So in the hopes of sounding like I’m writing a real philosophical exposition, my intention here is to zero in and expand on a previous quote from Rorty’s essay “Philosophy as Science, Metaphor, Politics” in Essays on Heidegger and Others and hopefully push further into the nuances of metaphor in philosophy. Anyway:
“Both perception and inference leave our language, our way of dividing up the realm of possibility, unchanged. They alter the truth-values of sentences, but not our repertoire of sentences. To assume that perception and inference are the only ways in which beliefs ought to be changed is to adopt what Heidegger identified as the “mathematical” attitude. It is to assume that the language we presently speak is, as it were, all the language there is, all the language we shall ever need.”
Now the thing to note here is that Heidegger is noted as taking the “poetic” lean in philosophy –that is as compared to the scientific or political. However, as Rorty points out in a later essay (and that is if I understand him right (Heidegger fell short of his promise by turning his emphasis on the poetic approach into a mandate towards the obscure and esoteric language of the priest or shaman. In other words, Heidegger, by giving the poetic privilege over the political (that which is about social justice (showed the very elitist colors that may have been flying when he so blatantly subscribed to Nazism. This, as Rorty points out elsewhere, was the result of Heidegger’s reactionary disposition in the face of technology. And we should note here Heidegger’s rather eccentric choice of appearing before his classes garbed in the traditional German outfit you often see on polka bands.
Rorty then turns to Davidson’s take on metaphor (something I will have to drive into after I understand it better, but what it ultimately comes to is a quote from pg. 14:
“Another way of putting this point is to say, with Davidson, that “the irrational” is essential to intellectual progress. In a paper on Freud, Davidson notes that “mental causes which are not reasons” –that is, beliefs and desires which play a role in our behavior but which do not fit into the scheme of beliefs and desires which we would claim as ours- are needed not only to explain “deviant” behavior (as Freudian psychoanalytic theory employs them) but also to “explain our salutary efforts, and occasional successes, at self criticism and self improvement.”
(First of all, note to self: need to dig deeper into Davidson.)
That said, we can see here a bridge or overlap (or maybe even a premonition of (with modern discoveries in neuroscience and, contrary to the bah-humbug attitude of more scientific approaches such as that of Dennett or Searle, the import of the metaphoric/ poetic (that which Heidegger failed to follow through with (that, despite their seemingly irrational nature, can add to our evolution in terms of brain plasticity. (And it allows for a connection that can eventually be made with Deleuze.)
My window is almost out, so I have to do this quick and elaborate later. But as J. Allan Hobson points out in Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction, dreaming (that which we would normally think of as an irrational experience (actually may play a vital role in the process of brain plasticity….
Unfortunately, I have to let this go for now. But elaborating on that last point gives me my rhizome for tomorrow.
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Appendix (something I had time to write earlier that goes to the pragmatic point:
“(Biological evolution can be defined as change with modification over a period of time.)
In the context of the past, the past tense of change is changed. This implies that the fossil records are about things that have changed. And subsequently, (this implies) that we cannot know they have changed. For the knowing of change is contingent on our past experiences of what those things looked like before. Therefore, with reference to the past, biological evolution cannot be confirmed.” –David Salako: facebook.com/groups/philoso … ment_reply
I think we can consider evolution as having passed the pragmatic truth test of warranted assertability. In ways described by Eren, as well in other ways, it just works.
But to tentatively jump on David’s side of the fence, we could resort to the inductive limit and argue reasonably that there is no way of knowing that some guy with cloven hooves and horns didn’t plant this evidence to throw us off his tracks. And the best one could do is snort, “yeah, but it isn’t likely” and walk away leaving the argument pretty much unchallenged.
However (to jump back to the other side), were we to follow that argument with an assertion that, because of that, evolution must be false, we would be making a clear turn into bad reasoning. But then all we would have to do is change one word (a mere qualifier (and argue that because of the previous point, evolution could be wrong. But then we would just be saying the same thing as the first: simply converting our premise into a conclusion.
But this is all a lot of semantic play with minor references to existential reality. But once we move from the semantic to the existential, we return to the pragmatic force of warranted assertability in front of which semantic arguments fall limp.