Why? Radio Episode, "The Unity of the Sciences: Is All Knowledge Connected?" with guest Joseph Margolis
10:39PM Jan 8, +0000
Speakers:
Announcer
Jack Russell Weinstein
Joseph Margolis
Keywords:
language
human beings
learn
human
question
understand
knowledge
objectivity
philosophy
person
talking
understanding
disciplines
people
suggesting
speak
sense
means
change
universities
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Hello, everybody, welcome to Why philosophical discussions about everyday life. I'm your host Jack Russell Weinstein. Today we're talking with Joseph Margolis about whether or not human knowledge is unified. universities across the country are experiencing changes, administrators are restructuring things and altering how they hire faculty. Most of it's awful. A lot of it's just an excuse to have more money to spend on public relations. And a great deal of it is wrapped up in power politics, internal to particular schools. But in the middle of all that is the claim that the traditional disciplines are either obsolete or a luxury, a loss of faith in what gets called pure research. The argument goes something like this. Nobody does philosophy really, nobody does physics. What they do is work on topics. They're concerned with energy issues are relieving hunger or rethinking transportation. So nobody needs a philosopher or physicist. What's needed instead, is a group of people trained in various disciplines who can work together to make better pipelines or stop famine or invent a more efficient light rail system. research and teaching have to be more practical, the argument goes, and the faculty will have more publication successes, and get more grant dollars if they're clustered around a topic instead of an outdated field of study. Now, the uninteresting thing about this argument is that it's really about profit and whatever subject is hip at the moment. But these fads change frequently, the moment they do the people whose work is out of fashion becomes disregarded or worse gets fired. But the interesting thing about the argument is what it assumes about human knowledge, it suggests that the only way people can discover is by asking the most immediate practical questions, and the only way any of us learn is by working with people who share information about subjects we know nothing about. In the case of light rail, for example, this suggests that sociologists to examine how passengers interact, must be partnered with engineers who designed train engines. In the case of famine, economists who understand distribution have to work with geneticists who designed hardier grains. There's a truth here, light rail, no matter how efficient, we'll only be successful if it's designed around how people actually use it. And famine will only be relieved if the grain we sent to the hungry remains edible after its shift. In other words, knowledge is integrated, and every inquiry overlaps with many others. But there's something deeply wrong about the belief that researchers have to work with people in radically different fields. The history of discovery has shown us that the best and sometimes the only way to learn stuff is to become specialized to have some people working on some things, others working on others, and have their results, not their methods accessible to everyone. This means that sociologists should work with sociologists, engineers should work with engineers. And only after these groups have actually learned something should they connect. Universities are necessary, in part because they promote specialization first, and cultivate a large scale conversation only after there's knowledge to shale. Now, philosophically, all of this forces us to ask how knowledge is actually connected. That's the subject of today's episode. What does physics have to do with philosophy? What does chemistry have to do with art? These are questions no one would have asked a couple 100 years ago because the disciplines that we're all familiar with weren't invented yet. The American founding fathers didn't study economics, political science, or sociology, they learned to political economy. Early universities didn't teach physics, biology and chemistry. The original disciplines were natural philosophy, moral philosophy and logic. The classical Greeks taught music to help people to understand math, they taught gymnastics to help teach ethics, the modern world divided knowledge into specialized chunks, universities succumbed to the division of labor around at the same time that factories did. Specialization itself is one of humanity's most important discoveries. And despite what some will say, working on pipelines or famine relief for light rail isn't actually a specialization. It's only what we happen to be looking at right now. A university has to be flexible, it has to respond to the needs of the moment and ask classic human questions at the same time. It has to respond to how people understand themselves as human beings, not just the trends, and this is what our guest today will argue he's going to suggest that how we map knowledge is based on how we map people that we can't describe one without the other. And this brings us back to the university. Our schools are built on how we see ourselves, are we really people who only want profit and to call attention to ourselves? If so, our universities should succumb to these new administrative demands. But instead, if we are, as I believe, creators, explorers, discoverers and partners in a common world, we We must return universities to their most central purpose, the creation and dissemination of knowledge. I promise you, our pipelines, our food distribution techniques, and our light rails will get better along the way.
And now our guest Joseph Margolis is the Laurel H. Cornell professor of philosophy at Temple University. He's written more than two dozen books on philosophy of the human sciences, the theory of knowledge and interpretation, aesthetics, philosophy of mind, American philosophy and pragmatism. Joe, thanks for joining us on why.
Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
If you'd like to join the conversation, please email us at ask why umd.edu Post a question@facebook.com slash why radio show tweet at why radio show.com Or sorry, tweet at at y radio show or join us in our chat room at y radio show.org where our intern Michelle is waiting to talk to you. So, Joe, given that what we're talking about is how knowledge is connected? I think I can get away with asking question I actually don't get to ask too often, you've written so many books on so many topics, you've done sophisticated research in so many different areas.
