Epistemology

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Post-modernism v Anti-modernism

September 13, 2010 in Epistemology, Modernity, Noetic space | No comments

Still the post-modern lack of a political agenda has been deeply criticized from the left side of the political arena.(1) Eagleton has insisted in the relation between an epistemological breach and the contemporary political crisis. Post-modern contradictions include both a radical and conservative approach; again post-modernism is regarded as a transitional period. In the same vein as Jameson, Harvey has canvassed the close link between a cultural form and an economic system, namely capitalism, under a general contraction of the time-space axis, implosing into superimposed spaces, producing text intersections.(2) Postmodernity coalesces with the shift from a productive model based on Fordism to a system of flexible accumulation.

A critical analysis of the social theory of the concepts of individual and sovereignty, in the sense of their recapitulation, and their intrinsic modern character, can help us assessing the extent of the postmodern question, of new planes of construction being implemented, founded on the erosion of the existing strata and configuring a new noetic space, a new conceptual scheme. In which sense have those two concepts been tied together and how do the alteration in their interplay conveys a novel configuration or a simple phase of development, a novel plane of construction or a simple process of sedimentation? Therefore we have to analyze the transitions of these concepts. The decomposition into two modern elements can reconstruct the range of modulations that still were referred as individual and sovereign and, most importantly, how these notions could be assembled and rendered coherent.

(1) F. Jameson , Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1984. T. Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Cambridge, 1997.
(2) D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the origins of cultural change, Oxford, 1995.

Network, post-modernity, post-industrial, globalization, are categories that might be transforming the tissue, the cording, of thought, instituting a new plane of construction. Have they dislocated the relation among elements so that both classical sovereignty and the individual have become obsolete, due to the striation of the given plain of consistence? Are they insisting or have they already proceeded to resist in our noetic space? Where they forged in an implication that conveys their simultaneous rejection or demise, do they belong to the same plain of consistence on which our thought still roams? Where they elements in the central configuration of the plane of construction put forward by a period we call specifically modern?

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Categorie ruptures

August 10, 2010 in Epistemology | No comments

If any rupture of modernity had to be traced it would have to rely, rather than on sole increments on certain degree, in the shift of the categories we used to shape the world with.(1) The quantitative argument of globalization, in its exponential dimension, had to coalesce with the reconfiguration of the categories that served to represent the world. A merge of both societal and cognitive changes can account for the existence of an alteration.

We can assess certain arrangement of elements by means of the transformation of these configurations mapping our thought without matching with our actual representation of the situation. Representations are socially forged, they become modalities of apprehension, operating simultaneously changes in the possibilities of reconfiguring social change. In this sense, ideas function as innovation in economics, allowing new horizons of production, reshaping the activity by introducing new tools or forms of organization that alter the limits of productivity. New planes of construction use the previous sediments carried out by other planes to posit themselves on the morphogenesis of novel orographies.

(1) Hence the reliance on an unstable nomadology or in the increase of fluxes, For a difference between solid and fluid modernity cf. Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Oxford 2003. M. Berman, All that is solid melts into air, London, 1983.

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Deleuze and virtual continuum

August 4, 2010 in Epistemology, Methodology, Representation | No comments

Found at The Topology of Deleuze’s Spatium by Louise Burchill

One of Gilles Deleuze’s major ontological categories is that of a virtual continuum which, much like Spinoza’s substance, presents two sides-pure extension and thought-or, rather, two powers: the power of being and the power of thinking. This virtual continuum receives a variety of designations throughout Deleuze’s corpus: “intensive spatium” in Difference and Repetition, “ideal or metaphysical surface” in The Logic of Sense, “plane of consistency” in A Thousand Plateaus (written with Félix Guattari) and “plane of immanence” in What is Philosophy? (equally coauthored with Guattari). While these diverse terms may be argued to accentuate different aspects of the continuum so designated, Deleuze’s characterization of the latter remains, nevertheless, fundamentally constant-such that, as one commentator puts it, the various “objects” in question (spatium, surface, plane of immanence or, again, hyperspace) are all rigorously homothetic. Such a continuum is, accordingly, consistently described as a pre-extensive, non-qualified “milieu” or “space-stratum” enveloping complexes of differential relations, pure intensities and singularities, with Deleuze seeking to determine in this way an impersonal and pre-individual transcendental field that, assembling the conditions of real-and not merely possible-experience, would neither resemble the corresponding empirical fields (with their correlation of a consciousness and its objects) nor amount to an undifferentiated “depth” or groundlessness (sans-fond indifférencié) identified as pure chaos.

