I think this is valid and useful, but the idea has run amok in the position, adopted by some postmodern philosophers, that ‘therefore’ language no longer has external reference. I don’t see that has to follow. Meanings may shift depending on other meanings, while there remains an intention to refer to something.

I think the abolition of reference is madness because it would abolish the aboutness of language. Surely, a central aim of language is to talk about things, and that is what reference means. True, as I showed earlier, language is not always reference, or only reference, and often constitutes a speech act of illocution, as in making requests or giving orders, accusations, endearments, etc. But animals have that, in growling, calling, warning, posturing, luring, purring, or barking, while with them reference is in doubt. Dropping reference is to take away what people have more than animals have. It is de-humanizing.

Is all this relativism? Yes, in the sense that interpretations depend on the context and on the cognitive make-up of the interpreter, resulting from his/her path of life. But not in the sense that any interpretation is as good as any other. There is argument, a comparison or confrontation between differences in sensemaking.

This is closely related to the notion of warranted assertability replacing truth in any absolute and universal sense, discussed in item 104. There may be different judgements

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of purported truths in the same way that there may be different interpretations. Knowledge of the world is an interpretation of it. But some truths and interpretations are more warranted, have better arguments, than others.

157. What is rational? published 4-8-2014

Is being rational using reason, calculating optimum utility, giving reasons, or being reasonable?

Using reason is associated with logic, being consistent, making valid inferences, using argument, seeking truth, and respecting facts.

However, logic does not always have a grip. It builds on assumptions that are not always clear. It takes things for granted that perhaps should not be. Some situations are undecidable. Inconsistencies may be built into options or actions.

Facts are subject to interpretation and may be in dispute. As I argued in this blog, truth cannot be much better than warranted assertibility.

Aristotle distinguished between theoretical reason, as in science, and practical reason, as in morality. However, he considered the first to be the highest of a range of virtues, and able to reconcile all virtues in one harmonious whole. I think that good things may be difficult to reconcile, may be incommensurable.

In utilitarian ethics, as in economics, rationality means the choice of an optimal solution, for an individual or group, given desires and limited means. The underlying assumption is that all ideas, ideals, convictions, and desires are commensurable, can be brought together in a one consistent system of preferences.

Utilitarianism does not do justice to certain convictions. To adopt an example from Bernard Williams: racial discrimination may then be allowed, if it causes only limited damage to a few victims and great satisfaction to a large number of perpetrators. One may also, for reasons of conviction, go against one’s self-interest.

Also, the best choice is not always a good choice. One may have to choose between two bads. As Bernard Williams put it: ‘For utilitarianism tragedy is impossible’1

Alternatively, reason is taken as giving reasons, based on the idea is that every act must have a specifiable reason, standing apart from the act, outside it, hovering above it, so to speak. That is foundationalism. As Bernard Williams noted, the fundamental underlying idea is that the goings on of the world must and can be made transparent.2

1 Bernard Williams, Morality; An introduction to ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1993[1972], p. 86.2 Bernard Wiiliams, Ethics and the limits of philosophy, London: Routledge, 2011[198], p.112.

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Foundationalism has gradually lost its credibility. The world, and certainly actions, are not always transparent. People do many things for which reasons cannot be specified. Judgements are based on assumptions that are often tacit, or taken for granted, and an outcome of one’s socialization into a culture. Often, as Wittgenstein said, we cannot give better reasons that ‘That is just how it is done’.

That does not mean that one cannot give reasons, but they are to be accepted as partial, tentative, and subject to revision. The crux of rationality then lies in debate, putting reasons up for discussion, not in indubitable foundations. That is reason as being reasonable.

Look around in the world. People indulge in blind ideologies and murder each other for it. This is fed by two things. First, the delusion that since values and views must be universal, only one’s own are valid and the rest are to be annihilated. Second, surrender to emotion, to the neglect of argument and facts.

Philosophy had to learn that the ideal of simple, abstract, universal and fixed foundations, to regulate thought and action, is not viable and human, is even authoritarian, imperialistic. It cannot cover life, society and humanity in all its complexity, variety and variability. What remains is practical reason, being reasonable, willing to give reasons, debate, listen, be open to opposition, and be as truthful as possible. We now seem to need that more than ever.

Giving reasons when possible, putting them up for discussion, trying to be logical and consistent, respecting facts whenever available, choosing an optimal solution when it does not violate ethical principles and is not otherwise hampered by incommensurability, and empathy for the other while keeping an eye on one’s self-interest.

169. Truth on the move published 28-10-2015

The best-known notions of truth are static, concerning a state of knowledge. Here I add a dynamic notion, concerning a process of learning.

In item 25 of this blog, I discussed static notions of truth. The dominant notion was that of correspondence of ideas and knowledge with reality, on the basis of objective sense data. A second notion is the view of truth as coherence with a relevant body of knowledge, including accepted facts and logic, or in other words plausibility. A third is the pragmatic view, where something is true if it is fruitful, i.e. contributes to successful practice.

I combine the coherence and pragmatic views into the notion of warranted assertability. This includes both practical success in action and consistency with accepted facts, related knowledge and logic. It is a matter of debate what the relevant existing knowledge, logic, and accepted facts are.

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A different notion of truth concerns truth to form or fidelity to some ideal, in ethical and aesthetic truth, as in ‘he is a true friend’ and ‘that is a true work of art’.

I adopt a wider notion that includes both warranted assertability and fidelity to ethical and aesthetic ideals, which I call adequacy. This re-establishes the ancient idea of bringing together the true, the good and the beautiful.

Truth in a dynamic sense lies in a process of trying to achieve truth in a static sense.

The most notorious dynamic notion of truth lies in the philosophy of Friedrich Hegel. In his view, absolute truth, in an absolute spirit, manifests, realizes itself step by step in the course of history. This notion was adopted in the historical materialism of Marx.

An ominous result was that an appeal could be made to people to submit to suffering as a sacrifice to progress towards a horizon of truth and justice. And what is to be sacrificed is up to the ideologues, the Politbureau or the apparatchiks, to decide, as the visionaries of historical necessity.

Nietzsche’s view is closer to my heart: what matters is the ongoing search for truth, not the illusory claim to have reached it.

Final truth cannot humanly be achieved. In this blog I argue that adequacy is imperfection on the move. Things will come to be seen as truths that now seem absurd, unthinkable.

Can the static and dynamic notions of truth be reconciled? I propose two ways for this.

The first way is this. My ideal, my view of the good life, a flourishing life, is to utilize one’s talents in a creative contribution to the hereafter that one leaves behind, in a dialogic fashion, in debate and collaboration with others.

Then, truth in the form of fidelity to that ideal yields a dynamic notion of truth, in the ongoing striving for truth in the form of adequacy, defined above, combining warranted assertability with fidelity to ideals of ethics and aesthetics.

For the second way to reconcile the static and dynamic views I use the notion of the regulative vs. the constitutive. This is related to a distinction made in the philosophy of science between the context of justification and the context of discovery. The regulative, in justification, lies in criteria for good argument, such as factuality, logic, and coherence with what we know, and fidelity to ideals. The constitutive, in discovery, lies in the process of achieving such adequacy. How that may work is a different story (see item 31 in this blog).

The first and second ways of reconciling the static and dynamic views of truth amount to the same.

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172. What do you have in mind? published 17-11-2014

In thought and language, we treat abstractions as if they were objects in time and space. That is what in this blog I called the object bias (in item 29). One major instance is the container metaphor: people are ‘in love’, ‘in the mood’, ‘in error’, ‘in panic’, and so on. Also, we have things ‘in mind’.

As if thoughts were entities contained in our brain, as stowed away in a drawer, which we can ‘look at’ from within that brain. In fact, ideas are as much outside the brain, in practices, habits and institutions, as in it. There is no private language, as argued by Wittgenstein. To make sense we need corrections from others. Making sense is playing a ‘language game’. One cannot have an idea and ‘look’ at it from outside the idea. Some things are not selected but happen to us. There are things we do not believe but ‘have’. It is odd to say ‘I believe I have a pain’.

So what, if anything, do we have ‘in mind’? As I discussed earlier in this blog, I propose that we do have ‘representations’ in the mind, of a sort, in the form of neural pathways that are constructed from our interaction with things and people in the world. But one cannot step out of a representation and ‘look at it’ ‘from outside’. One dwells in it. One cannot have the cognitive cake and eat it too.

Also, I proposed that much of our thought is based on scripts, structures of connected nodes, which represent structures of logic, causality and action. The classic example is a restaurant script of entering, seating, food selection, eating, paying and leaving. The order and precise content of nodes was upset with the invention of the self-service restaurant. There, selection of food is not from a menu but from a display. If you do not play the game and sit to be served, you get no food.

Scripts are triggered in the mind by circumstance, and perception is unconscious assimilation into scripts, attempting to find a fit into a node of a script.

I imagine that in the brain such scripts are embodied in patterns of connection between neurons. That, I propose, is the embodiment of Wittgenstein’s language games. The scripts emerge as a function of perceived success or failure, with corresponding emotions, with neural connections strengthening or weakening (in adaptation of synaptic thresholds) or arising anew. Neural networks that occur simultaneously, or under similar conditions, more or less often, are tentatively connected. This is the embodiment of association.

The triggering of a script by circumstance embodies what in social psychology is known as framing. Scripts entail prejudice, stereotyping. If observations cannot be fitted into scripts they are ignored, not even registered. If something does fit into a node or several nodes of some script, the rest of the script is attributed to it, in ‘pattern recognition’. People ‘see’ things that are not there.

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This prejudice limits substantive rationality, but in evolution it probably was adaptive, in speedy recognition and action, conducive to survival and procreation.

All this, I propose, is how the formation of ideas and meanings from practice, discussed in foregoing items in this blog, is embodied. In terms of the theory of meaning: a script represents what is identified in reference, or denotation, and the ‘slots’ of nodes and features fitted into them constitute the sense or connotation that produces reference.

173. Where does argumentation stop? published 24-11-2014

Earlier in this blog I endorsed the idea (attributed to Wittgenstein and Heidegger)3 of social action in the world, or language games, as the cradle of meaning, but I objected to the all too easy acceptance that judgement of adequacy or ‘truth’ is simply up to consensus, established practice. That would yield an unacceptable, horrendous surrender of personality, creativity and responsibility.

Personality would be sacrificed to the collective. There would be no room to deviate and create something new, a new game with new rules.

Such radical social, cultural relativism would entail surrender to prejudice and discrimination. It would entail submission to the rule of powers that be. Large-scale aberration from justice, like the recent financial crisis, would be taken for granted (as indeed it seems to be, in view of the limited rebellion against it).

Yet, argumentation does indeed have to stop somewhere, and some basic conventions, terms of discussion, have to be taken for granted, to avoid infinite regress.

So, how far should argumentation go, and how can it escape from prejudice? How can individuality and sociality, self and other, be combined? How can unity and variety, and stability and change be combined? Those questions constitute perhaps the biggest theme in this blog.

While I accept pragmatic, temporary stops to argument, I cannot accept permanent ones. Indeed, that would be against the spirit of pragmatism that I employ in this blog, because it would raise temporary truth to the level of an absolute. One should not too easily assume incommensurability between language games (or paradigms) and accept differences of view as irreconcilable.

Earlier in this blog (item 21) I criticized some basic elements of the Enlightenment, but here I maintain its basic value of commitment to discourse, debate and attempts at mutual understanding.

Earlier, I discussed cognitive distance, as a source of variety for creation, and the need to ‘cross it’ in order to realize its potential.

3 See Lee Braver, 2012, Groundless grounds; A study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, MIT Press.

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How does that work? One central tool to trigger understanding between views (or paradigms, or language games) is metaphor: describing one thing in terms of another. This can be elucidated in terms of the scripts discussed earlier in this blog. In those terms, metaphor would entail the attempt to substitute items from one script into another, or to import a node from one script to another. Or in linguistic terms, to exchange connotations.

There is an evolutionary argument, from evolutionary psychology, why gaps between rival language games or paradigms should not, in principle, be unbridgeable. The human species developed ways of cognition that contributed to survival in the world, and that, I propose, has somehow become part of our shared genetic make-up. Perhaps that will sometime show up in brain science.

As a result there is a fundamental similarity between people in how they see the world. That similarity is greatest where it concerns interaction with nature, with its stable laws, in what I would call ‘first order similarity’.

In this blog I argued that this has also led to what I called the object bias, whereby we try to make sense of abstract notions on the basis of metaphors taken from experience with physical objects in time and space.

As a result, socially, culturally and morally cognitive distance is greater. Nevertheless some common basis remains, if only in the basic, primary, natural, physical experience that supply those metaphors used to make sense of abstract notions. I would call that ‘second order similarity’.

216. Theory, concept and fact published 14-9-2015

In debates in the philosophy of science, it has been claimed that the notion of empirical testing is problematic because observations and facts are ‘theory laden’. One always looks at the world through the glasses of some prior theory, or concept, or mental category. I have gone along with that. Now I take a closer look.

If facts are theory laden, how can theory be tested empirically? Isn’t there circularity involved? There is, of course, if facts are based on the same theory as the one that is tested. But one can distinguish between concepts underlying facts, and theories tested on them. This distinction between concepts and theory was made by the French philosopher Canguilhemi.

Here, concepts are based on different, earlier theory, now taken for granted and embodied in instruments and methods of observation.

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For example, a microscope embodies theory of light, and yields data on which one can test biological theory. Later atomic theory yielded the basis for electronic microscopes that can look ‘deeper’.

Later in this blog I will criticize mainstream economic theory, but I will maintain useful concepts from economics, such as, for example, economies of scale, substitution between factors of production, entry barriers to markets, and transaction costs.