Do that? How can you have only one career that touches on so many different areas?
In a way your, your earlier introduction seems to be what should I say just as true of finding out the unity of your own mind as finding out the unity of all knowledge. You can't really understand your world if you don't have a sense of the unity of your approach to whatever turns up from moment to moment in your world. And in a certain way you can't understand others, if there isn't similarly, some kind of unification, every effort, implicit or subterranean, as well as explicit about trying to find common ground. So there is a sense, which is perhaps too vague in what I've said that needs to be worked out, that would explain the relevance of the unity of thought or conception and the scatter of everything we do.
So if if there's something that holds us together, and we're going to talk about this more, certainly as the as the show goes on, if there's some that holds us together, that that is the sort of the unity of our mind. Does that mean that that in theory, a person can know every discipline and interact with it from their own individual perspective? Or is there something that just an artist just isn't going to be able to interact with physics, the way that they interact with art? Or they're not going to be able to get biology the way that a biologist Is there something about? What the way we look at knowledge that's idiosyncratic that's really just individual? Or is it in theory, all something that we can network together from our own individual perspective.
Whether it be suggested a couple of grounds on which it's clear, that we must be able to share that point of view or knowledge or language and so on. First thing is that there are no languages, which there are not bilinguals. That's to say, there is no human language that has ever been noted that only the people who learn that language as a first language speak. And in that way, everyone who learns some first language is in principle capable of learning the language of any other community of human speakers. So every language has bilingual competent speakers. And so from two to x, number of languages, all of them are interconnected. They're all very different, or at least some are extraordinarily different, and some are much closer than others. But it's an extraordinary fact that all the languages seem to be learned with you cool facility by the same human being. That's one point. And I think the second is that no matter how different we are, biologically, there's some more or less basic biological plan that applies to the entire range of human diversity. Those two points of which I say, relative uniformity, the uniformity of diverse languages, and the uniformity of diverse biologies. So,
I mean, there's a couple questions I want to ask you about being bilingual. But I'm gonna hold off for just a second. Because what's interesting is, I bring up this question of disciplines, and you bring up this notion of language, or are you suggesting that physics is a different language than biology that biology is a different language than say, painting is one way to understand the different languages, modeling it on sorry, one way to understand the different disciplines is modeling and on language. And since language is somehow common, and understandable to all people in this bilingual notion that you have, that we really can understand all disciplines in the same way.
If I may put it in a slightly different way, Jack, think of a human infant, newly born, who has no language at all. Now, it's, it's a, it's a marvel that we don't fully understand how it is that any human infant normal human infant will, in a relatively short, predictable interval of time will learn the language of the adults who are linguistically competent around it. And that infant can do this for any language that human beings speak. That's the first consideration. That already means that there must be some congruence or convergence in the capacities of all the members of the human race, to understand one another. There's some biological sharing, pre linguistically that makes that possible. Secondly, however, when a child learns the language, then it learns to understand random members of the community that speaks that language without actually making much of an effort. So there's something extraordinary about the fact that, first of all, the child can learn a language. And second, in secondary and learning that language can actually be tuned in to the thoughts, conceptions, understanding of every other member of the community that speaks that language. Now, some people have theorized that that means in a sense, that we're not completely individual, that in sharing the language, that sharing is as much a part of our individuality as whatever extraordinarily diverse way we might go over. In, we might go on in a direction that very few people share with us. So the diversity of the language that we use, and our pattern of thought, is a variant of something that's already common. Does that make sense? It
does make sense. I'm, I'm thinking about our listeners now, because of course, this is very conceptually difficult for me, I'm sure it's very conceptually difficult for them. And what what I seem to hear you saying is, when I asked questions about biology and physics and all these things, I'm actually asking the wrong question. What I need to ask is about how an individual human being interacts with other individual human beings. And so before we even start talking about the sort of these notions of the of areas of study, we have to figure out what it is this this, I don't like the divine language, but I'll use it this sort of miracle or this fact of human experience that we all at some level can understand one another. And a baby who has no language learns to understand everybody. And so even before we can talk about how knowledge is organized, we have to in fact focus on how an individual relates to the world around him or herself. Is that Is that a fair interpretation?
