Philosophical Catfight!

Here is an interesting/ ridiculous/ hilarious correspondance between Daniel Dennett and John Searle that took place in the pages of the New York Review of Books in December, 1995, entitled (ironically, I wish) "The Mystery of Consciousness". The main point that seems to be under debate here is whether or not consciousness exists, with a secondary topic being the abilty for science to reach a level of objectivity. Dennett doesn't actually get a chance to lay out his position here, as he instead submits a short, angry rant against Searle. However, the most interesting part of this debate, for me, is that it shows how, even today, philosophers are still depending upon a very old, inadequate language and a system of imaginary oppositions. (i.e., appearance/ reality, subjective/ objective, mind/ body, etc.) Searle even studied under J.L. Austin at Oxford in the 50's, but "seems" (as I am unsure, because I'm not a Searle scholar) to have latched onto to Austin's theory of Speech Acts, and to have missed Austin's broader point about the myriad uses of language.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1680

re: The Prince

I guess that my criticism of the medical profession stems from the presumption that it is free from interpretation. A lot of this probably has to do with the impact of certain legal issues upon the practice of medicine, but I think that it is also related to the belief and the desire for medicine to be a hard science - that is, for it to rest upon some foundation that is steadier than the social sciences, for it to be more objective, to be free from interpretation, which, it is assumed, is an expression of some kind of fallible subjectivity. [That somehow medicine is more real than law.] But I see medicine as first and foremost a social science, as a purely human activity that is primarily concerned with humans interacting with other humans. But this is totally understandable - Don't we want nothing more than to believe that we are dealing with a kind of certainty when our health and our lives are at stake? And aren't most people more than willing to engage in a quite a lot of self-deception in order to maintain that belief?

"There are instances where you have a faith - where you say "I believe" - and on the other hand this belief does not rest on the fact on which our ordinary everyday beliefs normally do rest." - Wittgenstein, Lectures on Religious Belief, p. 54.

At its simplest, this sentence is saying that we have different reasons for believing the things that we believe. [His belief in evolution has nothing to do with his belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, nor in his belief that it is raining outside.] But if we look closer, we might find that we have some peculiar reasons and/or explanations for our beliefs. For example, my belief that the antibiotics will kill my infection may have less to do with my knowledge of biology and chemistry and more to do with my desire for my doctors to be a part of a strange and mysterious system that has the power and the will to salvage my health. This could be called faith. And somewhere I hear Nietzsche lobbying in favor of the conclusion that our scientific beliefs are really just disguised leaps of faith. But I don't think this is quite right.

One Year Older

06.20.07 - So on what occasions, then, is perception in need of interpretation? On only a very few, I suppose. And those occasions would be incredibly particular; something along the lines of seeing a blurry dot upon the horizon and not knowing whether it is [to call it] a deer or an elk. And here we have a clear example of something we could call “misinterpretation” and mean it as a synonym for “mistake”. However, under what I would want to call normal circumstances, that particular function that we call perception has no need for that particular function we call interpretation. In other words, we don't interpret when we perceive. (I have P.I. §330 in mind here.) Now, of course these few and rather specialized instances of interpretation during otherwise normal perception ought to be investigated further, but the next question needs to be whether or not language, in particular the specific acts of labeling and remembering, requires in any way an act of interpreting. My instinct is telling me no, but in order to show this we're going to need to not only deconstruct but most likely dynamite certain preconceived notions of knowledge, interpretation and recollection, certain epistemological stalking-horses that, for centuries, have made us believe that we're more removed from reality than we really are. (And I dare you to count how many metaphysical-linguistic assumptions are being made in that last sentence.)
What use then, to us, is interpretation? My hunch is that the fields of science and medicine grossly under-use the concept of interpretation.
P.I. §333: “ 'Only someone who is convinced can say that.' - How does the conviction help him when he says it? - Is it somewhere at hand by the side of the spoken expression? (Or is it masked by it, as a soft sound by a loud one, so that it can, as it were, no longer be heard when one expresses it out loud?) What if someone were to say “In order to be able to sing a tune from memory one has to hear it in one's mind and sing from that?'” And this stabs at the heart of the matter, that when I recognize A as A, there is no process accompanying that act – that is to say, that there is no shadow A that follows and precedes A and allows me to fit A into a shape that is A-shaped.