There are levels of factuality. Suppose one has a cloud of data, in some two-dimensional space. One theory might draw a straight line through the cloud, another a curved line, and they fit equally well. They give different interpretations of the cloud but they see their own curve as the ‘fact’ represented by the cloud. Then they might agree about the cloud but not on what the cloud means. One theory may forbid curvature of the line through the cloud while the other demands it.

An economist might construe the cloud as ‘evidence’ of individual rational choice, a sociologist as ‘evidence’ of imitative herd behaviour. They may accuse each other of ‘not making sense’. They may also try to go back to the cloud and look behind the data to investigate them more closely, or to collect additional data aimed at settling the difference of interpretation, if they can agree on the method of observation.

‘Lower level’ theory underlying concepts used for observation may be more widely shared, even among people adhering to rival ‘higher level’ theories. But the lower level is not infallible or eternal. There regularly are discoveries that alter concepts underlying ‘the facts’.

Hopefully, in a conflict between rival theories one will sooner or later find facts explained by one theory but ‘forbidden’ by the other. It may happen that one theory can explain a fact that the other cannot. There are two views of light: as a stream of particles and as a wave. The wave explains phenomena of interference that the particles do not, but the particles explain phenomena that indicate that light has mass, which the wave does not. So, a dual theory remains.

The problem with social sciences is that such ‘crucial experiments’ seldom exist. There, observation more often remains a matter of perspective, which often hardens into dogma or even ideology.

245. Forms of realism published 7-2-2016

I discussed realism before, in item 28 in this blog, but here I want to elaborate.

According to ‘metaphysical realism’ ideas of the world are realistic, objective. According to Plato they exist independently from the thinking subject, but can be grasped, with difficulty. According to the ‘rationalism’ of Descartes, they are innate, given to us by God, in pre-established harmony with reality.

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According to empiricism (think of British philosophers Locke and Hume), knowledge is realistic because based on elementary observations (‘sense data’). Ideas arise by association between such elementary observations. But how objective are the elementary observations?

According to philosophical idealism, observations, even elementary ones, are formed by ideas in the form of mental categories. According to Kant, our perceptions of the world are formed by fundamental categories of time, space and causality, and we do not know the world ‘as it is in itself’. This caused a revolution in the theory of knowledge that still reverberates in philosophy.

Later philosophers (e.g. Hegel) contested the notion of the unknowable ‘thing in itself’. How can we even know whether or not we know, if our ideas are formed by mental categories? Classical scepticism (Phyrronism) renounced judgement on the issue (called ‘epoché’): we cannot know whether or in what sense we have true knowledge of the world in itself. That is the line I take.

Some philosophers have tried to get away, more or less, from the Kantian constraint. In his ‘phenomenology’, Edmund Husserl claimed the possibility of ‘bracketing’: setting aside forms of thought about the world, the whole of ‘symbolisation’, to see how phenomena enter our experience. I think it is an illusion to think that we can set aside all forms of thought.

Jacques Lacan, and following him Slavoj Žižek, assumed that the ‘Real’, beyond the established symbolic order, shows up as a ‘gap’ in that order, manifests itself in contradictions. I accept that contradictions may indicate the falsehood of our conceptualisations.

I do think that our conceptualisation of the world can and does change. Einstein’s theories transformed our notions of time and space.

As formulated by Žižekii, there has been a shift from the question ‘how, if at all, can we pass from appearance to reality’ to ‘How can something like appearance arise in the midst of reality?’

That is the line I have taken in this blog, developing an argument from evolution. As I argued in item 28, if we assume that the world does exist in some form, whether or not we know it, and it is difficult not to make that assumption, then the basic notions or mental capabilities with which we have developed those ideas must have been realistic in the sense of being adequate for survival in evolution.

We are inclined to think of the thing in itself as a substance. The priority, in most of human evolution, lay in dealing with objects in time and space, such as food, prey, shelter, enemies, weapons, … I proposed that this has yielded the object bias, a tenacious grasping for substance. Perhaps reality may better be conceived as a wave phenomenon,

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or a field of force, or a network of relations. But whatever new way of looking at the world we come up with, we cannot be sure that it is the final revelation. The intuition of substance is inadequate for abstractions, such as happiness, love, knowledge, meaning, justice, identity, nation, morality, etc. This is important because the proper conceptualization of such abstractions may now be crucial for survival of the human species.

To see how ideas may be constructed from action in the world, I developed a ‘cycle of discovery’ (see items 31 and 35). The basic logic is as follows. An established view is carried into a new area. There, it encounters misfits, things that cannot be accounted for. This exerts pressures to adapt. First, one will seek solutions from established repertoires of thought and practice. When that fails one seeks inspiration from practices in the new environment to mend the problems, experimenting with hybrids, combinations with the old. This yields insight into the potential of novel elements as well as obstacles in the old logic that prevent the realization of that potential, and insights into how one might try to alter the old logic. This yields new prototypes that need to be tested, and this will sooner or later converge on a ‘dominant’ design that develops into a new standard.

In this, realism enters in two ways. First by submitting what exists to the stress of novel conditions, with novel demands and opportunities. Second, in competition between old and new, and between different versions of the new.

246. Is it wrong to be right? published 11-2-2016

Philosophers often say that it is the task of philosophy to ask questions, not to answer them. In Socratic debate, Socrates only elicits, by intellectual midwivery, the recognition by the debaters of the errors in their thought. Socrates is cagey, not giving his own view.

To me, this is a cop-out. One should be willing to commit to one’s views and defend them, claiming one is ‘right’, and submit to the criticism of others. By not doing so, Socrates robs himself from the opportunity to learn, as if he has nothing to learn, thereby violating his own principles.

My position follows from my pragmatist stance concerning knowledge. It is by bringing one’s views into practice and into debate that one discovers their limitations and opportunities for improvement. In the quest for knowledge, not answering questions and committing to the answers is self-defeating. It has happened to me several times that people tell me I am wrong when I talk in terms of ‘who is right and who is wrong’, because, they claim, my stand on knowledge disallows me to do that. A decent relativist is supposed to say that there ‘is no right or wrong’.

Concerning truth, I have adopted a ‘relativism light’. Absolute, objective, universal truth cannot be achieved, and knowledge is socially constructed. Claims to truth depend on the

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context and on the perspective taken. However, that does not mean that ‘anything goes’, that any opinion is as good as any other. One must be prepared to offer, defend and revise arguments. For this I adopted the term of ‘warranted assertibility’, and in ethics ‘debatable ethics’.

What remains of older, more ambitious claims of rationality, of Enlightenment values, is this: the commitment to debate on the basis of arguments. This may resemble the position of Habermas, but counter to his view I do not think that debate can be ‘herrschaftsfrei’; free of power, domination. In preceding items in this blog I followed Foucault in recognizing the role of interests, positions and power, individual and systemic, in knowledge. Also, rationality is limited in subconscious drives. There is only limited free will (see item 5). It is not always, perhaps never, possible to achieve full mutual understanding, in view of what I called ‘cognitive distance’. But all that does not yield an excuse not to try to cross that distance as much as possible.

I think we should commit to arguments, as long as we believe in them, saying ‘I think I am right’ but being prepared to concede 'no, you are right’. If we surrender claims of right and wrong, what is the point of debate?

The commitment to debate entails that one offers arguments for one’s views, in terms of purported facts, logic, coherence with accepted views. Recognizing that none of this yields ‘rockbottom truth’, one is still seeking the best arguments, in deciding who is ‘right’. The debate may be undecidable, resulting in rival views co-existing together. But each side will pursue further arguments to boost the warrant of assertibility. And upon debate one might conclude that one is right here and the other there. While it is odd to say that something can be both true and false, in debate one can be partially right or wrong.

While I admit that in some ways the distinction between normative and descriptive, between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, is problematic, I think that in some ways it is still valid and useful. The search for warrant applies normatively and descriptively. Normatively because that is what debate should be about.

Descriptively, people want to be right as part of an inherent drive to exist, to manifest themselves, in what is called the conatus essenti (e.g. with Spinoza), and to win, in a Nietzschean will to power. Trying to win arguments transcends physical violence. I would add the spirit of Levinas, discussed in item 61, with the awe for the ineliminable otherness of the other, as a fount of spiritual awareness, and, I would add, a source of learning that contributes to the flourishing of life (see item 64).

It all becomes problematic when the Levinassian spirit is lacking, and one side subdues the other, imposes his/her ‘truth’, or when one’s position in some institutional structure imposes it. This I grant to Habermas. Then, one may hope to have the courage to rebel or opt out.

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260. What is an intellectual? published 7-5-2016

In item 218 of this blog I used a definition of the intellectual from Foucaultiii: ‘The person who uses his knowledge, his competence, and his relation to truth in the field of political struggles’. Elsewhere, I found a similar definitioniv: ‘… engagement in public life, in the service of a cause that divides politicians, elites and simple citizens’.

The paradigmatic case is that of Emile Zola, with his ‘I accuse’, in the upheaval in France with the affair Dreyfus. Another is that of Sartre. The notion of a public intellectual seems especially French.

This leaves room for a wide variety of intellectualsv: of the left, the right, progressive and conservative, of humanism (Thomas Mann was mentioned, but there was doubt whether he might be too a-political), and even of Nazism (Heidegger). Some defend universal values, such as freedom (Sartre), while others (Foucault) militate against universals in defence of particulars. One may even be an intellectual at arms against any hegemony of intellectuals.

While Foucault pleaded for the intellectual as an expert in some area, Sartre proposed that the intellectual begins where the ‘technician of practical knowledge ends’.vi

An important feature is independence, if not autonomy. In item 218 I discussed how difficult it may be to maintain it.

Connected to that, and connecting with Bergson and Derrida, as in preceding items of this blog, I add what I think is a central feature: the intellectual is engaged in Bergsonian ‘duration’ and Derridadaist ‘deconstruction’. This elaborates on the idea that the mission of the intellectual is to break dogma and shift established, taken for granted beliefs or perspectives.

Even deconstruction may be deconstructed. As I argued in item 251, the change, transformation involved in duration and deconstruction cannot be without pause. Some stability is required, and it is part of the task of intellectuals to bring it about, in diffusing, explaining and defending perspectives.

Max Weber distinguished between a ‘morality of conviction’ and a ‘morality of responsibility’. The first may be obvious, but is the latter a requirement for an intellectual? And is the criterion for responsibility then feasibility of the views expressed? I am inclined towards responsibility, but I grant that feasibility may lock one up in the status quo.

While feasibility and stability may be virtues, it is a challenge not to be co-opted in dominant perspectives, as I argued in item 218. The intellectual must have the courage to maintain independence even at the cost of being ignored, ostracized or persecuted. That is easier said than done. Nazism denounced intellectuals as enemies of the state, forcing

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them to either conform (Heidegger) or to emigrate, either in reality or virtually, in ‘inner emigration’.

But often, in liberal democracies the price intellectuals pay is bearable, with a little courage. It can help to congregate in societies of their own. Yet, one may ask how many exercise such criticism, at universities, academies of science, and editorships of scholarly journals.

To use other terminology from Foucault: the intellectual engages in parrhêsia, or should do so, taking risks in engagement, being committed rather than maintaining the aloofness of a philosopher, teacher or scientist. The art of it then is to nevertheless maintain the telling of truth, or the search for truth, in the form of warranted assertibility, and not fall into rhetoric to mould assent.

263. Order and disorder in thought published 28-5-2016

With babies, thought is erratic, incoherent, in what the philosopher William James called ‘a blooming, buzzing confusion’. As they develop coordinated movement, in focused action, thoughts mirror this in some coherence, in neural configuration. Then comes the miracle of language to further form and order thought.

Montaigne withdrew from public life to his castle, disenchanted by the hypocrisy, cowardice, mediocrity, and inanity there. He withdrew into himself and to his dismay found his thoughts flying off in all directions. He found that he had to discipline his thought in the order of writing them down, addressing some indeterminate audience.

Wittgenstein argued against the possibility of a private language. Meanings of words need to be stabilized in the order of discourse.

In sum, one needs others to stabilize one’s thoughts.

Nietzsche was insane for the last ten years of his life. One speculation about it is that his insanity was due to a syphilis that purportedly he contracted from a whore, seemingly the only time he had sex in his life. I offer an different possible speculation. Nietzsche argued for will to power, sublimated in transcending the self, overcoming resistance of the self to its transformation. Pain, suffering is an inevitable part of that, a price to be paid. Nietzsche certainly had his share of pain and suffering. Physical pain from a chronic migraine. Mental pain from loneliness and isolation. His one friend, Paul Ree, with whom he had a triangular relationship with Lou Salomé, was ultimately chosen by her over him. His earlier infatuation with Wagner’s wife Cosima was dissolved in his break with Wagner. Nietzsche ostensibly believed in self-transformation, in lifting himself from the swamp by his own bootstraps. I wonder: could this have contributed to his insanity?

As I argued extensively in this blog, one needs opposition from others to correct and develop oneself. To order one’s thoughts it helps to write them down, as Montaigne

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discovered. It may help even more to call in the discipline of logic, or mathematics, if possible, to get a grip. But response from others, rejoinder in debate, yields a more powerful boost.

One needs that to get out of rigidities, ruts, vicious circles of thought. In this blog (item 49) I argued that it contributes to the highest level of freedom: freedom from one’s prejudices.

However, perhaps discourse, harnessed in language, is still too structured, too limited in its scope of variety. Perhaps one also needs more random sources of disturbance. The role of randomness for learning is shown in so-called genetic algorithms in computer science, inspired by the evolutionary logic of random mutations of genes and cross-over of parental chromosomes to generate new forms of life. Earlier in this blog (item 35) I referred to the ‘neural Darwinism’ developed by Gerald Edelman, which applies such evolutionary logic to the brain.