Although I refer to the concepts ‘plain of consistency’ and ‘plane of immanence’, here they acquire a different signification. ‘Plain of consistency’ depicts the actual instantiations that are possible and performed within the given linguistic-cultural material; it refers to the language in its socially grounded form, used by any speaker of a given community. ‘Plane of immanence’, on the other hand, refers to the logic that allow the connections and linkages between the elements found at the plain, it is, in this sense, to ex-plain. These elements are the outcome of different arrangements, configurations, and sedimentation phases: the plane of immanence constitutes the condition of possibility of these configurations.

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Epoché, Épos, Époque

August 2, 2010 in Epistemology, Modernity | No comments

Absolute narratives, universal accounts and genres vest particular tendencies. They convey discourses of legitimation, they resort to a plain of consistence, according to post-modern claims. A certain absence of judgement, conditioned by a plain of consistence, an anthropological distance, is required to unveil the apparently neutral belief systems and practices. This attitude precludes a naturalist, objective, comprehension of texts and makes room for an inflexion, but it is also related to a de-doxiphication, an end of meta-narratives and an accentuation of difference.(1)

If post-modernism supposes a certain fundamental transformation of the discourses and categories, of the noetic space, making the world intelligible. We would have to investigate the basic orography that shaped a stratum of thought configuring both our experience and our self-understanding, our embedment on a certain plain of consistence. Both in a geological and textual analysis we are faced with superimposition, a multi-layered structure, of disparate stages of sedimentation.

One of the phenomena related to postmodernism is globalization. Globalization as a general process can be traced to the roots of modernity and especially to the enlargement of the globe started by the discovery of the new continent and the techniques developed in Western Renaissance. Following a cumulative direction, modernity would encompass a quantitative process of augmenting exchange and a linear expansion, on the other hand, interconnectedness and other network attributes are also used to highlight the current character of globalization.(2)

(1) L. Hutcheson, The Politics of Postmodernism (2nd ed.), London, 2002. H.F. Harber, Beyond postmodern politics. Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault, New York, 1994.
(2)D. Held et al., Global Transformations. Politics, Economics and Culture, Cambridge, 1999.

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Power, Epistemology, and Ontology: the individual

June 4, 2010 in Epistemology, Individual, Power | No comments

The increasing importance of biography in relation to individuality is an indicator of difference and the assertion thereof. In this context, Luckmann highlights the augmenting number of roles men play daily but their simultaneous anonymity, their impersonal character.(1) Maffesoli vindicates the person and their roles, submerged in sentiments and feelings, as a post-modern category in relation to the mechanical, functional, individual.(2) In this sense, tribalism is marked by the sharing of common sentiments, their ephemeral character, the externality to the self, partaker in order to ‘be with’ rather than in the search for any project or ideal. Only an aesthetics of emotion redounds in an ethical connection and increases networks based on intensity, on a passionate rather than on a traditional, mechanical, social or political order.

The intersection of social conceptions and epistemology suppose both an individual that is subject of knowledge, and a series of individual objects that can be known. Their existence is verified by the application of the principle of manipulation and production. Individual is a way of being constituted as well as a way of understanding, of referring to the world. A definition of individualism implies not only an ontology, but also an epistemology.(3) The relation between individualism as a social conception and a certain outlook on nature can be tracked down to the beginnings of modernity and its resilient orography.

