Skip to main content

peak experiences, cultural objectivities, justice, mathematical objects, emptily intending,

When we add 2+3, we can see, as it were, with our mind's eye that it equals 5.  Very elaborate proofs, however, cannot be seen to be valid as a whole.  In other words, no single one glance of the "mind's eye" will confirm that the argument as a whole is valid.  Or rather, it is not presently humanly possible, but anyone who asserts that it is valid is likely to imagine a Herculean mind (to steal from Dworkin) that could see all at once the validity of such arguments.  To put it in the language of phenomenology, we "emptily intend" this sort of fulfillment even though it is presently practically unattainable.

Might this sort of empty intending be relevant to our concept of justice?

Consider the following analogy:  knowing the right way to interact with friends and family is comparable to apprehending the validity of the simple equation (2+3=5) just as knowing how strangers in society are to interact is comparable to knowing that an extremely complex argument is valid.  Just as A is to B, so is C to D (where A=friends and family; B=simple equation; C=strangers; D=complex argument).

This seems a bit convoluted, but I think I'm onto something.  After all, it seems plausible that the concept of justice both presuppose and be ordered toward fulfillment (phenomenological pun intended) in friendship and family.  Beliefs regarding justice seems to involve reference to how the whole fits together (not in a neat, deductive manner, however), and seeing how they do fit together would be like a Herculean mind grasping the truth of an exceedingly complex argument.

Justice is to be conceived of as being just as concrete as how my family functions well.  That is, the justice in question, by the way, is not a Platonic ideal: rather, it's how my society works or functions well.  It's a cultural object that is not quite a thing, but is commonly apprehended by all.

More on this later on...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...
Post a Comment
Read more