And how about dreaming? And mind-blowing drugs like LSD? I recently read in a newspaper article that MRI scans of the brain show that patterns from LSD are similar to those of sleep and of babies.

Perhaps thought requires an alternation of order and disorder: order of language and logic, minor disorder of shifts from discourse and debate, and more radical leaps of disorder in dreaming. Perhaps this entails the same logic as the one for invention that I developed before, which also included a dialectic of order and disorder, in assimilation and accommodation, in exploitation and exploration, with convergence and divergence (see item 35).

In item 137 of this blog I suggested that this may be linked to the dialectic of Yin and Yang in Taoist philosophy.

264. Useful, warranted, or workable? published 5-6-2016

In this blog I have adopted the notion of truth as ‘warranted assertibility’. The warrant is to be based on arguments and facts. In this blog I have also adopted pragmatist philosophy, found in American philosophers Peirce, James, and Dewey, but also in Nietzsche (see item 149) and Wittgenstein. Some peoplevii claim that pragmatism demands that we no longer claim or ask whether someone or something is ‘right’ but only whether it is useful. That is not my view.

As I argued in item 246 of this blog, it is still useful and warranted to claim one is right, compared to some rival claim, in the sense that one has better arguments. Without any such claim, what is the point of debate? To stand behind one’s arguments is to claim one is right.

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Note that there is a pragmatist argument here. If usefulness is the criterion of warrant and we can argue that debate is useful and that for debate claims of being right is useful, then claims of being right are warranted.

While some (American) pragmatists indeed claim that something is true if it useful, what I make of it is the wider criterion that ‘it works’. To be useful something must work, but if it works it need not be useful. What does ‘it works’ mean? Dutch has the expression ‘het klopt’. That expresses exactly what I have in mind, but is difficult to translate. It means something like ‘it fits’, ‘hangs together’, ‘stands up’, ‘works’.

In science, something is taken to be true if it ‘works’ in the sense that its implications accord with logic and experience. For warranted assertibility I propose that an assertion should work either in that sense or in the wider sense that it has implications for action that are effective, reach some goal, are indeed useful in that sense, or for which there are arguments also in a moral sense. In the latter, warranted assertibility becomes what I called ‘debatable ethics’. In sum, I render ‘warranted’ as ‘workable’, which is wider than ‘useful’.

I recall that the philosopher Hegel said, in German, that ‘Das Vernunftige ist das Wirkliche, und das Wirkliche ist das Vernunftige’. ‘Vernunftig’ means rational, or reasonable. ‘Wirklich’ means real or actual, but literally it says ‘workable’. So perhaps what I am saying in this piece is attributable to Hegel.viii

‘Working’ has several dimensions: logical, empirical, practical, moral, validity, …. Thus warrant is relative to which of these aspects one is talking about. These, in turn, depend on perspective, context, purpose.

The question then is what or who determines whether ‘it works’, or what criteria apply. Here I arrive again at Foucault’s view that it is determined by established, institutionalized ‘regimes of truth’.

In philosophy, one such regime is analytic philosophy, and another is ‘continental’ or ‘non-analytic’ philosophy (see item 158 of this blog).ix They have different views on what are interesting and legitimate assumptions and questions.

In economics, mainstream, neo-classical economics gives priority to formal rigour, in the use of economics. Heterodox economics attaches more importance to plausibility and realism of assumptions.

If in one such system one disagrees and does not conform, one needs to accept the price of ostracism, go in a hiding of some sort, or opt out, or switch to a different system.

Genuine novelty does not fit, offers new meaning, ‘does not work’, lacks recognized warrantand hence is not accepted, until it is shown to ‘work’ in novel ways and gathers cognitive, social and political clout the break the old frame. It is ‘untimely’, as Nietzsche called it.

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Are there assertions, questions or expressions where it does not make sense to ask for a warrant? Consider poetry. Is it not the point of poetry to escape from warrant, to say something unwarranted? Even there one may debate, as among literary critics, whether or not, and in what way, a poem ‘works’, in terms of rhythm, sound, tone, rhyme or alliteration, metaphor, originality, ….

Consider illocutionary speech acts, such as ‘go read that book’. One could ask ‘why, explain’. And consider expressions of feeling, in the following exchange: ‘I love you’, ‘that is not love’, ‘why not?’, ….. There is a saying that there can be no dispute about taste, but why not? One can explain the liking of something by comparing it to something else that is evidently likeable. But at some point argumentation must stop, as I argued before (in item 173 of this blog). At some point the debate will end in ‘that is just how I feel’, or ‘that is just how it is done’x.

270 Rationality unravelling published 5-7-2016

In this blog, I have been criticising the dreams of reason from the Enlightenment. But present culture appears to go around the bend to replace rationality with intellectual rubbish. We cannot go back to the Enlightenment, but a renaissance of reasonableness is needed. In the preceding item of this blog I argued that philosophical and scientific claims of firm, fixed, indubitable foundations are themselves unfounded. But more modest claims of knowledge as the best we can do at any moment, in ‘imperfection on the move’, are still warranted.

While reason was overrated, emotions and play have been neglected in traditional education. There was too little art, expression and personal development: features that were included in the ideal of ‘Bildung’ proposed by Wilhelm von Humboldt. But now knowledge, analytical skill and depth of understanding appear to be crowded out by feelings, emotions and a craving for excitement and hype.

Opinions are given equal standing as arguments, hunches are presented as facts, invective replaces debate. Public debate becomes uninformed, not only from a dominance of emotion and excitement, but also for lack of capacity to absorb requisite information and insight.

This was evident, in particular, in the recent upheaval of Brexit. Voters were lured by partial truths, at best, and with outright lies. They were diverted with appeals to sentiments of resentment, nostalgia, nationalism and xenophobia.

This is a political, economic, and intellectual disaster.

On Twitter, invective, unsubstantiated accusations, bogus facts, contradictions, and lies are presented on equal footing with facts and logic. Informed arguments are made

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suspicious as fabulation by ‘the elite’ to protect their privileges. This sets the gate wide open to political opportunists and narcissists to grab power.

The tragedy is that beneath all this lie justified complaints and grudges concerning lack of democracy and lesser involvement of the lower educated, less prosperous citizens in prosperity and policy.

In a recent article in a Dutch quality newspaper (NRC Handelsblad) the question was put: how to respond to the sloshing waves of twitter garbage in the approach of the upcoming parliamentary election, in 2017. Continuation with informed and well-reasoned argument is discouraged as having an adverse effect, deepening sentiments against the elite, as it did in Brexit.

In the article, the recommendation was given to counter in the same fashion, going along with the tide, with ridicule, accusations and invective against the populists. But this will yield a vicious circle of unravelling rationality and reasonableness. Going along with the barking on twitter (see item 219) will turn politics into a dogfight.

271 Dumping the deep published 9-7-2016

In addition to the unravelling of rationality under the terror of twitter, discussed in the preceding item in this blog, there are problems even in the effort to be rational, in knowledge becoming more shallow, with less depth, in a dumping of the deep.

There is a widening gap between an increasingly complex and fast changing world, requiring a greater depth of insight to cope with it, intellectually, psychologically, and politically, and the decreasing depth of actual knowledge and learning.

There is less time as well as capacity for depth of knowledge. One has to deal with a fast and vast surge of information. Slogans replace expositions. Slow, focused, printed knowledge is replaced by faster, wide range, pictorial, iconic digital information.

In the economy there is a prerogative of the fast and the short term in finance and investment, knowledge and learning, organization and work. This crowds out deep investments, in knowledge, products and production, and this holds back economic growth.

Politics is focused on votes in the next election. This crowds out orientation to structural change, reflection on novel ideology, changes in the undertow of politics, pressures building up, which then break out unawares, as in Brexit.

What deeper, slower knowledge there still is, is increasingly ignored by policy makers. Absorbing and implementing the deep knowledge offered by scholars and scientists requires a horizon that goes beyond that of policy as well as the horizon of the

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incumbency of politicians and managers. By the time the ideas bear fruit the manager or politician has moved on.

This demotivates the providers of deep knowledge, and tempts them to throw in the towel. There is a demand for quick application of knowledge, discouraging the more fundamental, long term research. Newcomers at universities see this and are motivated to dodge the deep and go for the quick and shallow. Scientists also have to reduce their findings to catching sketches.

Or I am being too pessimistic? Is this the muttering of a grumbling old man? If what I say concerns individual deep, specialized knowledge, could this be compensated by patterns of complementary knowledge in groups? Can individual wisdom be replaced by wisdom of the crowds? Bees in a hive rather than in a single bonnet? But if individual knowledge is shallow, how can pooling provide depth? Scientists increasingly work in teams, with a whole ream of authors crowning a publication. But there, individual depth of knowledge is combined, in division of labour, to cover complex issues.

Many things are still individual. Choosing a job, an education, a profession, a home, insurance, health care, and forms of saving and investment. And take voting: one can deliberate with others, but in the booth one has to make up one’s individual mind about a whole political programme. And in a drive for more democracy there is pressure for more voting, in referenda, even on complicated things like exiting from the EU or not. In the existing system of representative democracy the voter votes for a party with a programme, delegating expertise. In referenda that is bypassed, and the shallow wins.

273. Philosophy, science, and literature published 22-7-2016

Science, or ‘normal science’, as Thomas Kuhn called it, takes certain primitive terms and basic premises for granted, often not even consciously, as the rock bottom to build theories on and conduct experiments. That is what makes it ‘hard’.

We might see it as the playing of a Wittgensteinian language game.

In his ‘theory of scientific research programmes’, Imre Lakatos proposed that a scientific theory consists of a fixed ‘core’ of basic notions and principles, with a ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary assumptions that may be adapted to protect the core from falsification, accommodating misfits, thus ‘saving appearances’.

When contrary evidence becomes ‘excessive’ (Kuhn), and repair with auxiliary assumptions becomes too forced and contrived, there arises pressure for a more fundamental change of view, called a ‘paradigm switch’ by Kuhn, consisting of a breakdown and replacement of the core.

Here, I want to re-connect this with the ‘hermeneutic circle’, discussed in several earlier items in this blog (see e.g. item 252). Along the ‘paradigmatic axis’ words and concepts

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(‘paradigms’) are taken for granted, are inserted in sentences/propositions, in specific contexts of action, along the ‘syntagmatic axis’. Let me call that ‘the way down’. There, abstractions are enriched, infused, nourished to life from practical life. And then, in application, in the practical business of life, one sooner or later encounters misfits or novel opportunities, where concepts seem forced, and this occasions tentative shifts or replacements of them, along the paradigmatic axis. Using words shifts their meaning. Let me call that ‘the way up’.

That is the business, in particular, of literature, in storytelling, where life is shown to be richer than theory. Conduct that according to norms of normality are irrational or immoral are swallowed in a ‘suspension of disbelief’. Literature burrows into individual experience that bursts the seams of abstraction. The most telling case of meaning shifts is that of poetry. Then, the difference between science and literature is that between applying paradigms in application, in normal science, and using experience to shift notions and meanings, in literature. Philosophy used to be seen as belonging to the first category: using concepts to clarify experience. 20th century philosophy rejected that and made philosophy more literary, narrative, going from experience, from action in the world, to shifts of concepts. No longer only the way down but also the way up.

Science is in crisis when it also needs to take the way up, to craft a paradigm shift. Established abstractions are unhinged. Then it becomes more like literature. Fundamental discovery is the poetry of science. It remains narrative until scientists have put novel abstractions in place, and scientists can again throng along the way down.

These days I am confronted with this as follows. I am participating in a large project to transform economic theory and teaching. The financial crises have woken up some economists to the inadequacies of their science. In a recent meeting, new principles were proposed. They were discarded by other economists as ‘mere story telling’, in betrayal of the established rigour and clarity of their science. There, in defending and maintaining its analytical strength science becomes a force of conservatism.

Elsewhere in this blog, I proposed a ‘cycle of invention’, with an alternation between fitting experience into existing theory, along the ‘way down’, in ‘assimilation’. In several stages this can lead to a break into new theory, along the ‘way up’, in ‘accommodation’, and I indicated the connection with the hermeneutic circle. The cycle of invention is one guise, or form, of the hermeneutic circle.

In earlier work I used the term ‘discovery’, but that literally means the removal of a cover from something that exists, lies there, ‘behind experience’, waiting to be dis-covered. The term ‘invention’ is better, with its connotation of ‘creating by thought’.

274. Is pragmatism conventional? published 30-7-2016

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I has been claimed (e.g by Richard Rorty) that pragmatism is conventional: ‘treating conventionally accepted norms as foundations’xi. I am a pragmatist and yet I disagree, up to a point. If pragmatism were conventional, it would be inherently conservative, and I propose that pragmatism can support novelty.

What is conventional? I propose that it can be rendered as operating within an established language game. Certain terms, meanings and ‘rules of the game’ are taken for granted. In science, it could, I proposed in the preceding item in this blog, be rendered as preserving the ‘core’ of a ‘ research programme’, in the terms presented by Imre Lakatos: fundamental theoretical and methodological principles that are not susceptible to falsification. Empirical anomalies are to be dealt with by means of alterations in a ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary assumptions.

In my view, as I argued before (in item 264 in this blog), something is to be accepted as ‘warranted’ when it ‘works’, logically, empirically and practically. I propose that this does not necessarily require fit in some existing language game, and hence can escape conventionalism in that sense. I grant that it does presuppose some agreement on criteria concerning logic, empirical testing, and practical success across language games. There is no rock bottom for truth beyond any and all perspectives, but we may not stand empty handed in trying to step out of a language game, or a research programme, into a wider, more generic one. I am not claiming that this is always possible, and that there is some ultimate, authoritative language game that can decide universal legitimacy.