That is fair. But allow me to say one thing more, which may seem to solve some of the puzzles that you're talking about. I'm saying that the problem of a child coming to understand the other members of the society that it learns to converse with is no different in any important respect from our being moderately able to speak about foods, the weather, and so on in common. And being able to speak about physics, and philosophy and art criticism and so on. That there is a sense of alien, the alien quality of any other individual's life. That, in principle, is not significantly different from the kind of division of labor that we get, in all the specialties of academic disciplines, or have skills of one kind or another. It might be building a house, or it might be preparing a meal. Or it might be, say, repairing shoes, or something of that kind. But this problem of differentiation is in principle, the same from one individual to another, from one society to another, from one discipline to another, and so on. Some diversions of the sword may be more difficult intrinsically than others are, but the problem of understanding is exactly the same as far as I can see,
you know, one of my favorite things about my job, and one of my favorite things about being on the radio show, is when I have that experience of someone just pulling the rug right out from under me. And I think that's what you did. And I'm amazed by the idea that while we think of these disciplines, like physics and chemistry, as inherently more complicated or inherently harder that in some sense, this is an illusion. In some sense, it is the same process of understanding, as the baby learning to speak, or learning to talk about food, or learning to talk about basic needs, I want a hug, I want some water, I'm scared of the dark, that we're so educated, we're so socialized and habituated into thinking about these esoteric, these complicated fields that people need advanced degrees, that I keep, what you're suggesting is that I keep missing the mark, because it's the project. It's the it's the problem of understanding in general. That's hard. Not the problem that that's that's tremendously fascinating. How do you, how do you get there? How do you go from being either a student or just a casual reader or someone who reads you know, the science section in the newspaper? How do you get from the being in awe of the complexity of the universe, to reducing it to and the word is simple, but I don't mean it, you know, in the general way, this the simple problem of understanding how do you get from that complexity to the most foundational question of human of human understanding?
Well, I think you hit it on the right on the mark. Certainly, one stands in awe of human infants, learning the complex skills of speaking from no language at all, they may be doing something so extraordinary that all of these other things pale in comparison, or think of a family trying to understand its own children, or think of a cocktail party in which you're baffled by the pattern of thoughts of the person who is holding a martini next to you. What's something of that Congress? Where is the evidence that those complexities are of a lower order than those of specialists? disciplines like physics I'd say. I understand from talking to friends who've been mathematicians, for example, that after they get familiar with their own specialty, they tend to become quite bored with it. Because it's so routine, that they don't see how one could go on merely with the seemingly profound complexities of their discipline. And they turn to other things that are more interesting because the complexities of these other things, perhaps playing in a small musical ensemble, something of that guy strikes them as introducing the kind of complexity involving an ensemble of people that tests them in a much deeper way than from their point of view, their own specialty mathematics that say, Whatever do
you know, your you may have not intended to? But I feel like you've answered the first question I asked, which is, you know, why? How do you have a career that, that challenge that that spans all these topics? And your answer, it seems, as I understand it, is how can you not? How can someone not just throw themselves at various different points into these new places and these new ideas? Because if you don't, you get bored? And it seems to me what you're doing is that you're you're echoing the Socratic injunction you're saying the unexamined life is not worth living. And that what we learned from looking at the babies and what we're learning from looking at the at the cocktail party, is that it's the everyday it's the simple, it's the things we take for granted, that challenge us, at least as much. If not more than that, then then the things that we get degrees. And and I don't mean to be anti intellectual, obviously. But what I mean is, we're educated to think that that specialized stuff, is the hard stuff. But really, it's the everyday examination that unravels and reveals the true complexity of the human experience. Absolutely.
Could I add something here, which may help? Coming back to your first question? It's taken me a long time to realize that I probably have been intuitively searching for a reasonable answer to one question. And I know and persuaded that that question, is the central question for answering all these other questions that you're hinting at? And that is quite right. What is it to be a human person, I myself have a very unorthodox view of what a human person is, I think that a person is an artifact of language. What I mean by that is that in the human infant, when it learns the language, is literally transformed into a person, a person, as I understand it, is a creature, perhaps they will be machine persons down the line, I don't know. But right now, we think of a person as a living creature capable of speech, and whatever speech makes possible. Now, my point about that is, language itself was gradually invented, over conceivably hundreds of 1000s of years. Only human beings, as far as we understand it, have a true language. And although the language that we speak is clearly continuous with the communicative abilities of other creatures, particularly the higher mammals, the apes, especially, but the point is that there are capacities which we acquire, only because we acquire speech, for example, the ability to think about your own inner experience, or to report it to other people who are able to understand it, because you report it linguistically.
