I got Guy Robinson's collection of essays, called Philosophy and Mystification, (1998, 2003p). It is arranged in the form of what amount to classical introductory problems in analytic philosophy, centered on logical positivism of the US UK variety. This school is a combination of basic empirical claims and strong dependence on logic, most influenced by Wittgenstein in Robinson's case. In classical terms, Aristotle is central for Robinson.
The general problems discussed are those in the table of contents: 1), Understanding Nonsense, 2) Following and formalization, 3) Infinity, 4) Miracles, 5) How to tell your friends from machines, 6) Nature and necessity, 7) Skepticism about skepticism, 8) Fool's intelligence, 9) Language and the society of others, 10)Des sive natura: science, nature, and ideology, 11) On misunderstanding science, 12) History and human nature, 13) Newton, Euclid, and the foundation of Geometry, 14) Coda: philosophy and history. There are at least two central themes and or methods. The first is from Wittgenstein and follows the torturous analytic of language used in presenting problems such as determinism, necessity, infinity and induction. The back cover calls this muscular Wittgenstein and I think that characterizes the approach well. While it is good practice for thinking and writing, it makes tedious reading. While Robinson promises plain language and he delivers, the reader has to care about some of these problems to follow the closely argued points. I had a hard time staying awake in analytic philosophy because most of the problems were just games. I discovered there were some games I liked and the problems with infinity were one such area. There is a great wealth of background that Robinson mostly glosses but if you have read some of the background works, you can see the iceberg, and it goes deep. He must have been a fine teacher. What is the nonsense he writes about? It is usually the move from a local understanding that seems clear at first and limited to finite examples. For instance, the whole number ten and its parts , and a whole watch both have a unity, closure, and can be broken down into parts. The former can be seen as the additive and multiplicative deconstructions i.e. prime factors, additive partitions. The problem and potential for nonsense is found in the leap to infinite models, were whole now extends to some global construction that in fact can not be constructed, only imagined. This category is surprisingly rich in nonsense as it becomes transformed into a transcendental mode of thought---and part of what Robinson calls the deification of Nature. We can not see Nature as a whole, so Robinson moves the emphasis to the Aristotlian model of a more limited understanding, of what we can see, study, and make reasonable deductions. In one of the best examples in the book, Robinson begins an analysis of Newtonian universal time and absolute space. With the help of Einstein's limitation on the velocity of light, he repeats the conceptual move that such global absolutes can not in fact exist, since instantaneous signalling and infinite velocities can not exist. This move successfully materializes spacetime and withdraws it from the realm transcendent absolutes. This example is very close to the mathematics of infinity, another well known problem area of 20thC math and physics. There are a variety of theorems in calculus that deal with approaching a limit. The technical solution is to sandwich the limit between a construction of the least upper bound and the greatest lower bound. The limit or point or real number lays just in between. While it is tautological, since we assume the limit is on the interval, at least it is pinned down from both sides. The above is intimately related to Robinson's attack on infinity and Cantor's transfinite numbers in particular. These are infinities that can be extended. But the problem comes from the idea, they can only be extended after they close as omega, the first transfinite number. Then they can be extended in one direction under rules of transfinite arithemtic post closure. Robinson concludes this is nonsense, just as a whole infinity is nonsense. An infinity is limitless, so how can it be added to first to reach closure as a whole, and then extended which only compounds the problem. Still Robinson has to agree to the diagonalization of the rationals and he takes a constructionist approach, which amounts to saying keep working away and we can accept the open ended construction. Math is full of useful fictions, so it doesn't bother me particularly. They make for interesting stuff to figure out, if I am in the mood. Robinson's goal is to demystify and then render material, so endless construction is not a problem. The problem is that induction by finite inferrence, at some point has to take the same leap. Here Robinson refuses Russell's idea of using the concept of a probability with increased repetition can approach a probable certainty with each enumberation. He also contrasts some of these concepts to the working scientist, and historizes the practices that make up doing science. This is were he touches on Kuhn and the idea that paradigm shifts are historical breaks, that break the ideal of smooth accumulation of knowledge. There was also discussion on the incomenserability of paradigms, etc. No help. I think Robinson makes too much of the incomenserate. I've got Kuhn somewhere, but I haven't found it. I have mixed thoughts about this book. It is often a tedious text, but it is also a cookbook collection of highly useful arguments. He locates many problems within the Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza historical period and the arrival