There is overlap of at least some terms, principles, assumptions, perspectives, between language games, even if they are in different languages (English and French, say). If terms are shared, they are not likely to have identical meaning, since meanings depend on relations between terms in the game, but, I propose, they are likely to have some family resemblance if they are used across games.

To be specific, let me expand a bit on a project for a radical transformation of economic science, which I mentioned in the preceding item in this blog. That is based on radically different perspectives on human conduct, ethics, scientific conduct, and the notion of uncertainty. Many economists reject this out of hand. However, I do employ some established concepts from economics, (such as ‘transaction costs’), though twisting and extending them a bit, and I refer to phenomena that economists might acknowledge (though they look differently on their relevance for theory). My ambition is to show that alternative theory explains certain facts better if only one accepts them as relevant. That ambition may fail, but it is not necessarily hopeless.

Can a pragmatist offer rigourous arguments? Richard Rorty said he/she cannot because rigour requires unshakeable foundations, which the pragmatist does not accept. Again I disagree. He confused rigour with certainty. One can have rigorous arguments on uncertain foundations. Take mathematics. It is rigorous on the basis of uncertain, merely assumed axioms. The grounds for rigour may shift, but they are still there for some time or in some area. Euclidean geometry was supplemented by other geometries. It applies on a plane but not on a sphere.

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I agree (with Rorty) that rigorous argument requires a shared language game, terms with shared meanings, shared assumptions, shared grammar or method (rules of the game), and shared explanatory goals.

Compare this with Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a ‘ paradigm shift’ involved in breaking the rules of a game, stepping out of the game, resulting in ‘ incommensurablity’, an impossibility of rigorous argumentation between games.

But, as I suggested, one may still have the benefit of a wider, roomier, more general game. A different ball game is still a ball game. Parts of argumentation may show a family resemblance between language games. I do think that discussion between language games involves differences of meaning and intention, and therefore is always imperfect tinkering, and often does fail. Moving between games is more like literary narrative than like rigorous scientific discourse. That may be rejected as unscientific, and then debate is indeed hopeless.

What games are there in philosophy? I take this question also from Richard Rorty. One game is to take philosophy as ‘transcendental’, reflecting on the conditions under which some theory or practice (concerning truth, reality, or morality) is possible. But what are the conditions for such conditions to be possible? It yields an infinite regress of conditions for conditions. The underlying intuition is that there are, must be, independent, fixed principles to build on.

Another game, going against that intuition, is that of anti-essentialism, anti-foundationalism, as in pragmatism. Think of philosophers Peirce, Dewey, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Quine, Derrida, and Rorty.

Are these two games incommensurable, with no recourse to sensible debate? One may think of the supposed rift between analytic and continental philosophy. However, they still have things in common, such as the themes of knowledge and morality, even if they differ fundamentally in their views on them. Disagreeing on fundamentals, they may still compare implications for science, politics, economics, literature, …. They may even agree that in some cases the other side seems to be making sense. And indeed, some bridging between analytic and continental philosophy does seem to be taking place.

275. Science and politics: how different are they? published8-8-1916

If there is no ultimate, universal, fixed ground for any science, as argued in preceding items in this blog, does this mean that there is no great difference between science and politics? Richard Rorty claimed that: ‘ .. no interesting epistemological differences between the aims and procedures of scientists and that of politics’xii.

I disagree. To make a long story short, I would say that the procedure of science is to argue rigorously inside some language game, while in politics, in a democracy at least,

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the aim is to achieve some agreement across a variety of language games, and that cannot be rigorous and scientific. Ambiguity and shift of meaning is part of the game. It is more a matter of practical wisdom than of analytical rigor.

Hence the frequent failure of attempts to make policy making scientific, as happened in the delegation of much economic policy to economic scientists, for example.

I connect this difference to that made by Pascal between the ‘ spirit of geometry’ and the ‘spirit of finesse’xiii. As he formulated it: the spirit of geometry is difficult, at first, since one has to switch one’s regard away from the complexity, the richness and variability of the world we are in, in the turn of abstraction. But then it becomes easy, to argue rigorously, in step with the march of logic or math. The spirit of finesse, by contrast, is easy, at first, because one keeps looking at the world in all its complexity, but then it becomes difficult to argue without error while maintaining that complexity.

In contrast with Descartes, I do not think that the spirit of geometry has access to rock-bottom foundations of truth in the form of self-evident ‘distinct ideas’. I do think it helps to clarify arguments and check their consistency.

Take economics. It uses mathematics but the virtue of that, in my view, is not that it yields workable models, but that it allows one to detect errors of argument. But then, to work in application to policy making one needs to revert to the spirit of finesse.

Politics, more like literature than like science, needs to allow for differences and for shifts in perspective, meanings, assumptions, aims, in what people variously think, value and want.

If pragmatism means ‘anything goes that works’, then whether and how it is supposed to work is very different between science and politics.

In science, to work is to be consistent with established theoretical and methodological assumptions, and with what are accepted as facts.

In politics, to work, in a democracy, is to be feasible in the field of political forces and to appeal to a sufficient part of the electorate. Whether it is logically and factually coherent is of secondary importance, alas. In politics this may work, not in science. However, this is no reason not to try to make arguments for policy as consistent and informed as possible.

An authoritarian regime may impose a single language game, with aims, conduct, meanings and values settled centrally, and enforced on all. That is what makes it totalitarian. Some people love it.

It does not thereby become like science. In contrast with science it is not aimed at truth seeking and openness of conduct given established method, but at conformance.

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295. The commons of truth published 24-12-2016

Truth cannot be had, but we need it. Opinion is personal, fact is public, and without it the public collapses. If everyone’s opinion becomes personal truth, politics ends in pandemonium.

In this blog I have repeatedly defended a view of knowledge and truth that is a form of relativism, but not a radical form. We interpret the world according to mental frames that we have developed in the course of life, and hence depend on its trajectory. All the more reason to enter into conversation and debate with other people with other mentalities. It is our only chance to correct our prejudices.

We cannot achieve more truth than warranted assertibility, and the warrant is achieved in dialogue, debate.

That requires the ability to engage in giving and assimilating constructive criticism, trying to establish some commonality of truth. That requires the crossing of cognitive and cultural distance, which requires openness, empathy, and the determined effort to engage in voice, falling back on exit only as a last resort.

What we observe, in present culture wars, is the opposite: a flight into self-righteousness, seeking exit. Moulding apparent facts and fabricating outright falsehoods for the confirmation of prejudice. Like other commons, the commons of truth requires joint tending, not the self-serving ravaging of it. Conduct does not need to be self-effacing, as long as it is not self-enforcing.

It needs institutions to help carry the care for it. Perhaps, first of all quality media that dig the deep, sift the fair from the foul, and bend right what is hammered askew. If markets force them to fail in this, competing on hype and low price, then they should be subsidized, to enable their task, hiring and keeping the best of journalism. That is one of the requirements of a politics of virtue.

But how about creative destruction? Can the commons be reconciled with creativity? Creativity creates self-assurance and the will to break rather than preserve established order and truth. Boundaries can challenge rather than subdue.

Yes, but creation must prove itself, demonstrating that ‘it works’. It must establish a new warrant. It should accept that challenge and should not shield itself from such tests. It should demand the opportunity to prove itself, not deny the need for proof.

The commons of truth is not a thing, a pasture, say, or a bedding laid out with ready doctrine, but rather a process, a practice of seeking warrant, testing it, rejecting and remaking it. The trick is to tolerate disagreement and treating it to curiosity. Creating distance as a challenge to cross.

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313. From outcome to process published 4-5-2017

Earlier in this blog, in item 29, I prosed the hypothesis that there is an ‘object bias’ in thought and language. The idea is that in a long period in the evolution of humans, as hunter-gatherers, thought and language have been biased as a result from the need to deal adequately, for survival, with objects moving in time and space, and human action upon such objects. Think of the sabre-toothed tiger, enemies on the prowl, a lost child, an incoming speer, building a shelter, carrying burden, etc.

Then, when abstracts became needed, those were conceptualized as metaphors in terms of such objects and actions. This is helpful, but sets thought on the wrong foot, since abstractions do not behave like such objects in time and space. A chair when carried from one room to another does not drop a leg or change colour, but the meaning of a word changes when moved from one sentence to another.

One of the results, I propose, is that thought is pre-occupied with substance rather than process, to outcomes rather than the processes by which they may or may not be produced.

One salient example, in my experience, is the preoccupation of economists with optimal outcomes, in equilibria, regardless of how they might be achieved. I was confronted with this while working at a business faculty at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Dealing with organizations one cannot just look at outcomes because it is processes, in particular the ‘primary process’ of production, that is the topic at issue.

This difference in thought yielded one of several fundamental obstacles to integrating two faculties, of business and economics, as it the was my task to accomplish at the time, as director of a research institute. I now think that the preoccupation with outcomes is connected with the object bias.

It is a special case of the preoccupation with substance and with stable absolutes, as an ideal of thought, in Western Philosophy. There were exceptions, such as Heraclitus, who saw the world as flow, in contrast with Parmenides. Aristotle in some of his philosophy was oriented to process, of development towards an end, such as growth in nature, and more generally process as the realization of potential. But there has been a dominance of Platonic though of a higher reality, beyond the chaos, buzz, complexity and change of the observed world, of stable absolutes.

It is also associated with the outsider, ‘spectator’ view of the thinking subject, observing the world from without rather than being involved in its process, which I discussed in item 309 of this blog.

I think the object bias bedevils thought in a wide range of notions, including happiness, love, thought, truth, meaning, and trust. The deeply rooted inclination is to see these categories (‘seeing’ is itself one of the metaphors) in terms of object thinking, in terms of ‘having’ something, ‘being in’ something, ‘working on’ something, ‘transporting’ it, etc.

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We are ‘in love’, ‘in trouble’, ‘grasp’ knowledge, ‘store’ information, ‘send’ information along communication channels’, ‘have’ a body, and ‘have’ an identity.

I think understanding can be much improved, and with it our ‘grasp’ of society, by thinking instead in terms of processes, rather than states or outcomes.

In items 6, 124, and 193 of this blog I discussed love as a process of developing ‘eros’, passionate, romantic love, into ‘philia’, loving companionship.

In items 8 and 211 I discussed identity as a process of formation

In item 183 I defined happiness as a process.

In items 104 and 264, I discussed truth as a process of dialogue, debate, trying to establish and test ‘warranted assertibility’.

In item 168, I discussed the notion of word as a process.

In items 31,35, and 138 I considered economics and learning as a process of trial and error, akin, up to a point, to evolutionary logic, rather than ‘intelligent design’, in a ‘cycle of invention’.

I noted, in items, 128 and 137, that in Eastern philosophy there is more awareness to process, in Buddhism and Taoism. I noted that my ‘cycle of invention’ seems akin to the cyclical interaction of Yin and Yang.

317. Fairy tales of technological utopia published 27-5-2017

In the media one finds impressive tales of technological prowess. Those are promising especially for medical care, with genetic modification, artificial cells and viruses, for fighting diseases. Mobilizing brain signals to steer machines, such as wheelchairs, or external skeletons strapped on lame legs. Use of quantummechanics for new computers. Imitating nature with new materials. One sees sparkles of ingenuity, creativity, and originality, visionary passion.

However, all this is sometimes glazed with a soothing, intoxicating sauce of technological utopianism. Technology as our saviour, resolution of all problems.

But technology also yields unexpected, unintended and sometimes undesirable outcomes. Look at nuclear energy, which we now want to get rid of. Genetic modification, artificial cells and viruses bring risks of misuse, criminal usurpation, and possibly calamitous accidents. That is no reason to stop, but it does call for prudence and sober evaluation.

Similar utopianism is radiated by bobo’s of the digital revolution, such as Mark Zuckerberg en Bill Gates. The more information and communication the better. But now

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use of the Internet is leading to the construction and sale of detailed user profiles that can beneficially be used to tailor services and innovations, but are also used to manipulate, guide choice, and affect privacy and ownership of personal data. Young people get terrorized by ridicule on social media, become depressive from pressures from Facebook and Instagram to compete on looks and pimped accounts of achievements. Twitter sounds nicely birdlike but derails in the barking of blood hounds. And how about hacking and computer viruses?

In connecting brains to machinery and to each other we seem to be on our way to a collective brain and identity, a hyperidentity, in which individuals are small parts in the machinery, like neurons in the brain, with no knowledge or even awareness of the whole. Will that constitute progress, yield happiness?

I heard one of the utopians quote the 16th century British philosopher Francis Bacon in saying that ‘nature is to be put on the rack’ to ‘own up to its secrets’. We seem to be doing well at that, in environmental damage.

And do the most pressing problems of humanity lie in areas where technological intervention will help? Or do they lie more in human conduct and thought, in political, social and philosophical issues, in partly legitimate grievances of populism, emerging authoritarian regimes, suppression, corruption, wars, terrorism, refugees, banking crises, re-emergence of nationalism, and threats to liberal democracy?

320. Emergence published 17-6-1917

Reductionism is a form of scientism: the idea that natural science is the only respectable form of knowledge, on the basis of experimental facts and rigorous, preferably mathematically formalised argument. Reductionism is analytical: it decomposes phenomena into fundamental elements that together explain the whole.

The opposition claims that ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’. In the formation of the whole something is added that cannot be found in the parts. That is called emergence. Aristotle already talked about it.

Emergence is akin to self-organization. That arises in nature, as in evolution, where forms do not arise from ‘intelligent design’, but from random trials that are selected out when they do not function well enough to survive and replicate.