Joe, I'm going to interrupt you for just a second because there is there's so much here, and the quote here, there be monsters, it's going through my head, we need to take a break. When we come back, I want to dive right into I want to tell a little story first, and then I want to dive into this question of people being artifacts of language. You're listening to Joe Margolis and Jack Russel Weinstein on why philosophical discussions about everyday life, we're talking about the unity of knowledge and the basic questions of the understanding of human experience. We'll be back right after this
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you're back with Jack Russell wants to and why philosophical discussion in everyday life. We're talking with Joe Margolis about human understanding and about the connection and the unity of knowledge. Now, if you will all indulge me I want to tell one of my favorite stories about my daughter, ADINA, longtime listeners will know I can't resist this sort of thing. My daughter was about 18 months at the time, maybe a little less, she's just learning to speak. And we're having a like a cookout in the back, just the family and my friend Gail. And I finally sit down after making all the food and getting all the food on the table and Adina says, you know, Dina want bowl. She's she's at the stage, right? Where nothing can touch and all that stuff. And she says Dina want bowl? And I said, Adina No I just sat down, you know, have some food. She says Dina want bowl? And I said Dina? No, I want to sit I want to eat. She says, Do you know what bowl getting angry and it looked at her like the stern, the strict father and I said, ADINA, just eat your food. I need to sit down and she looks at and she takes the thankfully plastic plate in her hand and she slams it on the table. And she says Dina, what bowl that is understandable? Well, needless to say, I got up and got the ball, right, because she won the argument, implicit and she won every argument since I have to admit, implicit in this is this notion that she had, that if she could communicate her want, it would be granted. If she could communicate her need her idea if she could just get the language out to tell these creatures, these parents who provide her with all of these things, what she wanted, she will get it. And there's tremendous faith in language from her perspective. And still, it's still her personality, that if she can just articulate. And I think that's what we're talking about. So Joe, I want to come back to this notion. And before we get to the more technical stuff, I want to ask, Is your perspective, that human knowledge is fundamentally rooted on a component of language and that the human person is an useI artifact? And we'll figure out what that means in just a second, an artifact of language? Are you inherently optimistic about the possibilities of language? Do you think that language is? I don't know, I don't know how to ask this question. Do you think an English is an infinite tool, something that really is the key to knowledge, not only our access to knowledge of the world, but access to other people? Do you? Do you celebrate the largeness of language? Or are you frustrated by the limited nature of language?
And yes, I mean, the image of the Tower of Babel, for example, is already signaling the fact that the gift of language is also the curse of language. I mean, to understand language is to also understand that other people think in different ways from the way one thinks himself. So, the irreconcilability of different points of view, is also attributed to sharing a language you can really understand the, what separates your perspective from that of others, unless you share a language one might say, so that there's no sense that sharing a language means sharing the same views about everything on the contrary, certain kinds of problems which are characteristic of the human race can only be formulated in a way from I put it that way, linguistically, animals don't face what shall I say? Alien ways of behaving? Maybe Hey, they've uniformly relatively speaking, especially wild animals, although there may be dangers, that one stalk of animals senses in the presence of others, but their behavior is predictable and tends to be relatively uniform. Whereas human beings are endlessly diverse and being endlessly diverse. Though they share a language, they reach a point where they one can't understand one another, precisely because it requires decoding or interpretation, which is peculiar to human communication. And there is no promise in language that everything will be hunky dory. If we only wait long enough. I think that's not possible.
You know, what, when I when I think about translations of languages, and the problem that you're talking, I always one of the I always reflect on a very specific moment in my life. I'm living in Vienna, Austria, and I'm, I've learned enough German at this point to have basic conversations. And I'm talking to somebody about finishing my dissertation, I think it was. And I said that, you know, in German, I said, I'm very proud of of my dissertation, and had been stalled of mine to say Tatian. And in English, what that means is I feel good about my dissertation. I'm happy with the way it turned out. But in the Austrian context with the German meant was, what the German language ended up saying, which I hadn't intended was, I think my dissertation is better than others. I am proud of it. And there was this moment when I was talking to this person, where she sort of recoiled because it was such a rude thing to say. And eventually we figured it out. But even the words that we share, require so much background knowledge, so much acculturation, that that even if we do share the same culture the same? I mean, it seems just what you're what you're saying that that, that there's so much more to overcome with language than there is to solve Am I Am I being now too pessimistic? Absolutely. Okay.
I've been told that when China and the United States sign a agreements, it's not clear to either side, what the meaning of the words they use, actually is, because the Chinese read the Chinese version. And the let's say, the Americans read the English version. And there's enough overlap, that they agree that this represents his gorgeous statement in both languages of what they presumably share. But if problems arise about the application of that agreement, then it turns out very clearly, that provision hasn't been made for resolving those questions in terms of the agreement. Now may I say, and this may amuse you, that I think this problem occurs when scientists are performing their experiments and reporting on them to other scientists. The same discrepancy, in principle occurs among people speaking the same language, and also whatever one regards is the idiom of physics, when they try to understand the payoff of what they're reporting about their own work. So I see that the problem of Chinese American understanding about a written agreement is not fundamentally different from the problematic agreement and disagreement among trained members of the physics community, about the meaning of the experiments that have been performed. It's not the same problem. So
if if, if, if what you're saying is that the trained physicists, you can't really communicate the meaning of their work to other train physicists, then how is how are we in a romantic relationship, supposed to communicate the ability to say I love you, I want this. This is what I think a relationship is every one of our listeners, every one of our listeners has had the experience of trying to communicate something to someone they love and it falling flat and them hearing something completely deaf. From from what the person had intended or them saying, you know, and so it is this is it's the fundamental problem of humanity of understanding is this inability for us to communicate linguistically to one another?
