Sharing a belief defines a group, a group society within the conceptscape
of such groups. The questions for membership are whether one wants
to belong and whether one likes the identity. One can thus seek to
change beliefs of a group, change personal beliefs and membership, act as
a bridge between two groups and so forth. There is never a condition
of permanent exile called "being wrong." At worst there is the
condition of being alone. The former is a contamination; the latter
can be intrepid or outdated but still with visiting rights to other
communities of belief.
When meaning is divided into the
accurate and the innacurate, there are problems of belief-enforced
intolerance, religions of perfection, eschatologies of arrival,
dissatisfactions with the present. When meaning is divided in
membership and non-membership as the conceptscape focuses the web of
meaning, we can only guess at the problems but we can see that the old
problems will have the driving power taken away from them.
Quotes
“What, then, does a post-sovereign epistemology have to say about the
legitimation of knowledge? The crucial point is not that there is no
legitimacy, but rather that questions about legitimation are on the same
‘level’ as any other epistemic conflict, and are part of a struggle for
truth. In the circulation of contested heterogeneous knowledges, disputes
about legitimacy, and the criteria for legitimacy, are part of the
dynamics of that circulation. Understanding knowledge as ‘a strategical
situation’ rather than as a definitive outcome places epistemological
reflection in the midst of ongoing struggles to legitimate (and
delegitimate) various skills, practices, and assertions.” Rouse, Joseph.
“Beyond Epistemic Sovereignty” pps. 398-416 in [Editors unknown] The
Disunity of Science. 1996. Stanford University Press. p. 412-3.
“... it is simply wrong to insist that all systems and structures
necessarily totalize and inevitably repress. What Derrida cannot imagine
is a nontotalizing system or structure that nonetheless acts as a whole.
Taylor, Mark C. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture.
University of Chicago. 2001. p. 65.
“General knowledge, I argue, is a dubious ideal even for specialists
inside their own fields. As subject matters grow in complexity, their
literatures grow unmanageable; too big and too interdependent with further
literatures. Organizational complexity precludes breadth of vision.
Complex fields aren’t single conversations to which one can rationally
acquiesce; their innards aren’t fully transparent. Competence comes with
focus. It waxes in microcosm and wanes in macrocosm. It multiplies
specialties and narrows their focus. And general knowledge is doubly
dubious seen as a field-spanning wisdom. It ignores the division of labor
needed for decision-making in a complex society. There are too many
knowledge claims in the world. No rational person would try to evaluate
each one comprehensively. Public problems cross many field boundaries, but
individual expertise can cross only a few, and so complex decision-making
is surrounded by a penumbra of unintelligible communication.” Willard,
Charles Arthur. Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric
for Modern Democracy. University of Chicago Press. 1996. p. 19.
"As Donna Haraway has recently argued, rationalists speak as if they were
‘nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively.’ Instead, she sees
relativism as ‘a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere
equally.’ As she puts it, both stances are ‘god tricks’: one claims not to
be speaking from a specific, identifiable place and pretends, instead, to
be able to evaluate the matter globally–either by being everywhere or by
seeing everything. Haraway’s proposal for avoiding both ‘god tricks’ is to
think in terms of situated, partial knowledges.” Biagioli, Mario. “From
Relativism to Contingentism” The Disunity of Science. 1996. Stanford
University Press. p. 193.
“Noise is always in formation; there can be neither form nor formation
without noise. When information is understood as a process rather than a
product, the line separating it from noise is difficult to determine.
Noise is not absolute but is relative to the systems it disrupts and
reconfigures, and, conversely, information is not fixed and stable but is
always forming and reforming in relation to noise. Forever parasitic,
noise is the static that prevents the systems it haunts from becoming
static. Static makes systems shifty. If, on the one hand, structures
become too rigid to adapt to changing circumstances, the systems they
support collapse; if, on the other hand, there are no systems to process
data, noise becomes fatal. Life is lived on the shifting margin, boundary,
edge between order and chaos, difference and indifference, negentropy and
entropy, information and noise. The interplay of noise, which is
informative, and information, which is noisy, creates the conditions for
emerging complexity, which is the pulse of life.” Taylor, Mark C. The
Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. University of Chicago.
2001. p. 123.
[This is a short description of
Gregory Bateson's concept of the Double Bind, which I would maintain is
evidence of the lifescape. In this quote the missing arena from
discourse is described as "the field" or even "Rule A.2."] "However,
the double bind is not merely a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't'
situation. In and of itself, a no-win situation cannot drive someone
crazy. The crucial element is not being able to leave the field, or point
out the contradiction; and children often find themselves in just such a
situation. Thus Laing sums up the double-bind predicament as: 'Rule A:
Don't. Rule A.1: Rule A does not exist. Rule A.2: Do not discuss the
existence or nonexistence of Rules A, A.1, or A.2.'
"What happens to a child caught in such a situation? Clearly, he will have
to falsify his own feelings, convince himself that he really doesn't have
a case, in order to maintain the relationship with his mother or father.
"'He was glad to see her [writes Bateson] and impulsively put his arm
around her shoulders, whereupon she stiffened. He withdrew his arm and she
asked, 'Don't you love me any more?' He then blushed, and she said, 'dear,
you must not be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your feelings.' The
patient was able to stay with her only a few minutes more and following
her departure he assaulted an orderly and was put in the tubs.'" The
Reenchantment of the World, Morris Berman, Bantam, 1981, pps. 226-7.
Examples
Statement of Point
Validating both primary societies,
lifescape and conceptscape, provides a path to deal with the rampant
contemporary complexity in both spheres as well as a consistent mechanism
to let larger, established social groups set conceptual standards. These
two “societies” of lifescape and conceptscape have continually divided
philosophies into religious types that adjust to the territory’s (lifescape’s)
vastness through physical and emotional adjustment tactics or into ideal
types that harness conceptual logic into effectiveness. Not including the
idiosyncratic complexity of the lifescape leads to diverse estrangements
of the heart and unreformable dogmas. To use only the powerful
conceptscape to view into another human’s depths is to crash about crudely
and dysfunctionally while destroying the basis of sociality. On the other
hand, not treating the hard-won concepts of the methodological sciences
and cultural heritage groups as powerful clusters in their own rights
leads to relativistic dissipation. The validation that status societies
give to concepts is enough normative help to epistemology as well as the
best we can ever hope for given there are no external sources of
validation.
Bibliography
Further
Considerations
| |