More generally, in emergence elements have a potential to unfold properties, in interaction with each other, and develop collective properties, depending on the environment.

The fundamental theoretical argument for the novelty that is added in synthesis is the following. The whole, be it an organ, an organism, a brain, a sentence, an organization, a market, or a society, must achieve some coherent functioning to survive in its

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environment, which determines what works and what does not, and it must incorporate the conditions for it. As a consequence, not everything comes ‘from inside’, from the components, but also from outside, the functional conditions for survival. In that, the whole reflects the external conditions, which did not lie in the parts.

Emergence arises widely in nature and society, on many levels. Chemistry arises from physics, biology from chemistry, evolution from genes, consciousness from neurons, organizations from people, markets from firms, consumers and institutions, societies from people, communities, culture, language and institutions.

In language, the meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of words in it, but also, the other way around, word meaning also depends on sentence meaning. Earlier in this blog, I used the hermeneutic circle to analyse this (items 36, 252 in this blog). Concepts are embedded in sentences, where they obtain one of several potential meanings, but in the action context they can also acquire a new meaning, which shifts the concept. Here, the outside selection lies in the language community, and in what Wittgenstein called language games.

Meanings and ideas arise from action in the world. I proposed (in item 29) that this yields an object bias in our conceptualization of abstract notions as if they are like things moving in time and space, and in terms of ‘what you can do with them’ (affordances). That also connects with the idea from pragmatist philosophy that truth can be seen as ‘what works’.

Relations are emergent. If individuals develop their perception and ideas, and their judgements, in interaction with their physical and social environment, then the course of relationship is fundamentally uncertain. That means that it is not known beforehand what can happen. One may have expectations about what people may do, but one is regularly caught by surprise. One cannot even reliably predict one’s own responses.

In groups, social constellations, complexity increases further, in on he ne hand mimicry of conduct and on the other hand rivalry and rebellion, in agreement or conflict. As discussed elsewhere in this blog (item 205), it looks like people have both an instinct for survival, by protecting their interests, and an instinct for altruism, at least within one’s own group, where one is prepared to make sacrifices at the cost of self-interest, in what is called ‘parochial altruism’.

Organizations and institutions can lead to what I have called ‘system tragedy’ (items 109, 159, 187 in this blog). The culture of an organization, the (international) markets in which it finds itself, and the public institutions of laws and regulations, form expectations, positions, roles, interests, and entanglements between them, which routinely yield outcomes that were not expected or intended, and where guilt cannot easily be attributed to single individuals, who often could not, or did not dare to act otherwise, given their positions. An example is that of ‘the banks’.

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History is even more complex. It anything is unpredictable it is that. Look at what has happened in just one year, with the rise of populism, the election of Trump, Brexit, and the rise, apparently out of nowhere, of Emmanuel Macron. With each of those one would have been declared a lunatic if one had predicted it. Where does that complexity come from?

In an earlier item in this blog (item 100), concerning the nature of causality, I analysed the emergence of the Dutch United East India Company (VOC) in the 16th-17th century, as a mix of causal factors of different kinds: accidental conditions of climate and geography, entrepreneurial action, eclipse of competitors, technological and organizational innovations, in more or less accidental ‘novel combinations’, and conditions of war. If any of those factors had been different, or occurred at another moment, nothing or something entirely different might have occurred.

321. Adaptiveness published 14-6-2017

In the preceding item in his blog I discussed emergence, where elements produce wholes with properties not present in the elements. Emergence is studied as ‘adaptation’ in the research field of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). A subfield of that is that of Agent-Based Computational Models (ABCM). There, interaction and adaptation of agents is simulated in computational models. I have used that, with a PhD candidate and a postdoctoral researcher, to study whether and how trust can arise in markets.xiv

In general, such a model has at least the following elements: properties of agents (such as capabilities, preferences), a representation they make of relevant elements in their environment, rules for decision making, a mechanism whereby they observe and evaluate each other, adaptation, i.e. strengthening or weakening of rules and preferences, depending on perceived success, and the invention of new rules.

In this case the central question was under which circumstances, if at all, trust can emerge in markets, even while profit is the criterion of success, and agents can choose between competition and collaboration. They form an opinion on the trustworthiness of partners on the basis of loyalty in collaboration. Next to profit, trust may form part of the value of collaboration. The weight attached to trust relative to profit is adaptive, depending on realised profit. Their own trustworthiness is also adaptive. It is modelled as a threshold of defecting from a relationship: the higher the threshold, he greater the loyalty. In adaptation there is also a random element.

De model enabled us to investigate when and how frequently trust may grow even though success is measured as profit. The aim was to test claims from economics that under competition trust cannot survive. According to the simulations with the model, often trust does indeed grow, but it depends on the circumstances, governed by the settings of parameters of the model.

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Beyond this modelling, here I give a reflection on traits that help adaptiveness. If through the uncertainty of emergence it is not possible to determine ahead of time what may happen, then one must be prepared for the unexpected. There are several ways for his.

In robustness one chooses a way that is not sensitive to unexpected turns. Then one may lose some benefit in some cases but avoids heavy loss in others. Robustness can be explored in scenario analyse. There, one invents different possible futures (scenarios) to investigate how sensitive options are differences between them.

In flexibility one choses a way that can easily and quickly be replaced by another, to adapt to circumstances as they arise.

In resilience one is resistant, able to incur and absorb adversity. One form of that it is create slack: excess capacity to absorb unforeseeable shocks, in money, time, space, reputation, or cognitive capacity.    

In Inventiveness one learns to learn, to invent new ways, depending on experience, and to analyse the conduct of others for their success, and to deliberately seek novel challenges by which one can discover new ways. That is found in the theory of invention that I discussed earlier in this blog (items 31, 35). Diversity is important for the evolution of a group (such as a species, in evolution, or an industry, in markets), and for discovery. It increases the chance that at least ome of the various forms fits whatever emerges.

322. Reference and constitution published 1-7-2017

In this blog a leading principle is that of philosophical pragmatism. It can be summarized as follows: the human being perceives, senses, feels and thinks according to mental processes that guide actions but are also formed by them, in interaction with its environment, especially other people.

As a result, the human being is socially constituted. However, every individual is also unique in its mental construction along its individual life path.

In other words, to connect with the preceding items in this blog, the individual is emergent, in its mental construction. Its parts constitute an identity, as a coherent subject, which is not present in its parts. And while its path of development is constrained by genetic potential, its outcome cannot be predicted. It is uncertain as a result of interaction between self and other. Hence relationships also are emergent.

This presents a major challenge to economic science, as will be argued in later items.

Here I want to add to previous discussions of meaning (items 32, 168 in this blog). There I used the distinction between reference and sense (derived from the work of Frege), but with a twist. Reference is what an expression refers to. The word ‘cat’ refers to the collection of all cats. Sense was defined by Frege as ‘The way in which something is

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given’, the way it presents itself. I turned that into ‘the way in which we identify’, i.e. how we identify something as something. How we identify some animal as a cat.

I argued that the latter, sense, is idiosyncratic, with largely personal connotations attached to the concept, collected along one’s path of life. We have all had a variety of experiences with different cats. This connects with the distinction that de Saussure made between ‘langue’, the given shared understanding of meaning, at any moment, and ‘parole’, idiosyncratic language use that varies between people and over time.

Here I want to add to that discussion, using an insight from Jerome Bruner[i], a philosopher who has been an important source of inspiration in several aspects of my work. The idea I want to pick up from him here is that in much of our thought and talk we ‘do not refer to the world but constitute it’. That captures well the idea, originating with Kant, that we cannot observe the world as it is in itself, but construe a virtual reality, a rendering of the world and our position in it. That is how we make sense of the world.

Much of that is not conscious, not a matter of rational reflection, let alone a testing of hypotheses.

Let’s face it: this constitution of our view of the world entails prejudice. Among other things, that yields a problem concerning claims of objective scientific knowledge. That claim lies not in individual objectivity but in debate between scientists, and is imperfect also there.    

It also fits with the idea that the knowing and sensemaking subject is not an objective, outside onlooker of the world, but part of it, constituting itself in it. That is found, for example, in Heidegger’s notion of ‘being in the world’.

So, there is constitution in a double sense. The individual is constituted by action and interaction in the world, and in the process it constitutes a representation, a virtual reality of that world. Since it is done in interaction with others there is some commonality, some shared sense and understanding, shaped in part by shared language (langue) and other forms of culture, as well as idiosyncrasy (parole), which yields the variety that feeds renewal of sense and purpose, both private and public. This is a crucial thing about humanity and society.           

342. Process philosophy published 15-11-2017

According to Kant, we can know neither the ‘thing in itself’, out in the world, nor ourselves. Hegel turned this epistemological gap: we don’t know, into an ontological one; it does not exist. Žižek went along with Hegel, and, following Lacan, proposed that people craft an illusory ‘object-a’, for things and selves, as discussed in the foregoing items in this blog.

This objet-a is part, I propose, of what I have called an ‘object bias’: the irresistible urge to see the world and ideas, concepts, meanings in terms of objects.

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Here I propose an alternative: let us shift the focus of our understanding of the world from object to process. I have argued for that in several places in this blog, concerning being, identity, cognition, truth, meaning, and democracy. I summarize this below.

I have referred to Heidegger’s view of ‘being’ not as a noun but as a verb. I deny identity as some fixed given, with some enduring essence, and presented it as a process of emergence in acting in the world. As an alternative to the idea of identity as an object I proposed the idea of identity as a position in developing networks of contacts with people. Inspired by Levinas’ philosophy of the other, I proposed that identity is developed in interaction with others, and that intellectual and spiritual progress requires openness to opposition by the other.

In all this, I use the view from pragmatic philosophy ( Peirce, James, Dewey) that cognition is developed from interaction with the physical and social world. Instead of truth as some ‘thing to be found’, I employ the idea from pragmatist philosophy of truth as ‘warranted assertibility’, in a process of debate, and ethics not as a fixed order but as ‘debatable’, in Aristotelian ‘phronesis’ or practical wisdom, where ethical judgements depend on context.

I also use the work of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone that feelings, ethics and morality arise from interaction in movement and bodily interaction with others. This yields a ‘dynamic congruency’ between emotions and movement that is not a given but is ongoing. Among other things, this yields mirror neurons.

Mirror neurons are not present at birth and are not genetically determined in later development. Like other mental constructions they arise from networks of neuronal connections that emerge and develop in time, ‘sprout’ and are ‘pruned’ depending on how often they are activated and how productive they are. It is no coincidence that they arise in the motor regions in the brain, which govern movement.xv

I present meaning not as some fixed reference, with a word as a label attached to a thing it refers to or ‘denotes’, but as a process of sense-making, of how to identify whether something belongs to some class, or whether something is true. This is done on the basis of connotations one attaches to things. I adopt the distinction between reference and sense from the logician/philosopher Frege. Reference concerns something as ‘given’, sense concerns ‘the way in which it is given’, as Frege put it, which I turned into ‘the way in which we identify something, an X as an Y’.

Sense depends on experience: connotations are collected along the course of one’s life, in a culture, in a series of contexts. A life course is unique to a person, and hence sense varies between people, yielding ‘cognitive distance’.

Reference can be undetermined, with uncertainty, or difference of opinion, whether some object belongs to a class or not. It can also change. I used the example of a stuffed cow used as a chair. New connotations emerge from action in the world, and they may remain

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idiosyncratic or become publicly adopted. I used the ‘hermeneutic circle’ as a model of meaning change.

Perhaps the distinction between sense and reference can also be used to clarify Žižek’s notion of ‘master signifiers’ attached to the idealized ‘object-a’. He uses the example of the monarch as the master identifier of the social order. Here, the ‘objet-a’ is the intended reference, and the ‘master signifier’ is a leading sense maker for identifying it.

The peculiarity here is that what is referred to does not in fact exist, is a ‘phantasm’, as Žižek calls it, but people believe, or make believe, that it does exist. In other words, the reference has no ontological anchor, so that the sense of the signifier cannot be tested, and master signifiers can be manipulated, and become an instrument of ideology.

Žižek used the example of ‘professor’. Other scholars may have the same degree of knowledge, talents, and scientific achievements as the professor, but are not professors. Thus, Žižek claims, the term ‘professor’ is ‘empty’. It is not. It has sense, in helping to identify someone as a professor, also to people who cannot judge his/her qualities. It brings in a link with official standards, procedures and authorities appointed to appoint professors.

Thus, a master signifier yields institutionalized sense. Is it thereby indoctrination? It certainly is, but it is also a pragmatic necessity to avoid endless debate between different senses of scholarship, in order to get on with the job of appointing professors.

For democracy, I proposed to replace the current perspective of positioning, in voting for a political party and its programme, once in four or five years, by an ongoing process of being involved in making and implementing policy, in a ‘commons’, at least on a local level, in citizens councils.

To summarize all this, I used the motto of ‘imperfection on the move’.

355. The universal and its particulars published 3-2-2018

Žižek adopts Hegel’s view of the ‘concrete universal’: the universal should be seen as incorporating all its particulars, which may be in conflict which each other, and inevitably there are anomalies that do not quite fit the universal.

Repetition, in the manifestation of the universal in its particulars, is never quite repetition, duplication, but always differentiation. And this may erode or explode the universal, in what Hegel called ‘aufhebung’.xvi Žižek suggests (in his Parallax view) that such dynamics forms the essence of the universal. I will return to the issue of essences in a later item in this blog.

The philosophical significance of this is that it deviates from the Platonic idea of the universal as transcending the messy world of particulars, and being fixed.

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That is also of significance for politics, where the totality of the state should leave room for variety of individuals in the state as well as a variety of states.

Žižek also reminds us that Christ is the personification, particularization, of God the universal.