Well, I would, I would answer your question, this is sort of advice to the love Lauren isn't. First, we fall back to the now called expressions. I mean, if everyone says, under these romantic conditions, you're imagining, I love you, then the formulaic nature of that way of expressing it is already a kind of assurance that we're on the same wavelength. That's one, one consideration. And the second is a kind of linguistic tolerance. That is, you hear me say something in a language you more or less understand. But if you had questions about what I really meant, you may suppress them. They never get asked. And the our behavior together, reassures each member of that pair, that whatever the differences were, they didn't upset our expectations in a practical way. And I think that the truth is that communication succeeds language conversation, linguistic communication succeeds. Because of those two considerations, one, reliance on the purely formulaic, and secondly, tolerance and a generous sense about what it is the other meant. Now, I think there is a lesson in that. But it seems to me that we don't ever know for sure, we don't ever know for sure that two people, for instance, taste ice cream the same way. And in that similar in a similar sense, we don't exactly know that we understand one another in the same way. But the differences may be so minor, in terms of larger practical concerns, that we paper that over skillfully, and we get on to the next stage of the game. And that language is an incomplete instrument. Because of its the generality of words, we use the same verbal expressions for endlessly varied situations. So that the meaning of what we say must change ever so slightly, from one situation to another. And nevertheless, we can get on with life. That's the that's the comedy of the thing you might say.
So so instead of leading to this question of what it means to be an artifact, what you're saying is, we say I love you, not because it's trite. And not because we're not poets, and we can't say it better, but we say we love you. Because we know that the person is going to understand what we mean. And if there is a lack of understanding and that phrase, we respect one another and trust one another, and to tolerate that difference and to move on to the next thing, because I explained using a common phrase what I wanted to say you heard this common phrase, and that allowed us to connect it so this leads, this leads to this question of how we construct ourselves. So So now, for for my listeners who haven't read Aristotle in a long time. Um, Aristotle default divides things into into natural and Artefactual nature and artifact Nature Physics, the word physics comes from physics is stuff that occurs without human involvement. And then artifact is stuff that humans build up. So what you're actually suggesting is that because of language, and I'll want you to explain this, because of language, humans are themselves a human creation. It's not that we're a natural occurring animal. The way that maybe a slug is or a snake is, but rather, we are a human construct, analogous in some sense, to the way that a dam is a human construct or a building as a human construct or a novel as a human construct that it's the human agency the human endeavor, of intertwined in language. If that seems to introduce interest you the most in terms of human understanding. That's
right. So we're clearly not artifacts as members of the human race, biologically, were what are known as natural kinds kinds were members of a natural kind cards. But when the infant learns a language, which we didn't have from the word go, so to say that we this was invented and shaped, and transmitted over time over must be hundreds of 1000s of years. And somehow the structure of that achievement, as it changed, was transmitted successfully from one generation to another, then what we call the human person or self was itself being shaped by the ability of the members of the human race, biologically, to learn that invented form of communication. So strange thing is that infants can learn this in absolutely staggeringly quick time.
One of the things that, I think is the hardest for many people, and I always struggle with it myself to grasp is that the way that a seventh century person thought of themselves, is very different than the way that a 21st century person thinks of themselves. That the idea of, of what it means to be Jack, or what it means to be an individual is itself very, very different, let alone compared to say Neolithic human beings. Forget about the fact that there weren't mirrors forget about the fact that mirrors weren't in the house in houses until about 100 years ago. That that, that I think of myself as a person with boundaries that have to be respected, I think of myself as as a free agent who gets to make decisions. And I think of myself as a fully formed human being in some sense. But all of these categories are very, very different than how someone at another time has thought of a thinks of themselves. And so I think what you're suggesting is that the self, how we think about ourselves, how we describe ourselves, not just as Jack or Sally or Joe or Sam, but as as human as person, that that too, changes over time. And that it's a product in part of the language that that gets, that works over time, right, for those who want technical language, Joseph pragmatist, right. So, so, so the language, the language,
say that members of the race, Homo sapiens, have a biological nature, but that mode of functioning, which human beings learn by learning language, so that they become persons, changes the human being so profoundly, that he has a history rather than a nature as persons, we are or have histories. And as members of Homo sapiens, we have natures which are associated with the kind of creature that we are, and we are a hybrid. In other words, we're a hybrid artifact, where a combination of whatever the talents or powers are, that depends on our biology. And it depends on our culture and language.
You said this thing which is incredibly said, as creatures, we have a history not a nature. And so, we in America like to ask questions, are human beings inherently evil? are human beings inherently good? Are human beings inherently giving or and human beings inherently selfish? And what you're suggesting is, as long as we account for the biology as long as we account for the things that are unchanging, there is no definite nature of human beings. What we are is the product of a long history. And as that history changes, not only how we think of ourselves will change, but how we actually are will change because we are an artifact because we're a product of human creation is is that the punch line?
Whoa, I think It even goes a bit further. Because we're now on the edge of a new era in which our technology will begin to change our biology. I believe that that's happening. Well, there's certain people are experimenting with the possibilities of combining the kinds of powers of machines and electronic resources and so on. And suppose that those become are installed in our body in a way that we become very different creatures, or genetic engineering was something of the kind. We are also changing our by fundamental biology, or we're on the edge of doing so. What then will we say, is human nature.