Friedenthal shows the coalescence of natural science and the conceptions of man and society. The various interrelations between social theory and natural philosophy stood at the base of the prevalence of Newton’s system in front of Leibniz’s ideas.(4) The congruence of both social and natural thought, their consistent configuration in a plane of construction, the common metaphors, based on philosophical assumptions, paved the way to their ultimate acceptance. Prejudices and beliefs, inserted in theoretical constructs, philosophical concepts that underlie diverse disciplines, do not only influence their elaboration but determine their ultimate acceptance and composition within the society’s tissue of credence, the roaming on a plain of consistence producing the conditions of possibility of a judgement, the acknowledgement by others of their righteousness, producing attitudes towards concepts and sustaining forms of power.

(1) T. Luckmann, “Persönliche Identität und Lebenslauf -gesellschaftliche Voraussetzungen”, H.G. Bruse and B. Hildenbrand (eds.) Vom Ende des Individuums zur Individualität ohne Ende, Opladen, 1988.
(2) “The rational era is built on the principle of individuation and of separation, whereas the empathetic period is marked by the lack of differentiation, the ‘loss’ in a collective subject, in other words what I shall call neo-tribalism…” M. Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes. The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, London, 1996. In this sense the individual loses his autonomy. “Each social actor is less acting than acted upon,” p. 145.
(3) Cf. D. Shanahan, Towards a Genealogy of Individualism, Massachusetts, 1992 defines thus the concept of individuality he traces historically. “For the purposes of this study, we will consider individualism as that system of beliefs in which the individual is not only given direct status and value but become the final arbiter of truth,” p. 20. An interactive understanding of consciousness could produce a final criticism to the notion of individual.
(4) G. Friedenthal, Atom und Individuum im Zeitalter Newtons. Zur Genese der mechanistischen Natur- und Sozialphilosophie, Frankfurt, 1982. The author stresses the influence of the English philosophia prima in Newton’s concept of absolute space and the necessity of the existence of particles in the void. Actually Leibniz’s and Newton’s systems were equally apt theories, the latter’s accommodation to society grounded its ulterior success. “Es handelt sich also nicht kaum, dass ein naturphilosophischer Untersuchungsgegenstand einer sozialphilosophischen ‘Denkform’ entsprechend modelliert worden wäre, sondern darum, dass in beiden Bereichen die gleiche Untersuchungsmethode angewendet wurde, der derselbe philosophische Grundsatz über das Verhältnis von Element und System zugrundelag.” p. 313. Cf. T.A. Spragens, “The politics of inertia and gravitation- The functions of exemplar paradigms in social thought”, Polity 5, 1972-3, pp. 288-310. Cf. S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, Princeton, 1986. The relation between a conception of nature and our place in it and their multifaceted implications is not only a question for anthropological or historical study, but also penetrates certain highly influential scientific topics. Thus if we understand nature as a self-regulating organism we become part of the larger enterprise of sustaining life on earth. M. Migdgley, “Individualism and the Concept of Gaia”, Review of International Studies 26, 2000, pp. 29-44. Cf. J.E. Lovelock, Gaia. A new outlook on nature, Oxford, 1979. Cf. I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, La nouvelle alliance. Métamorphoses de la science, Paris, 1979. On the other hand, some insist in the importance of selection and stress the competition among genes to persevere and become dominant in a population, R. Dawkins, op. cit.

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On individualism

June 2, 2010 in Epistemology, Individual | No comments

The work from Lukes has stressed the polysemy of contemporary individualism.1 Actually individualism appeared firstly as a description stemming from conservative factions after the dislocation and the disintegration of the traditional pre-industrial society, but, as we will show, its seeds, its basic shapes, were already present in the modern plane of construction on which Hobbes stood and shaped.2 Its character as a particularly modern ideology produced a configuration, in the sense of a fait social total, as analyzed by Dumont.3 A configuration remarkable in asserting the values’ chasm between elements and totality, actualized already in the analytic-synthetic method incorporated in the modern plane of construction.

