479. Castaways

There is a tendency, in recent ‘postmodern’ philosophy, to jettison familiar ideas of truth, subject, identity, causality, meaning as reference, and ‘representation’ of things in the brain. But those concepts came up because we needed them, and we use them all the time, in practical daily life. And I take the view of pragmatic philosophy that philosophy should contribute to life and give perspective for application. It should ‘work’. There are indeed philosophical problems with those notions, but to connect to practice, we can salvage something of them with some twists, as I have been trying to do in this blog,

Truth as correspondence with objective reality is problematic, but we need it, in wanting to know, for example, whether what Corona experts say is ‘true’. Life depends on it. But

 we can still use the notion of truth in the form of ‘warranted assertion’, proposed by Dewey. Onje should come up with arguments for ba proposition, in terms of its coherence with accpted truths, logic, facts, and whether it ‘works.  

I want to maintain that we cannot do without  the notion of ‘subject’, as the one, I as a person, who perceives, feels and acts. And it is not necessarily the idea of a self that is given, outside the world, somehow, and looks at it from outside, as a spectator. One can see the self as arising and developing in action in the world and thus not being independent from it. One can see ‘identity’, not as having a fixed essence, who one ‘really’ is, but as work in progress, in a process of adaptation, change, within bounds.

‘Causality’ can mean many things. It is not necessarily mechanical push. It can be more than purely formal succession, of one event or thing (effect) following the other (cause). It can be the removal of an obstacle. The old notion of a final cause, something a thing strives for or moves to, may not be valid in nature, but it is still a cause of human action.

One can maintain the notion of meaning as reference, not in an ontological but in an epistemological sense: we can remain sceptical about its actual objective reference and maintain it as intentional: we do aim to refer, in pointing to things and talking about them, even if we are not sure in what way, and how far, this reference is correspondence to reality. Whatever it is, it yields results in action. If it is not adequate, we could hardly have survived in evolution. And we can add to it a complementary meaning of meaning, ‘sense’, as proposed by Gottlob Frege, and one does not necessarily have to see that as he did, but as the way in which we identify things. One can also see the meaning or an expression as depending on the ‘language game’ in which it appears, as Wittgenstein proposed. And next to the  intersubjective order of meaning between people, called ‘langue’ by de Saussure, needed for communication, one can identify the volatility of meaning, in idiosyncratic usage and understanding, poetry and metaphor, called ‘parole’ by de Saussure.     

Representations in the brain need not be mirror images of things, and need not be taken as a test of things we observe, to establish their validity or truth. They can also be adapted to things if those things ‘do not fit’. They take the form of neural networks that form and adapt in experience.

Only when such adaptations of familiar notions remain inadequate should one consider the introduction of a new concept, detached from practice and then often incomprehensible, as one finds in the philosophies such as those of Heidegger and Deleuze.