So what happens to us when we become even more integrated with advanced technology, because of course, the technology that we don't think of as technology, the pencil, the wheel, the hairbrush, this has had profound effects on who human beings are. And so whatever the next chapter is, is going to change that even more, I think so, I want to take a step back from this conversation about language. Or rather, I want to dive headfirst into a complicated question that that comes from it, which is, is there such a thing as objectivity, if all of our knowledge is filtered through this language and constructed by language and the product of this of this history? Do we have to abandon the idea of objectivity? Or is there objectivity? As you know, as people traditionally define it as as as a truth that is independent of human experience? Or human knowledge? Or do we have to redefine objectivity? Or is there just subjectivity? And it's all just our perspective? And that's one of the reasons why we can't make sense of it all?
Well, certainly the problem of they just say parents, confirming that their children have learned the language. So well, that they can ask questions, make statements, reveal plans, intentions, values, and so on, which are intelligible and plausible to the rest of the population, let's say a family that has to listen to what they say. So, the question of objectivity or of norms, of understanding or something of the sort is built into the very notion of learning and sharing a language. So there, there must be some reasonable picture of objectivity, which makes sense of the mutual understanding of the members of some human society. And therefore, there is a sense in which whatever they engage in, has some grip on objectivity. Well, but if you follow that line out, then objectivity is itself a construction of the human community that speaks together.
So what we call objectivity is what everyone who is sharing this language, this practice, it's the common ground that they have, it's not something out there in space, like, like a platonic form or like, like God's perspective, it's rather the overlap or the or the cultural agreement that people have when they communicate language.
That I'm saying that that's at least common grounds okay. Now for specialized undertakings. There may be specialized projections of what objectivity means. Let me give you an illustration from what we were talking before about. The fact that we can speak in Bunnell, formulaic English makes it possible to learn how to make sense of complicated, modern poems. But that's already a stretch. One knows that the poet is using highly idiosyncratic almost private are extensions of language and yet we learn to follow that as a specialized skill. So the same thing would be true of learning the practices of the skilled physicist who is making very complex experiments. In other words, the objectivity of these more specialized activities depends on our ability to share what we might regard as a natural understanding of objectivity, for mundane matters.
Does that make sense? It does make sense. And I'm, I'm, I'm resisting the urge to, to throw philosophical names. But But let me let me see if I can do this in a way that that, that everyone who hasn't read the history of philosophy will understand. Is, is, is objectivity than simply the product? Or one of the the defining characteristics of a particular language game? In other words, are we defining objectivity, or at least common ground by whatever rules, the community or the history or the culture sets up, and that once you step outside of that community, or culture or history, this notion of common ground or this notion of objectivity, just doesn't apply anymore, because you have to be in the game in order to understand it?
Well, I am inclined to think that it's a balance between the extent to which the commonalities penetrate the more specialized and complex extensions, and the difficulties of following the practices into these more complex areas, you have the interaction of both of those aspects, so to say, so you can't altogether understand the novelty. And you can altogether fail to understand it. It's drawn into the commonalities of your culture, but the commonalities of the culture have to be understood also in terms of the resources of bilingualism, and what we might call biculturalism. It's possible, as I was suggesting, that the speakers of any language because they belong to the same species, I suppose, are able to learn the language of an alien people. And in learning one's own language, or the language of an alien people, we learn the culture of the community that surrounds us, and of every community, that there that one can find in the world. Now, we do this by a division of social labor. Not everybody does it, but it's recoverable within the community of our own exchange, a way of putting this very simply is there's no real difference between inter societal understanding and intra societal understanding. The problem of understanding the members of one's family is essentially the same as the problems of understanding people who speak different languages. Because the idiolect sleep idiosyncratic version of the language which we share, is just as difficult to fathom. In that sense, as the language which you've never heard before. You
know, I there's, there's something there's something very again, I'll use the word optimistic, there's something very optimistic, or I should say useful for those folks who have a cosmopolitan point of view. And what I mean by that is, there are lots of people who argue now and I will admit to my listeners that I'm pretty much one of them, who argue that national differences, that cultural differences, while they are tremendously important, they're subordinate to the fact that we are all human beings, and that we can all share. If you might want to call it a moral point of view, you might want to call it an existential point of view, but there's something that unifies the human being that the human species that is more important than local conflicts, the fact that you know, the city council's fighting or the or the Tea Party in the Occupy Wall Street people are fighting that there's there's something really important on the human level and and if I understand what you're saying, right is that there's this incredible optimism that because we can, in theory, understand all human language, because there has never been a language that is not translatable into another language, this cosmopolitan point of view, this human wide point of view, is the foundational truth of everything else, that it's the human first, that gives way to the local and not the other way around.