Individuality is a contended notion at least since the foundation of contemporary sociology.4 A manifold approach to individualism is indeed common among social theorists.5 Still there seems to be a certain consensus concerning the recent shift from a participative notion in political and social matters towards an expressive individualism; from a reflexive individualism to a focus in the body, encompassing hedonistic and narcissistic modalities, that sign a reply. A strong polarization, sensible to the question of the exact extent and value of the individual, is amply affirmed throughout social science within diverse approaches and analysis. This disparity conveys the climate of recapitulation and reconfiguration regarding this central notion. Among the solutions, normative versions of individualism have emerged tending towards communitarism.6 This central concept has been also reviewed from psychological perspectives, from social cognition to psychoanalysis, to underline the importance of relation, and the unfinished character of a self-concealed, autonomous, unified, individual.7 Basically, it is the sense of individuality, the feature of a unity implied in subjectivity, that is at stake.8 Thus individuality seems indispensable to understand the criticism of modern subjectivity and its political and social implications.

(1) S. Lukes, Individualism, Oxford, 1973.
(2) Cf. C.B. McPherson, The political theory of possessive individualism: Hobbes to Locke, Chicago, 1962.
(3) L. Dumont, Essaie sur l’individualisme. Une perspective anthropologique sur l’idéologie moderne, Paris, 1983. In his Postscriptum he asserts how modernity contains other characteristic configurations, although he deals extensively with the division of state an Church and the constitution of the modern states, he does not overtly refer to sovereignty.
(4) Schroer proposes a division of three currents that have underlined either the endangered individual as conceptualized by Weber, Adorno’s critical theory or Foucault, a hyper-individualism portrayed in Durkheim, Parsons and Luhmann and a more ambivalent tradition headed by Simmel, Elias or Beck. M. Schroer, Das Individuum der Gesellschaft. Synchrone und Diachrone Theorieperspektiven, Frankfurt, 2000.
(5) For a thorough analysis of the later social theory with chronological perspective about man’s self-conception cf. H. Keith, Das Sebstverständnis des modernen Menschen. Theorien des vergesellschafteten Individuums im 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt, 2001.
(6) Cf. M.J. Piore, Beyond Individualism, Cambridge, 1995. J. Crittenden, Beyond Individualism: Reconstituting the Liberal Self, Oxford, 1992. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self. The making of modern identity, Cambridge, 1989. A. McIntyre, After Virtue. A study in moral theory, Notre Dame, 1984. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, 1989.
(7) Against a cartesian theatre of unified consciousness cf. D. Dennett, The intentional stance, Cambridge, 1987. On individuation as a process rather than an ontology cf G. Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, Paris, 2006. Well known is the tripartite model developed by Freud in Das Ich und das Es (1923). Similarly Lacan’s analysis and the separation of three domains: symbolic, real and imaginary.
(8) P. Bürgin, Das Verschwinden des Subjekts, Frankfurt, 1998. Halman suggests the parallel trends between post-modernism and the popular growing attachment to individualism as a social attitude but it is also a configuration of individual that departs from classical formulations. L. Halman, “Individualism in contemporary Europe”, A. van Harskamp and A.W. Musschenga (eds.), The many faces of individualism, Leuven, 2001.

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Mental structure and Lebensform

May 12, 2010 in Cognitive Science, concepts, Epistemology | No comments

According to post-structuralist claims, epistemological changes depend on a certain mutation within a cadre of ideas, whose transformations imply general changes in other areas of that structure: structures are stable, though transformational, figures. The weakness of this position relies on the quasi-ontological character of structures, how do they present themselves in the mind of the observer? Cognition allows us to discern the conditions of possibility of certain social thought-structures, their expansion and their evolution, as embodied ideas. Cognitive science and mental models also point to an understanding of the spread and evolution of ideas embedded in a mental structure. Hence, it is the mental structure and not an ontological order of being the ground for change. Men create the conditions of existence of ideas by being provided with a schema that can integrate them. Still, we can always find inconsistencies in a set of believes, they prepare the ground to new mutations that might achieve a novel consistency, coherence, and coercion. Wittgenstein referred to this consistency as a Lebensform, related to a language game, to a wider system of relations than those presupposed in a mere system of signs.1 A Lebensform conveys both social practices and discourses, categories, on the other hand, highlight both their cognitive content and the implied readiness to action.