I now want to compare the Hegelian view with the view of the universal and its particulars presented in this blog (in items 16, 17, 135).

In my view, the universal is not the totality of its particulars, but an abstraction from them, from the rich variety of contexts where the particulars reside. This is in contrast with the Hegelian view that the particulars ‘fall’ from the universal. In my view they ‘feed’ it, form its roots. In its use, to become real, the abstract universal needs to be re-embedded in the richness of the particular context at hand. With a flourish, I would say: the abstract is a hermaphrodite, inserting itself in the context and being impregnated by a host of particulars that may give birth to a novel abstraction.

For sceptical David Hume the abstract, the universal, is a fiction. I think it is a little more than that. It is rooted in the reality of its particulars, and is a wager on what is invariable across contexts, but this is open since there is no end to possible contexts. Unforeseeable contexts may arise.

An abstraction is itself a universal, an abstraction from varieties of abstraction. The abstraction of abstraction is, as I would now formulate it, that one drops features that do not systematically return in different contexts, in search for what seems essential, though that will never be found. It falls under what in this blog I have called ‘imperfection on the move’. The terms of the abstraction are ambiguous and themselves variable. What, precisely, is a context; is that notion liable to shift? What is essential: does that not imply some judgement of relevance, and how fixed is that? And other criteria may arise: some form that a formalization should have, perhaps.

The universal is often supported by a prototype that yields an exemplar, that guides identification of particulars as belonging to the universal. I read somewhere that for the English the robin is the exemplar of ‘bird’, while for the Dutch it is the sparrow.

From Lacan, Žižek adopts the notion of a ‘master signifier’ that symbolizes the universal. It is not necessarily an adequate characterization and often serves to bend thought in a certain direction, or hide incongruity, as a support of ideology. For an example, in item 348 of this blog I used the idealized model of perfect competition, as the master signifier of market ideology, while in fact it is never achieved and the endeavour of firms as market participants is to block competition.

The implication of this view of universals is that typically one cannot give necessary and sufficient features for something to belong to a category. For an example, I have used the example of ‘chair’. Once, in a newspaper I saw a man in a stuffed cow with a dent for the

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seat, with the caption ‘watch me sitting in my cow’. After that, when walking past a field with a cow one might say ‘look what a beautiful chair’.

For further analysis, I used the notion of the hermeneutic circle, in item 36, as Heidegger also did. Words for concepts, abstractions, along the paradigmatic axis, are inserted into sentences, along the syntagmatic axis, and there are connected with other concepts, and this unique configuration may yield a novel perspective on the concept.

The variation is one of both context and people. In my discussion of meaning (item 32) I used the distinction, going back to Frege, between denotation/reference and connotation/sense. For Frege, sense was ‘the way in which something is given’: how does an object present itself? I reconstruct it as the way in which reference is established: how does one recognize or select something as a chair? That, I propose, happens on the basis of associations that one has with the concept, collected along a path of life, by which one recognizes something as belonging to the concept. Which connotation is picked out, or triggered, depends on the context. And then, misfits will appear, anomalies, which may occasion a shift of the universal, or a split, or absorption in a novel one. This yields a constitutive role for the individual, not as subjugated to the universal but as feeding it.

How, next, does dialectical change work? That is the topic for the next item.

356. Dialectics on the move published 10-2-2018

Žižek tells usxvii that Hegel’s dialectics has been falsely interpreted as a closed circle: he intended the end as a new beginning.xviii This goes beyond the old Aristotelian idea that things have a potential that is realized in the end. With Hegel, on the path to realization of potential a new potential is created. The question now is how this works. Unless I missed something in Hegel, he gives no explanation how, by what logic, dialectics works, produces novelty, from opposition or tension.

In a later item in this blog I will discuss ontology: the philosophy of being, of things in the world. There, I will use the idea, shared by Graham Harman and Tristan Garcia, that there are two dimensions to objects in the world: first, how they are composed, ‘what is in them’ and second their position in their environment, ‘what they are in’xix.

The first is the analytic view of science, breaking things down into their components, the second is the phenomenological view, considering the lived experience of things. The latter connects with philosophical pragmatism and Wittgenstein’s notions of ‘meaning as use’. I will now claim that the two arise from each other: how something is composed determines, in part, how it exists in its context, and that, in turn, affects how it is composed. How does that work?

For transformation, in this blog (item 31), and in a book published in 2000), I proposed a ‘cycle’ of discovery or invention. I did not develop it with Hegel in mind, at least not consciously, but was perhaps fed by prior readings of Hegel. I was inspired, more

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explicitly, by the theory of the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget concerning the development of intelligence in children. The basic idea there is that when one is confronted with new experience, the attempt is made to assimilate it in existing mental frames, and when that fails such frames are accommodated. I now wonder if it can be seen as a further development of Hegelian thought. In a later item in this blog I will propose that it clarifies ontology, in what I call dynamic ontology.

To recall, I proposed that the cycle of change starts with generalization, defined as application of a practice in novel contexts. In the novel context, the practice is challenged by new conditions of survival. What had been adopted as a universal is confronted with novel particulars.

Note the link with evolution here, with the idea that novelty, in speciation, arises from challenges in a new selection environment. The classic example is the emergence of new species after the disastrous crash of a meteor on earth, which made the dinosaurs and other species extinct. In innovation policy some firms now actively seek novel markets to find out limitations by identifying failures, as a source of innovation.

Faced with failure in a novel context, the first step, which stays as close as possible to the existing frame, is to ‘tweak’ that frame, in differentiation, in trying out different variants of the same, with recollection of earlier forms that were at play in the emergence of the present practice.

This may not suffice for survival in the new context. Here is where Hegelian opposition or contradiction kicks in. In the failure of the practice one gets to really know it, with its limitations that call for renewal.

From the conflict between practice and the novel context, experiments arise, in what (adopting the terminology of Piaget) I call reciprocation, inserting elements from practices met in the novel context that seem to succeed where the old practice fails, into the logic of the old practice. This yields misfits between the old and the new, novelties that conflict with existing logic.

This, I think, is the fundamental step in dialectics: experimenting with hybrids of the old and the new, to discover ways of relieving the tension between them. It allows for the exploration of the potential of novel elements, and of the limitations of the old logic that obstruct the realization of the new potential, which gives hints in what directions a novel logic might be explored.

Necessity is both the mother and the midwife of invention.

Novelty, as it emerges in a new basic logic, is hesitant at first, labouring with inconsistencies or frictions that remain, with fall-backs into the old, requiring further adjustments in the constellation of the new basic logic and its elements, until it settles into what in the innovation literature is called a ‘dominant design’.

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In sum: in moving to a new place or context one encounters the need and insight to open up content to new possibilities. What was taken as a universal is confronted with deviant particulars (see the preceding item in this blog). Note the similarity to the hermeneutic circle (item 36, 252).

Note that the cycle is in fact a spiral, not a closed loop.

Is this helpful as an elaboration, elucidation, or twist of Hegelian dialectics?

383. Silly simplicity published 11-8-2018

Many concepts that play an important role in public debate are ambiguous: they have a variety of meanings, and often it is not clear which is at issue. Think of God, democracy, justice, power, liberalism, identity, trust, love, truth, meaning, good and bad, culture, beauty, art, causality, change, freedom, and more. Discussants bash each other in disagreement, thinking they are talking about the same thing while they are not. These are slips of simplification, of reducing many-sided concepts to simple, reductive caricatures.

i Gary Gutting, 1989, Michel Foucault’s archaeology of scientific reason, Cambridge U. Press.ii In his Less than nothing. iii In an interview on ‘Truth and power’ in 1976, reprinted in James D. Faubion (ed.), Essential works of Foucault 1954-1984, volume 3, Power, The New Press, 2000. iv Michel Trebitsch & Marie-Chistine Granjon (eds.), Pour une histoire comparée des intellectuels, Editions Complexe, 1998.v Also from Trebitsch & Granjonvi Jean-Paul Sartre, Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels, a lecture given in Tokio in 1965.vii e.g. Richard Rorty in his Essays on Heidegger and others.viii I have not checked with the literature on Hegel whether this has perhaps already been said and is warranted. ix ‘Continental’ is a misnomer, since American pragmatist philosophy is also non-analytic. x As argued by Wittgenstein.xi E.g. by Richard Rorty, in an essay on Derrida, in Essays on Heidegger and others, Cambridge U. Press, 1991, p. 119xii Richard Rorty, 1991, Essays on Heidegger and others, Cambridge University Press, p. 172.xiii In his Pensées.xiv See: T. Klos & B. Nooteboom, Agent-based computational transaction cost economics,Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 25 (2001): 503-526, Alexander Gorobets & Bart

Nooteboom,Adaptive build-up and breakdown of trust: An agent-based computational approach,

Journal ofmanagement and Governance,10 (2006): 277-306. [i] Jerome Bruner, The narrative construction of reality, Critical Enquiry, 18/1 (1991), 1-21.xv Maxine Johnstone, ‘Movement and mirror neurons: A challenging and choice conversation’, Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, vol. 11/issue 3, p. 385-401.xvi There is an English term for this: ‘ablation’, but I don’t like it and leave ‘aufhebung’ untranslated. It means at the same time ‘lifting up’ and ‘elimination’. xvii In his Parallax view.xviii The Latin word terminus can mean ‘end point’ as well as ‘starting point’. xix Tristan Garcia, 2014, Form and object; A treatise on things, Edinburgh University Press.

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Take atheism, for example. That depends on what meaning you assign to God. Some people say Spinoza was not an atheist because he was passionate in recognizing God as the primary principle from which all else flows, the top axiom of the mathematical system of his Ethics, written, as Spinoza said, ‘more geometrico’, in the manner of geometry, with axioms from which successive theorems are derived. He protested against being seen as an atheist, and being punished for it. Yet he was an atheist in not recognizing a personal, providential, loving, caring God, and that was the operative meaning of God to Spinoza’s contemporaries.

Take liberalism. I am a liberal in being in favour, for want of something better, of a liberal parliamentary democracy with freedoms of expression, religion, association, and election, and the separation of powers. I am not a liberal in favouring laissez faire markets. I do not adopt the utility ethics of liberalism. And then, arguing the shortcomings of markets I run the risk of being called illiberal.

Take democracy. Authoritarian leaders call their states democracies because the leaders were chosen in elections that were free, more or less. But democracy requires more: the features of liberal constitutional democracy specified above. But those are never perfect. How democratic is it if leaders can only be elected at great cost, for which they need sponsorship from business, whose interests they then have to protect? Currently there is spreading complaint in European democracies, in populist movements, that ruling elites have distanced themselves from the lives and interests of the people. The claim next is that representative democracy has outlived itself, and forms of more direct democracy should be used, such as a referendum, where the will of the majority is imposed without debate on the rights of minorities.

Take power. People complain about ‘people in power’ in a democracy and at the same time cry out for more effective leaders who have the power to make decisions where inept democracies are caught in indecision. Behind this lies the confusion between negative power, limiting or restraining choice, and positive power, offering new options and more room for choice. The authoritarian leader projects himself as offering the second while falling back on the first, in his imperfection, which yields mistakes that with his power he can hide.

Take trust. Some see it as control, constraining opportunities or incentives for doing harm, while others see it precisely as something going beyond control, motivating people to do right not because they have no alternative or need the reward, but because they want to, on the basis of ethical or moral conviction, social customs and connections, or friendship.

As I argue elsewhere (in item 29 of this blog), this wrong-headed perspective on universals is part of what I call the ‘object bias’ in human thought: universals are treated as if they were specific particulars, like objects moving in time and space, with a well-defined identity across contexts. In fact, they are objects of a different kind, with meanings depending on time and place.

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424. How things change published 25-5-2019

In preceding items in this blog I proposed that objects adapt across contexts, while retaining their identity. How does this work?

Harmanxx lauded the work of Lynn Margulis for offering a logic of change of objects from symbiosis, interactions of previously separate objects, and the notion of exaptation, where a feature that served a given purpose shifts to a new purpose under change of conditions. A famous example is bird feathers, which first served the purpose of thermic isolation, and because of their lightness later also served for flying. He also mentioned punctuated equilibria: the phenomenon that in a slow build-up of change, in evolution the breakthrough of change can be relatively sudden.

Here, I want to bring those ideas together in a wider frame. In particular, I want to add the role of the environment that enables, prods and constrains change.

In earlier items in this blog I adopted the perspective of Object Oriented Ontology (3O): objects have an internal structure of components with properties, which yield a potential to develop features in interaction with other objects in the environment.

The perspective I take is akin to evolutionary thought: development depends on the ‘selection environment’. It is in a shift of selection environment that new challenges can elicit novel combinations of different features from previously separate forms of life.

These features, of novelty from interaction, relatively sudden transformation into new forms, in a shift of environment, are included in a theory of cyclical change that I proposed in earlier workxxi and discussed in this blog (item 31, 35, 356). It was first developed as a theory of invention, but later I generalized it to a more general theory of transformation of objects. I briefly summarize it below.

The process starts when an object in the form of a form of life is confronted with new conditions of survival, in a shift of the selection environment. This may be imposed from outside, as in a natural disaster, or invasion of new life forms, or a new environment may be sought, randomly or by some form of direction.

In the new environment, the attempt is made to assimilate novel conditions into existing processes in the object. I call this generalization. When that fails, such processes are adapted. The lightest form of that is differentiation: trying out a different selection from an existing repertoire of processes or features within the object, built up in previous development.

xx 1n December 2018, in Munich.xxi Bart Nooteboom, 2000, Learning and innovation in organizations and economies, Oxford University Press.