Well, I hear you, Jack, if I put it that way, you know, I have an image in front of my mind. Perhaps you remember it this? I think she was an Afghan woman, a pretty woman on the cover of was it Time magazine
was that I think you're thinking of the National Geographic image, the very, very famous
one. I've had her nose cut off.
Oh, no, no, no woman
who's fun father. had, he had her disfigured, she came to the United States for cosmetic surgery, as I understand it, but he had this cut, he had her nose cut off, because she didn't Dishonored him in a way by not being willing to abide by the requests of senior members of his family or by behaving in a way which was contrary to his understanding of Muslim practices. Now, the the ability of the Taliban, to decapitate young girls who want to go to school signals, the impossibility of that kind of diversity ever being completely overcome. So I agree with you about your notion of what you're calling a cosmopolitan outlook. But I also see this other worrisome dimension, which is just as fundamental to mastering language, as the commonality thesis seems to suggest I
that's just a tremendously useful question. Or tread tremendously useful example because it allows me to ask a question that it's a little far afield from what we're talking about. But I think it naturally follows and it harkens all the way back to Plato and Aristotle and the question of whether or not people act immorally knowingly or not whether or not by Plato, Plato seemed to suggest that that that people only acted wrong only were vicious when they didn't know any better. And so I guess, given the example that you gave, can we explain? Persuade is isn't the right word. But can we use language? Is it theoretically possible to use language to convince to persuade to explain to articulate I don't know what word to use? A way moral problems? Is it ever going to be possible for us to use language to reveal to the folks in the Taliban what is so fundamentally and profoundly immoral and if we can just find the language that we can communicate in their culture that that the horrors the evil will go away? We a couple seasons ago, Kwame Anthony upaya was on our show and he talked about using honor codes and traditional honor societies to get people to shift their morality into into what he felt was a more modern, more more respectful morality. And so I guess I'm channeling a PIAA and asking you if we can find the right translation devices if we can be truly bilingual can we use this language this commonality to get people to stop being such horrible human beings?
Will I would like to back your view, but I'm not certain that it works that way, Jack, to be perfectly candid. Now, may I ask you this is probably a bad move, reversible. Whether you think think that the moral norms are really independent of the Artefactual form of life, that, as I'm suggesting, we have learned to abide by I'm suggesting that the moral codes are themselves Artefactual constructions of the same kind as artworks, or technologies. And that, therefore, the this ambivalence between good and evil and so on, will never be overcome, I can't see it. I would like to believe that everything will turn out hunky dory. But I think the evidence is that we are partisans of different values. And those change over historical time and the complexity of our society, global society now is so fantastic, that the uniformities of its processes tend to bring the differences of different societies more and more into conversions, but never completely. That's my sense of it.
Well, this is I mean, this is again, for those folks who are who are more familiar with the literature this is this is the pragmatic conception, right? That the truth is what the community is going to converge on the long run in the long run, never arrives. I'm in addition to channeling a PIAA Steven Pinker was a guest on the show, and he has such a strong faith in progress that, that I hear him over my head, I want to I want to ask one last question, because I actually think it relates, although it's very, very hard to, to leap from the moral questions to other things. But but but in one of your papers, you remarked that it was it was through art, that you began to understand the the Artefactual nature of a human being that it was it was working on, on on art that allowed you to sort of see the person as this product, what, what is it about? And you've written quite a bit on aesthetics and art? What is it about art that gave you such an insight into human understanding of what it means to be a person this this is part of the reason why I'm asking this is because this closes the tie some loose ends from the very first question where we were talking about the relationship between physics and biology and, and say, English or art. And so your insights about what a person comes from what a person is, and how the understanding works. You suggested came through your work in art, how did that happen? How did you get such a sense of what it means to be a human being and what human understanding means? By being immersed in the art world and looking from an aesthetic point of view?
Well, I'm not entirely sure I have the answer. But let me make one small stab at it. Suppose we contrast having a conversation with reading a poem. In fact, just a short while ago, while I was talking with my daughter, and friends, who are here both we were talking about Emily Dickinson. Now, Emily Dickinson's poems are notoriously hermetic or difficult to interpret. People fall into conversation, even if they're strangers if they speak the same language. And it's quite amazing that they can understand one another. You if they, when they leave. If they think to themselves, how in the world did I understand that person? I know nothing about his or her life. I just know that they speak English. But you get feedback in a conversation, which keeps correcting you if you misunderstand what's going on in that conversation. But if you read a poem by Emily Dickinson, you're really on your own. And nevertheless, in spite of its difficulty, we're able to understand by training and some talents, we're able to understand her difficult poems, eventually, with more or less the same ease with which we understand the conversation, even though There's no feedback. You follow me?
I do but talk a little bit more about what you mean by no feedback.