1 “Richtig und falsch ist was Menschen sagen; und in der Sprache stimmen die Menschen überein. Dies ist keine Übereinstimmung der Meinungen, sondern der Lebensform.” L. Wittgenstein, Nachlass, Oxford, 2000, Item 227a, p. 159. Ibid. Item 235, p. 8. “…der Ausdruck der Gedanken, die Sprache, ist den Menschen gemainsam. Es ist eine Lebensform in der sie übereinstimmen (nicht eine Meinung).” L. Wittgenstein, Nachlass, Item 124, p. 213.

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Cognitive models and Networks

May 11, 2010 in Cognitive Science, concepts, Epistemology | No comments

Background knowledge is highly important in our conceptualization and in the formation of new categories.1 Concepts are nested both in our perception and in our actions, they somehow become incorporated attitudes.2 They sustain situated action, the activity immanent to a plain of consistence. But a concept can be adopted in a wide array of situated conceptualizations and may therefore have a variable representation.3 A central model predefines the conditions of an amplified model but remains inaccessible to change due to its abstract, superordinate, character which does not permit an alteration by means of experience in a somatosensorial form, thus remaining attached to our direct experience but inalterable.4 A connectionist model of learning supposes the formation of nodes of information that become more robust and, simultaneously, more inaccessible, achieving a higher level in the cognitive hierarchy, becoming, in a sense, a prioris to knowledge.5 Still, a certain resemblance can enhance the categorization of a novel concept as long as there is a minimal information able to connect the new object to the given knowledge.6

A contemporary example of such a structural-cognitive model that becomes ubiquous is the metaphor of a network.7 It has been applied both to the tendencies of capital delocalization, the embeddedment of large multinationals within sovereign states, and also to an understanding of man that relies on, on the one hand, the developments in cognitive science and the models of parallel distributed processing of information, in the functioning of a decentralized body-brain system, and by asserting the variably scattered, extended, character of personality.8

1 B.H. Ross, “Remindings and their effects in learning a cognitive skill”, Cognitive Psychology, 16, 1984, pp. 371-416.
2 Cf. G.L. Murphy, The Big Book of Concepts, Massachusetts, 2002. D.L. Medin, “Concepts and conceptual structure”, American Psychologist 44, 1989, pp. 1469–1481. M. Morris and G. L. Murphy, “Converging operations on a basic level in event taxonomies”, Memory and Cognition 18, 1990, pp. 407–418. L.A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman (eds.) Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, New York, 1994.
3 L.W. Barsalou, “Situated Conceptualization”, H. Cohen and C. Lefebvre (eds.), Handbook of categorization in cognitive sciences, Saint Louis, 2005.
4 G. Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things
5 Cf. J.K. Kruschke, “ALCOVE: An exemplar-based connectionist model of category learning”, Psychological Review, 99, 1992, pp. 22-44.
6 A.S. Kaplan and G.L. Murphy, “Category learning with minimal prior knowledge”, Journal of Experimental.
7 A.S. Kaplan and G.L. Murphy, “Category learning with minimal prior knowledge”, Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Leaning, Memory and Cognition, 26(4), 2000, pp. 829-46. Cf. E.M. Pothos and N. Charter, “A simplicity principle in unsupervised human categorization”, Cognitive Science, 26, 2002, pp. 303-43.
8 Cf. M. Castells, The rise of the network society (3 vols.), Oxford, 2000 ff.