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This may not suffice for survival in the new context. Then, and here symbiosis comes in, experiments arise, more or less randomly, of combining features from the object with features from objects in the new context. Here ‘exaptation’ comes in, with old features acquiring new functions. This happens largely by trial and error, but in human discovery, it is more directed, less random, in selecting objects that seem to succeed where the object at issue fails, and adopting elements from that. Here symbiosis comes in. I called this reciprocation.

This yields hybrids, with partial fits and partial misfits between elements from the focal object and objects in its environment, in novel combinations that partially conflict with existing design logic. This may require work-arounds, duplication, and add-ons. Then, selection, in trial and error, operates on trials to eliminate the misfits, in different designs. In deliberate, human design, this is directed at limitations imposed by the old logic on realization of the potential of novel elements, adopted from outside objects. That gives hints in what directions a novel logic might be explored. I called this accommodation.

When a successful novel logic of design emerges, with less redundancy and more coherence of elements, it is tentative at first, occasionally falling back into old, habitual forms. Selection now is aimed at eliminating those, and further eliminating redundancies. There, it competes with old, still existing forms, until it fully realizes it potential and eliminates the competition, in a new ‘dominant design’.

In comparison with the slow and stepwise development that occurred before, in generalisation, differentiation and reciprocation such breakthrough to a new logic that realizes new potential and eliminates misfits can be relatively sudden, yielding a ‘punctuated equilibrium’.

In sum: in moving to a new place or context one encounters the need and insight to open up content to new possibilities, in interaction with objects encountered there. That can yield the emergence of a new object, with a new logic of structure and functioning.

An core issue in ontology is how to explain change of an object in which it retains its identity, in contrast with change that generates a breakdown of old identity, in the emergence of a new object. Here, I propose, in assimilation and differentiation identity is preserved, but it is shaken in reciprocation and broken down in accommodation.

424. How things change published 25-5-2019

In preceding items in this blog I proposed that objects adapt across contexts, while retaining their identity. How does this work?

Harmanxxii lauded the work of Lynn Margulis for offering a logic of change of objects from symbiosis, interactions of previously separate objects, and the notion of exaptation, where a feature that served a given purpose shifts to a new purpose under change of

xxii 1n December 2018, in Munich.

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conditions. A famous example is bird feathers, which first served the purpose of thermic isolation, and because of their lightness later also served for flying. He also mentioned punctuated equilibria: the phenomenon that in a slow build-up of change, in evolution the breakthrough of change can be relatively sudden.

Here, I want to bring those ideas together in a wider frame. In particular, I want to add the role of the environment that enables, prods and constrains change.

In earlier items in this blog I adopted the perspective of Object Oriented Ontology (3O): objects have an internal structure of components with properties, which yield a potential to develop features in interaction with other objects in the environment.

The perspective I take is akin to evolutionary thought: development depends on the ‘selection environment’. It is in a shift of selection environment that new challenges can elicit novel combinations of different features from previously separate forms of life.

These features, of novelty from interaction, relatively sudden transformation into new forms, in a shift of environment, are included in a theory of cyclical change that I proposed in earlier workxxiii and discussed in this blog (item 31, 35, 356). It was first developed as a theory of invention, but later I generalized it to a more general theory of transformation of objects. I briefly summarize it below.

The process starts when an object in the form of a form of life is confronted with new conditions of survival, in a shift of the selection environment. This may be imposed from outside, as in a natural disaster, or invasion of new life forms, or a new environment may be sought, randomly or by some form of direction.

In the new environment, the attempt is made to assimilate novel conditions into existing processes in the object. I call this generalization. When that fails, such processes are adapted. The lightest form of that is differentiation: trying out a different selection from an existing repertoire of processes or features within the object, built up in previous development.

This may not suffice for survival in the new context. Then, and here symbiosis comes in, experiments arise, more or less randomly, of combining features from the object with features from objects in the new context. Here ‘exaptation’ comes in, with old features acquiring new functions. This happens largely by trial and error, but in human discovery, it is more directed, less random, in selecting objects that seem to succeed where the object at issue fails, and adopting elements from that. Here symbiosis comes in. I called this reciprocation.

This yields hybrids, with partial fits and partial misfits between elements from the focal object and objects in its environment, in novel combinations that partially conflict with existing design logic. This may require work-arounds, duplication, and add-ons. Then,

xxiii Bart Nooteboom, 2000, Learning and innovation in organizations and economies, Oxford University Press.

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selection, in trial and error, operates on trials to eliminate the misfits, in different designs. In deliberate, human design, this is directed at limitations imposed by the old logic on realization of the potential of novel elements, adopted from outside objects. That gives hints in what directions a novel logic might be explored. I called this accommodation.

When a successful novel logic of design emerges, with less redundancy and more coherence of elements, it is tentative at first, occasionally falling back into old, habitual forms. Selection now is aimed at eliminating those, and further eliminating redundancies. There, it competes with old, still existing forms, until it fully realizes it potential and eliminates the competition, in a new ‘dominant design’.

In comparison with the slow and stepwise development that occurred before, in generalisation, differentiation and reciprocation such breakthrough to a new logic that realizes new potential and eliminates misfits can be relatively sudden, yielding a ‘punctuated equilibrium’.

In sum: in moving to a new place or context one encounters the need and insight to open up content to new possibilities, in interaction with objects encountered there. That can yield the emergence of a new object, with a new logic of structure and functioning.

An core issue in ontology is how to explain change of an object in which it retains its identity, in contrast with change that generates a breakdown of old identity, in the emergence of a new object. Here, I propose, in assimilation and differentiation identity is preserved, but it is shaken in reciprocation and broken down in accommodation.

425. How change is blocked published 31-5-2019

In the preceding item in this blog, I showed how ideas can develop, in a ‘cycle of discovery’. From that one can also derive where and how obstacles for development can arise, as follows:

a. Obstructions to movement into new contexts, in ‘generalisation’, as the source of new insights in limitations and opportunities. This can arise by arguments of property (one is not allowed to take it away), or by entry barriers (one cannot enter the new context, obstacles to trade).

b. A blockage of ‘differentiation’ by rigidity in the composition of elements, perhaps to preserve advantages of scale or economies of experience with present arrangements. For business, the head office may forbid such local adaptation.

c. Obstacles to ‘reciprocation’, to incorporating new elements from the new context, for reasons of local ownership, unwillingness to upset existing roles, structures, institutions, reputations, or sheer mental myopia and prejudice.

d. Limitations to creativity and imagination or, again, institutional obstacles, that prevent radical change of basic logic or design principles, in configuring old and new elements in a new basic logic or design, in ‘reciprocation’.

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In b and c, the obstacle can arise from excess power. When one has the power to impose one’s own, existing logics and designs on the new local context, the challenge and opportunity from local pressure to adapt is lost. That happened, for example, with US business entering first Japan and later China. They offered so much in terms of technology and access to US markets that they could afford to impose their modes of conduct.

I also want to give an illustration of how one can get locked into erroneous ideas, taken from the literature on trust (one of my subjects). There is an accumulating store of trust research that employs available measures of ‘generalized trust’, i.e. ‘trust in people in general that one is not acquainted with’, to study effects of trust on a variety of variables, such as economic performance, human development, happiness, democracy, peace, and so on. I recently had to review another paper doing that. The problem with this is as follows.

Trust has several dimensions that one needs to take into account. One is the difference between trust in competence and the trust in intentions: commitment, no cheating. Another is the difference between trust and the wider notion of reliance, which can be based on control or on trust. Control is based on enforcement, by contract or hierarchy, or on incentives. Trust in the strong sense, or ‘real’ trust, going beyond control, is based on solidarity or loyalty based on ethics, morality, or personal bonding and empathy.

The measure of generalized trust embraces both forms, and when they are not separated they produce ambiguity of results. What are we then talking about? The wider notion of reliance, including both control and trust, or ‘real’ trust? The measure should be replaced by one of ‘real’ trust or trust ‘in the strong sense’.

When pressed, people making and using the measurement of generalized trust admit the problem but they stick to the measure of generalized trust for the pragmatic reason that no better measure is available. In particular, one wants to study the development of trust and its effects in time, and replacement with a new measure would eliminate its continuity. So one knowingly engages in research based on an misleading metric, and obfuscates it.

428. Is interdisciplinarity desirable, viable? published 17-12-1918

Interdisciplinarity seems obviously desirable: break down the walls between disciplines, and schools of thought within disciplines, to achieve a better, more integral understanding.

There are two arguments against this.

First, any theory can only, should, even, offer a partial view, in an abstraction from observed reality. In metaphorical terms: one cannot look in all directions at the same

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time. The virtue of theory lies in limitation of perspective, in reduction to some aspects of complex reality that one can handle in terms of causes or other relations.

For policy making often one cannot accept such disciplinary partiality. Different aspects of a issue arise together. I discussed this before, in item 275 in this blog. Policy making then requires some form of connection between disciplinary views. Between that of an economist and that of a sociologist, concerning labour markets, for example. While one cannot integrate all disciplinary perspectives, one can try to connect some of them.

A second argument against interdisciplinarity is evolutionary. For biological evolution to work, there must be reproductive isolation between species. Evolution builds on competition and symbiosis between separate species, and breaks down if they could all interbreed and amalgamate. Doesn’t that principle also apply to science? In science, the idea is that it evolves mostly by competition between disciplines and schools of thought.

There is a problem with this argument. For evolution there needs to be a ‘selection environment’ that selects different life forms according to their viability. If the units to be selected can create their own selection environment, evolution breaks down. This is called ‘co-evolution’. It happens in nature, but sparsely.

In science, the selection environment is the system of scholarly journals, with their editors and reviewers. Scholars must publish in them to survive in their careers. And then, scientists in a certain school of thought can guard entry to the journals, as editors and reviewers, and thus immunize themselves against new views from outside.

For outsiders there is a way out, in setting up their own proprietary journals. Thus arise isolated islands of scholarship, each playing its own game.

I have two examples from my own experience. One is evolutionary economics, which unlike mainstream economics is not oriented towards optimal outcomes, regardless of how those are achieved, but at processes of evolution, without prior intelligent design, which often do not yield optimal outcomes. It could not play along with mainstream economics, and to survive it set up its own journal: The Journal of Evolutionary Economics.

The second example is institutional economics, which also deviates from principles of mainstream economics. Instead of assuming autonomy of economic agents, as mainstream economics does, it recognizes how people are formed and conditioned in their actions by institutions, man-made rules of the game. It survived by setting up the Journal of Institutional Economics.

In this way, evolution in science runs aground. That does not mean that there is no merit in a certain separation between disciplines and schools of thought. It does have a function, but it is in danger of resulting in stagnation. Connections between views should be sought to generate novelty.

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This brings me back to the discussion of building bridges, crossing ‘cognitive distance’, in the preceding item in this blog. The difficulty of crossing such distance has several aspects. One is behavioural: scientists have an interest in defending the views on which their reputation is based. Second, it can be cognitively difficult to understand what is outside one’s habitual thought, due to lack of ‘absorptive capacity’. A third obstacle is ideological: differences in view are also associated with differences in method, differences in what one considers as ‘good science’. To some, such as many mainstream economists, that requires the use of mathematics. This also appears in the distinction between ‘major and minor science’, discussed in item 422 in this blog.

426. Upward and downward causation published 8-6-2019

Generally, objects are nested. They consist of components that may themselves be objects, and they are often themselves components of larger wholes.

In ‘upward causation’, components cause changes in the whole, in ‘downward causation’, the whole causes change in the components.

DeLandaxxiv denied that downward causation can ‘determine’ the components of an object. I think this comes from the idea that it would jeopardize the identity of the object and hence its reality as an ongoing entity under change of conditions.

Here I want to show how downward causation can affect (if not determine) the components of an object without surrendering its identity, and how it can go so far as to destroy it.

In an evolutionary view, the environment, as the larger whole, acts as the selection environment for the objects in it. It exerts pressures of survival necessitating adaptation. If the needed adaptation cannot be achieved, the object does not survive, loses its identity. In the preceding item in this blog I showed how adaptations can be identity-preserving, in increasing degrees of change, in what I called generalization, differentiation, and reciprocation, and frame breaking, identity destroying change in what I called accommodation, in the emergence of a new identity. If that survives it constitutes a new object.

Now this is a form of downward causation: the wider system of the environment offers prods and opportunities for adaptation by changes in the object. In the frame-breaking of accommodation it goes further than adaptation. While the new object may retain elements from the objects from whose interaction it emerged, generally those elements do not remain unchanged. The new structure will in general necessitate adaptation of them, in downward causation.

xxiv Manuel DeLanda, 2006, Assemblage theory, Edinburgh University Press, p.74

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To clarify this, I use the model of a script, as I did before, in this theory of change.xxv It is a useful tool, I suggest, for what DeLanda calls assemblage theory.

A script is a structure of connected nodes. The connections may signify causal connection, temporal sequence, logical implication, or sharing resources. The structure may dense or sparse, connections may be multiple or single, frequent or not. A scrip may be nested: the script may be part of a node in a superscript, and its nodes allow for a range of subscripts.

There is upward causation from nodes, enabling and constraining the script, determining its potential, its identity, and downward causation from the script, conditioning the nodes.

The classic example is a restaurant, with nodes of entry, seating, food selection, ordering, eating, paying and leaving. Each may be done in different ways, for example paying cash, by card, or by cheque, and each of those has its own script. The superscript is the structure of the environment in which the restaurant is inserted: roads, parking facilities, supply of goods.

Minor, identity preserving change affects the nodes but not their structure in the script. For example, the addition of a new payment mode, by smart phone. Here, downward causation does not break the basic logic of the restaurant.