I mean, the poem doesn't answer our questions about what it means. It isn't a human being who stands there and says, Well, by line seven, I meant the following. Now, in my view, this may be a leap. I want to say that biologically, the human race is another kind of anomaly. Because every other species of animal, it makes its life in a certain leash in a certain environment that is suitable to its more or less fixed way of living. But the human being lacks all of these instincts for orientation. And human infants are notoriously dependent for up to let's say, at least two years. And really more even more than that, in order to survive, they have to be cared for in a certain way. And the human being when it is transformed into a person looks around the world, which doesn't give any clues to us about how we should live, except the instruction survive. That's all we go on. But the conditions of survival, seem to be compatible with endlessly different views about morality, and public well being. And that's the trouble because we can't consult regardless of what the ancient Greeks thought, we can consult nature in the large and find out how we should live. It doesn't seem as if there's a connection between the one question and the other. And that, I think, is the barrier against perfect optimism. But there is room for optimism. I think
I think that's an excellent place to end. But I want to ask one other question, because I always say, I'm not going to ask another question that I always do. But am am I understanding you correct, that, that you're making a distinction between the human being, which is the fixed biological creature that has that needs food that needs oxygen that needs them, and the person who is the subject that uses language to exist and to make decisions and to communicate with others, so that so that what, what what the baby is doing, if I understand you correctly, is transforming is using language and as he is growing up by transforming from being a human being to being a person.
That's right. And now then the next corollary to that is to make that change, is to formulate, and to try to answer these questions about good and evil and so on that you're asking. Those questions only arise for human beings who speak, animals don't raise the same questions, putting it in that kind of technical way. norms and normativity are human artifacts.
Well, Joe, this has been incredibly challenging and incredibly informative, and has opened up more more possibilities than I can even enumerate. I want to thank you so much for joining us on why. Thank you. My pleasure. You've been listening to Jack Russel Weinstein and Joseph Margolis on why talking about the nature of human understanding and how human beings become who they are. I'll be back with some more comments right after this.
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We're back with why philosophical discussion about everyday life. I'm your host Joe Jack Russel Weinstein, you we've been talking with Joseph Margulis about every philosophical question imaginable. And I noticed from the comments that we've been getting on Facebook in our chat room, that that Not surprisingly, this was a hard one, this was a conceptually difficult conversation. And I'm glad that happened. Because it's a reminder that in everyday life, if you just pull the right thread, you, you jumped down the rabbit hole, right? Alice in Wonderland is a powerful story to all of us, because we never know when we're jumping into the rabbit hole. So what happened? What happened today? And here's a recap. I wanted to know what physics had to do with art, what biology had to do with philosophy. And our guests said, You're asking the wrong question. It's not how do these disciplines understand one another, or relate to another? It's how does a baby understand how to communicate to their parents? How does a child learn the language, the culture, the behaviors that are necessary to get along in the world, the most amazing thing is that a child with no language can come into the world. And before we know it, and every parent knows, it's like this, it's before we know it, they seem to understand everything we're saying. They seem to understand how we act in our behavior, they know enough to lie, to cheat, to steal food, when they're not supposed to whatever it is, and that it's this language that allows them to enter into the human community, and then the human community to advance further, that literacy, language writing, speaking, understanding, allows us to pass from one baby to another baby. And what that means is that rather than creatures who have physics or creatures who have biology, we're creatures that have a history, and I don't mean history, that discipline, I mean, we're creatures that have a past and we are defined by our past, everyone in North Dakota knows that we're defined by our past, we're defined by the fact that our ancestors were farmers, were defined by our relationship with Native Americans were defined by our winters, and our glorious summers were defined by the undersea ocean, the flatness and the fact that we are an Arctic sea, but no longer has water. We're defined by this. And we are a creature with a history rather than a nature. And that means that as history unfolds, we're going to change more. And so as technology changes, we're going to change more. We already know that young people's attention spans are changing because of video games because of MTV because of all these things. And this is a minor change what happens when our advanced technology is as every day as our hair brushes, as our pencils as our wheels. This was heavy, this was a lot this was conceptually difficult. What I want you to leave why with today is two things. The first is you can dive headfirst into the water and come up from air, you're going to be thinking about this for a long time. You don't have to understand at all. That's great. It's a celebration of the questions we have to ask. But the other message is that that's part of what it means to be a human being. That understanding this conversation is nothing compared to the understanding that my daughter that your child that all of us had to grasped from birth. And that's pretty amazing. You're listening to why philosophical discussion with everyday life. I'm your host Jack Russell Weinstein and as always, it is a tremendous honor to be with you.
Why is funded by the Institute for philosophy and public life? Prairie Public Broadcasting in the University of North Dakota is College of Arts and Sciences and Division of Research and Economic Development. Skip wood is our studio engineer. The music is written and performed by Mark Weinstein and can be found on his album Louis soul. For more of his music, visit jazz flute weinstein.com or myspace.com/mark Weinstein philosophy is everywhere you make it and we hope we've inspired you with our discussion today. Remember, as we say at the institute, there is no ivory tower.