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Concepts and cognitive science

April 26, 2010 in Cognitive Science, concepts, Epistemology, Noetic space | No comments

In the two last decades among the cognitive devices to understand categorization, metaphor has helped to explain the utilization of a concept domain, a source, into a new cognitive map, a conceptual target.(1) Thus conceptual change appears as the result of transposing certain unities of meaning into a new semantic field and therefore acquiring a new denotation that ultimately ought to become central. One of the insights of our analysis is the use of metaphors to back arguments, images and even whole scientific systems.(2)

A metaphor is not a mere linguistig trope but a cognitive ubiquous scheme in human cognition. Metaphors like ‘knowledge is seeing’, ’causes are forces’, are able to explain a domain in terms of a diverse domain and thus constitute platforms that integrate diverse elements, showing an underlying plain of consistence. In this sense, it has been observed how thought occurs mostly unconsciously, dominated by concepts, yet at the same time abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.(3) Blended spaces also suggest the motion of two domains mapped onto each other, a decontextualized central concept and a superimposed space, obtaining multiple shades and aspects through the blended experience.(4) Concepts are always nested in theories, knowledge structures, these are both external, cultural, social, plains of consistence, and internal, partial, imperfect, mental models, schemas, whose interlocking conforms the noetic space. The cognitive stabilization of models that corresponds to the basic nodes accords the conditions of possibility of knowledge and remains at a meta-level to our current perceptual-cognitive experience.(5)

(1)Especially relevant is the work by G. Lakoff. Cf. G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors we live by, Chicago, 1980. G. Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, Chicago, 1987. G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, New York, 1999. M. Black, Models and Metaphors, Cornell, 1962.

(2)“Some people will no doubt think that we are interpreting these authors too literally and that the passages we quote should be read as metaphors rather than as precise logical arguments. Indeed, in certain cases the ‘science’ is undoubtedly intended metaphorically; but what is the purpose of these metaphors? After all, a metaphor is usually employed to clarify an unfamiliar concept by relating it to a more familiar one, not the reverse.”A. Sokal and J. Bricmont Fashionable Nonsense, London, 1998, p. 9. “But scientific theories are not like novels; in a scientific context these words have specific meanings, which differ in subtle but crucial ways from their everyday meanings, and which can only be understood within a complex web of theory and experiment. If one uses them as metaphors, one is easily led to nonsensical conclusions.” Ibid., p.177. Especially interesting is the emphasis of Sokal and Bricmont on postmodern non-sense regarding the use of scientific theories and their metaphoric extensions. One of the results of this work is precisely that Hobbes, Rousseau and Schmitt also did use vaguely, inaccurately, or superficially, scientific ideas. Thus it does not seem a peculiar postmodern fashion but a rather common stance of social thinkers because of the precise features of a noetic space that nowadays seems to become dispersed into different disciplines, eroding the sense of meaning, the facility to roam on a flta surface. The use of metaphors rather as illuminating than as exact descriptions allow a new arrangement of elements, a metaphor is never an equation but transposing a source domain to a target domain necessarily produces inconsistencies.

(3) G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, op. cit.

(4) G. Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language, New York, 1997.

(5) “Cultural forms stabilize because they are attention-grabbing, memorable, and sustainable with respect to relevant domain-specific devices. Of course, representations are also selected for in virtue of being present in any particular cultural environment. Domain-specific devices cannot attend to, act on, or elaborate representations that the organism does not come into contact with. For the development of culture, a cultural environment, a product of human history, is as necessary as a cognitive equipment, a product of biological evolution.” D. Sperber and L. Hirschfield, “Culture, Cognition and Evolution”, R.A. Wilson and F.C. Keil (eds.), MIT Encyclopedia, of Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts, 1999, p. cxxii. An example given to religious representations stems from P. Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: Outline of a Cognitive Theory of Religion, Los Angeles, 1994.

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Orography and Epistemology

April 12, 2010 in Epistemology, Noetic space | No comments

Ideas are always rearrangements of given elements that, conveyed on a plain of consistence, determine the conditions of possibility of judgement.(1) Thus the history of ideas has to clarify and focus on the elements that co-figure, configure, novel arrangements on the plane of construction, producing new emergences, new pingos, a salience of the orography on the existing plain.

Pingo

It can also occurr that this protuberance does not succeed in piercing the plain of consistence and remains as a mere accident, rather than producing a striation it becomes element of the very plain.

(1)Thus comes true the assertion of Valéry that a work is the activity of many things moreover an author.

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