Major, frame breaking, identity changing change alters or replaces the set of nodes and their connections. For example, in the emergence of self-service, the order of nodes changed to entry, food selection, paying, seating and eating. This does not leave the nodes unaffected. In self service there is no ordering, and food election now entails carrying a tray with food.

In the preceding item in this blog I presented of theory of change, in a ‘cycle of discovery’. The connection is as follows. In generalization, the script is shifted from one environment, say country, to another. There, conditions require differentiation and reciprocation, adoption of elements from the local context. In moving to Japan, say, seating is not on a chair but on the floor, eating is with chop sticks, and hot tissues are supplied to wipe one’s hands. It is still a restaurant. The shift from service to self-service, however, yields an accommodation, a change of identity. That, in turn, was generalized to other areas, such as shops and hotels, with the requisite differentiation.

427. Collapsing bridges published 15-6-2019

Optimal cognitive distance

ability to collaborate potential novelty value

xxv Bart Nooteboom, 2000, Learning and innovation in organisations and economies, Oxford University Press.

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%

expected outcome

optimal distance cognitive In In this blog I have developed and used the notion of ‘cognitive distance’, in particular ‘optimal distance’, illustrated in the figure. It shows how in learning and innovation one can profit from bridging cognitive distance.xxvi

In my discussions of freedom (items 49, 311, 340) I proposed that the highest level of freedom is freedom from prejudice, and for that one needs opposition from others, which requires ability to cross cognitive distance. Where optimal distance lies depends on ability to collaborate, which declines with increasing cognitive distance (the line sloping downward from left to right), and the potential novelty value of collaboration, which increases with cognitive distance (the line sloping upward).

The ability to collaborate, to deal with distance, can increase or decrease, in an upward viz. downward shift of the line, as a function of accumulated knowledge and experience in dealing with people who think differently.

The upward sloping line reflects the innovative potential of collaboration, the downward sloping line the ability to realise that potential. Their product, a parabola, is what one can expect to gain, and this has a maximum somewhere, at ‘optimal distance’.

In simple terms: one should look for partners who are sufficiently different to offer something new, but not so different that one cannot make anything of it.

Ability to collaborate has two different forms. First, cognition in the narrow sense, in the ability to intellectually understand what someone else does or says. Second, cognition in a broader sense of empathy, understanding aims and motives, and sharing ways in which one thinks people should deal with each other.

Ability to intellectually understand others, called ‘absorptive capacity’, depends, first of all, on accumulated knowledge. Ability to deal with people who think differently depends on experience in doing so.

xxvi I first proposed this idea in my 2000 book Learning and innovation in organizations and economies (Oxford U. Press). With associates I developed and executed an empirical, econometric test, published in 2007: Bart Nooteboom, Wim Vanhaverbeke, Geert Duysters, Victor Gilsing, Ad van den Oord, Optimal cognitive distance and absorptive capacity: Research Policy 2007.

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Next to ability to understand others, intellectually and behaviourally, there is also a rhetorical side to the ability to collaborate: the ability to help others to understand and to empathise with you, with the clever use of metaphor, for example.

Now, present society is characterised by a fragmentation of group identities, with a decline of both the valuation of difference between those groups and the ability (and willingness) to cross it. This has been enhanced by the ‘filter bubbles’ facilitated by social networks.

It seems to me that next to the decline of the ability and willingness to empathize with people from different groups, there is also a general decline of absorptive capacity, of requisite learning and intellectual understanding, due to awareness and attention being swamped by entertainment.

428. Is interdisciplinarity desirable, viable? published 22-6-2019

Interdisciplinarity seems obviously desirable: break down the walls between disciplines, and schools of thought within disciplines, to achieve a better, more integral understanding.

There are two arguments against this.

First, any theory can only, should, even, offer a partial view, in an abstraction from observed reality. In metaphorical terms: one cannot look in all directions at the same time. The virtue of theory lies in limitation of perspective, in reduction to some aspects of complex reality that one can handle in terms of causes or other relations.

For policy making often one cannot accept such disciplinary partiality. Different aspects of a issue arise together. I discussed this before, in item 275 in this blog. Policy making then requires some form of connection between disciplinary views. Between that of an economist and that of a sociologist, concerning labour markets, for example. While one cannot integrate all disciplinary perspectives, one can try to connect some of them.

A second argument against interdisciplinarity is evolutionary. For biological evolution to work, there must be reproductive isolation between species. Evolution builds on competition and symbiosis between separate species, and breaks down if they could all interbreed and amalgamate. Doesn’t that principle also apply to science? In science, the idea is that it evolves mostly by competition between disciplines and schools of thought.

There is a problem with this argument. For evolution there needs to be a ‘selection environment’ that selects different life forms according to their viability. If the units to be selected can create their own selection environment, evolution breaks down. This is called ‘co-evolution’. It happens in nature, but sparsely.

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In science, the selection environment is the system of scholarly journals, with their editors and reviewers. Scholars must publish in them to survive in their careers. And then, scientists in a certain school of thought can guard entry to the journals, as editors and reviewers, and thus immunize themselves against new views from outside.

For outsiders there is a way out, in setting up their own proprietary journals. Thus arise isolated islands of scholarship, each playing its own game.

I have two examples from my own experience. One is evolutionary economics, which unlike mainstream economics is not oriented towards optimal outcomes, regardless of how those are achieved, but at processes of evolution, without prior intelligent design, which often do not yield optimal outcomes. It could not play along with mainstream economics, and to survive it set up its own journal: The Journal of Evolutionary Economics.

The second example is institutional economics, which also deviates from principles of mainstream economics. Instead of assuming autonomy of economic agents, as mainstream economics does, it recognizes how people are formed and conditioned in their actions by institutions, man-made rules of the game. It survived by setting up the Journal of Institutional Economics.

In this way, evolution in science runs aground. That does not mean that there is no merit in a certain separation between disciplines and schools of thought. It does have a function, but it is in danger of resulting in stagnation. Connections between views should be sought to generate novelty.

This brings me back to the discussion of building bridges, crossing ‘cognitive distance’, in the preceding item in this blog. The difficulty of crossing such distance has several aspects. One is behavioural: scientists have an interest in defending the views on which their reputation is based. Second, it can be cognitively difficult to understand what is outside one’s habitual thought, due to lack of ‘absorptive capacity’. A third obstacle is ideological: differences in view are also associated with differences in method, differences in what one considers as ‘good science’. To some, such as many mainstream economists, that requires the use of mathematics. This also appears in the distinction between ‘major and minor science’, discussed in item 422 in this blog.

446. How rational is altruism? published 26-10-2019

In this blog I discussed several aspects of altruism. How would an economist deal with it? Altruism, recall, is defined as making a sacrifice to someone else without counting on an adequate benefit from it.

What an economist would probably say first, as has indeed been claimed, is that under the pressure of competition one cannot afford it. To survive one needs to grasp every

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possible opportunity for profit. In fact, the pressure of competition is often not so sharp, with firms doing all they can to soften it, in limits to competition.

However that may be, suppose that nevertheless altruism is observed? The economist, seeking to explain everything on the basis of the maximisation of some ‘objective function’ under constraints, would say that then it must be rational, and that it can be reconstructed by including in the objective function a reward in the form of feeling good about making the sacrifice.

The problem with this is as follows. Assuming that the sacrifice is material, i.e. monetary, in the form of profit foregone, the benefit is not material but ….., yes what? Is it a feeling of moral duty, or a personal sense of empathy, or friendship, or love (agape), or response to a need, or a habit, or a favour in return to a favour received, or creating a good reputation?

Is it clear to the decision maker himself which is at issue? Is he honest to himself about the motive? Recall the issue of limited freedom of the will, according to which many, perhaps most decisions are made subconsciously, by impulse, which then are often rationalized afterwards. Could one still call that rational?

And suppose he knew which motive was at play, how measurable would its benefit be? The ‘value’ of it would be uncertain, dependent on contigencies the decision maker cannot fathom. If the party the sacrifice is made to also has limited freedom of the will, who can say how he will respond? How measurable is all this? If not, what remains of the notion of maximizing an objective function?

One should recognize that here, as in many other cases, there is uncertainty in the sense that one does not know all the things that could happen, and what the costs and benefits would be. Then, one cannot calculate and be rational in that sense. One operates by hunch or guess, or more or less at random. Not knowing what the outcome will or even can be, one needs the courage of making a leap of faith, relying on one’s intuitive hunches and impulse.

Research shows that often decisions made that way are surprisingly effective. It is just that one cannot explain how. After all, we operate subconsciously but effectively on the basis of routines in so many everyday activities.

Algorithms operated by ‘platform businesses’ such as Google and Facebook can predict your choices better, on the basis of masses of data collected on your conduct and choices, than you can yourself. Could one still maintain that our choices are rational?

448. Rhetoric published 8-12-1919

Rhetoric is effective speech: convincing and taking people in and along. There was an article about it last Saturday (26 October 2019) in the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant by

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Jan Kuitenbrouwer. That recounts the main dimensions of rhetoric, according to Aristotle: logos (logic, facts, arguments), ethos (moral force), pathos (feeling), and Kairos (hitting the target, coming home, fitting, adequate to the context). The last is the least known, but now seems to dominate, together with pathos. Some of that is needed, but there should be balance; good argument, ethical, with feeling and adequacy to those addressed. As simple as possible, no more complicated than needed. Perhaps one should add beauty, good sound and literary quality. Kairos fits with the Aristotelian notion of phronesis, practical philosophy, where one takes into account the context and the conditions of those involved. Logos and ethos should not make speech too heavy, with inappropriate bathos. It should be as light as possible, a bit like dancing, singing, please. But if logos and ethos are lacking, it becomes playing for the gallery, going for the effect, regardless of truth and ethical rectitude.

We now have politicians lying, and knowing it, for effect only, to enhance their position.

Communication, by politicians and in the media, seems to be going that way. The imperative has become to get attention and get people along. The way of least resistance, the easiest, the popular and the entertaining.

If this is true, why? Is it laziness, not wanting to exert one’s mind, or habit, what one is used to, brought up in? It is certainly that, in part, a result of commercialisation, market ideology, presenting beauty, glamour and youth as the paragon of value, brought home by the rhetoric of advertising.

Going with the crowd and with the ‘normal’ has always been attractive. But in some cases, communication should haul people out of context, out of their ‘comfort zone’, and have the courage of the unusual.

Rhetoric, and surveillance, are now used to engineer conformity, notably in China, and thereby make things easy and streamlined. Thought and ethical reflection, about good and bad, are no longer required, can be done away with. Communication becomes manipulation.

Is that modern times? Am I old-fashioned? Should I not care? Should it be, can it be reversed, with a modicum of logos and ethos for the sake of individualism?

I am critical of liberalism, for its lack of ethos for the other person, and of social, public feeling and responsibility, but respect for individuality and variety, difference should be maintained. In the struggle between collective and individual identity, the latter should still prevail.

450. Resonance and reality published 23-11-2019

As an antidote to the alienation that accompanies the acceleration in society (of technology. society itself, life), defined as voluntarily going along with things one does

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not really want, Hartmut Rosa proposed ‘resonance’.xxvii Resonance arises in a relation, between people and people, or between people and things, perhaps also between things, where there is mutual influence. Not an echo, not a copy, reproduction of the same, no fusion, but absorption in the one what comes from the other, and assimilation, perhaps transformation.

This notion corresponds with my discussion, at several places in this blog, of the contrast between Nietzsche and Levinas in relations between people. One needs to be open to others, let them exert influence, rather than exerting power over them. One needs opposition from the other, and from things, to achieve the highest form of freedom: freedom to change one’s value orientations, freedom from prejudice. This is no guarantee of objective truth. It can be determined by shared ideology or bias, such as a shared language, but it is better than a one-sided view.

There is a deeper value in this than I discussed before. As argued by Kierkegaard, and others, life, having a self, is being involved in a process, not having a thing, but a process of developing oneself. This derives from the Hegelian thought that one cannot look in all directions at the same time. Seeing anything requires looking in one direction to the exclusion of others. One cannot say or do everything. What works, what is true, fails sooner or later. In their failure one learns about things, so failure is inevitable and to be appreciated, in the interaction between people and things, in work and society. Hegel applied this to the collective, in a march of history, with the dream of ultimate amalgamation into one. But as stressed by Kierkegaard, it applies also, and in particular, to the individual, in his/her development, and is ongoing.

This, I propose, is the deeper meaning of resonance. In philosophy, it cuts even deeper, touching upon the old opposition between realism and idealism. Going back to the old ‘problem of Kant’: we see and conceptualise the world according to our ideas, or ‘categories’ or ‘forms of thought’, so that we (probably) do not see the world ‘as it is in itself’. What, then, is the basis for realism, and of the ‘truth’? As I claimed before, in this blog, truth is giving arguments, but that is always partial, needing arguments from a different perspective for supplementation.

There is an evolutionary argument: We must in some sense adequately conceive of the world,or at least part of it. Otherwise humanity would not have survived. We have the capacity to allow the world to shout ‘no’ if we are mistaken. This does not mean that we always see theworld completely and correctly, but we know it partly, in some sense, and we don’t know in how far. The only chance we have of approaching it is to compare it with what other people see and think, and to go ahead and practice that, allowing others and things to ‘shout “no”’.

xxvii Hartmut Rosa, Resonance, 2016, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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What part of the world do we see ‘correctly’, then? The part that is most relevant for survival and reproduction. Those are, first of all, things moving in time or space. Abstractions are based on metaphors from that more certain knowledge. These are the ‘metaphors we live by’ (Lakoff and Johnson), in what earlier in this blog I called the ‘object bias’. Misconceptions of abstractions, such as, for example, those of democracy, happiness, justice, meaning will jeopardise the future survival of humanity.

So, here also, the human being should develop and learn from the world.

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