Whitehead and Varela (part 2-2)

practice for presentation

Category:

Education

Tags:

• whitehead
• varela
• science
• biology
• evolution
• metaphysics
• life
• organism

[EvoLIEtion]

You need a pinch of Rorty in your intellectual diet.

[0ThouArtThat0]

Rorty's ideas are always good to keep in mind, but sometimes I feel he was a bit too ready to reduce everything to language. I don't think our knowledge can ever passively represent reality, but through some kind of participatory epistemology, I think we can break out of linguistic solipsism.

What do you think Rorty might add to what I've said in the video?

[normonics]

actually used Whitehead at work today. Used his concept of 'inert knowledge' in which an individual has the necessary knowledge to deal with something but doesn't apply it appropriately (or at all). Perhaps the presence of inert knowledge in an individual is a sign that their 'inside and outside' are not resonating properly.

[0ThouArtThat0]

yeah that also speaks to Varela and enactivism's notion that all knowing is doing, and vice versa.

[0ThouArtThat0]

Or that knowledge, when inert, is only verbal and not embodied.

[EvoLIEtion]

(cont)

Rorty, on the other hand, reminds us of the anti-centrality of propositions. There is no single, essential proposition to rule them all. And this is implied in the emerging ecological paradigm as well. If life, society, language, are described in network terminology, rather than hierarchical terminology, then surely the paradigm itself cannot be permitted to take a seat at the throne.

[EvoLIEtion]

"What do you think Rorty might add to what I've said in the video?"

Rortyan is deeply ecological in thought - his anti-essentialist, anti-foundationalist attitudes almost demand it. See the first three or four chapters of Social Hope, especially. I think ecological thinking is immensely powerful in a number of ways.

[EvoLIEtion]

"through some kind of participatory epistemology, I think we can break out of linguistic solipsism."

I'd be interested to know to how. It's just too easy for me to ask of you something like, "By what means will members of your community come to "participate" and, with luck, agree upon this barrier breaking epistemology?"

It's a Rortyan cop-out, a trick perhaps, or a very powerful (useful) description of the situation we language-users find ourselves in.

[adorianvlad]

You have a very elegant way of putting forward these issues; I am kind of falling a bit behind with your videos; I will have to ketch up with these sometime. They are crucial towards getting a better grasp of how reality works as such. Your perspective seems to me, although not very clean, in the semanthic way of course, at least you have many gateways open for further inquiry.

[Zeitschen]

In that book of Kant's he suggests that few biologists have not thought of the bold theory of evolution & he talks of development by adaptation & preservation. Of course Darwin adds natural selection, but in his memoirs he tells us that he got the idea from an economist, Malthus.

It is possible to get stuck on the notion of evolution, if it applies to everything it applies to nothing. I think it's better to look at different forms of development rather than at the abstraction of evolution.

[normonics]

who knows the apex better: the race car driver or the mathematician?

[smoking3co]

a priori stating there is evolution rules out the possibility of evolution, since the reality in the future is not yet at that point of evolution, so the only we we can be sure is in a pragmatical form....

science nowadays has a flaw method of constructing evidence.....

yr really good at this...