of the unheard of isolated, self-generative individual from Hobbes' beast to Rousseau's child. In his quest to historize his points, Robinson uses an overemphasis on contrasts between, say Aristotle's essence of Man as a political and therefore social animal, as over against the 17thC imaginary creatures, the collection of independent and autonomous individuals. Robinson's central thesis in these discussions is the problem that the scientific construct of nature became deified in an effort to reconcile what was incomenserate, two paradigms of significantly different world views the feudal and the early enlightenment. This was complicated intellectual and social history, and I think Robinson would have done better to illuminate the history with more examples than just Descartes and Spinoza. I think Spinoza's point was much more simple. As an exile, he knew, he didn't need rabbis or God around to enforce ethical conduct. Reason should suffice---even if it didn't---since most people are not reasonable, therefore the emphasis on control of passions. Spinoza's use of a universal substance was an adaptation of Epicius and Democritus' atomic materialism adapted from Gassendi. The materialism of the 17thC circulated around a cluster of published works in Amsterdam and included Gassendi, Descartes and Spinoza. Of these Gassendi was the closest to a deified Nature and Spinoza the least close. It isn't hard to understand why Hobbes thought human nature was beastly, far from reasonable, fresh on the heels of the English civil war, etc. I read Robinson to see if he had some insights into how astronomy was going to get out of the dark matter, dark energy problem. I think Robinson would approach this from the problem of talking about the whole universe. He hints at these walls like the problem of the big bang. When science writers talk about the whole universe, and the cosmological constant implies such an entity there might be a fallacy hidden in there that would need to be teased out. Perhaps that's a Robinson starting point. There is definitely something wrong because the difference between what should be by theory and what is by observation is so many orders of magnitude off, that this is no minor problem that can be expected to go away. Robinson's other point of interest is that most working scientists ignore the violent car crash of cosomolgies gone wrong. In the next to last chapter, Robinson begins a discussion of Newton, Euclid and geometry. He makes a central point, I've know for years working with geometry and abstract art, which is that geometry did not spring from some platonic world of logic and imagination, but from the trades and practices that use it. This idea is contra David Hilbert's famous Foundations of Geometry. One of Robinson's favorite subjects to turn into mystification is any thing with the label foundations. He picks Newton over Descartes (his favorite whipping boy) because Newton concretized geometry into the practices of physical science. Descartes took the pure math approach, mostly applied to abstract spacial constructions like the Cartesian plane and algebra. I would have preferred Galileo who designed fortifications and tested and calculated ballistic paths. Robinson's last chapter shines on its own. It opens with a discussion of the modern and what that might mean and wonders if there is a postmodern period. Here he outlines some of the cultural history, which is a rare turn for philosophers trained in the US-UK analytic mode. Robinson easily manages that switch. Then he launches into an a brief historical analysis of early and late medieveal European societies in terms of the change in social relations from one of service and fealty as bonded labor without money, and the rise of money and the slow change from serf to agricultural worker, agricultural labor, and various arrangements in between. This was a change in the social relations. Then the final move was to a full monied economy. Robinson uses this historical example to outline his concept of a paradigm shift, world views, and changed social relations. It is an excellant example to illustrate his conception of historical materialism. It is apparent after that discussion, no we are not in such a period, merely through cultural alterations. The thrust of this section is an indirect answer to Fredrick Jamesion idea of Late Capital. He wrote this chapter before the economic crisis of 2007-8 since the book was first published in 1998 hardbound, and 2003 in paper. To take up Robinson general approach, the key question would be, will capital's, political establishment, the power elite, be able to transform a majority of the working masses into debt peonage? This transformation would be just the sort of change of social relations that Robinson might claim to signal a historical material change to a different social order. There is another branch of this complex transformational battleground. The European example is being fought today. Greece is owned by the ECB through its foreign debt. This amounts to a battle over national state sovereignity, the power of a nation state to self-determination outside the scope of global capital control. The US is in a similar battle, a variation. The US financial sector a key actor of global capital owns US government officals to such an extent that there is no political will to stop this transformation, even at the risk of survival of the US population and its plummiting standard of living. We live in a corporate state and not just in metaphor or rhetorical device. The basic choice seems to be submit to endless personal debt peonage or suffer the consequences. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
