tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post116432013816792250..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: Technoethical PluralismDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-48225285957165121132008-01-07T23:55:00.000-08:002008-01-07T23:55:00.000-08:00You caution against using the criteria of any one ...<I>You caution against using the criteria of any one category to make judgments in another category. That is one specific way in which you say that the categories should not overlap.</I><BR/><BR/>My caution is intended to increase awareness of fruitful difficulties rather than necessarily to correct errors visible from some systematic account. The truth is I am often most interested in the places where the categories do indeed threaten to overlap (I think the bioethics, biomoralism example in this discussion illustrates this itnerest). The old instincts of my training in analytic philosophy recommend that I propose distinctions to relieve certain discursive tensions and collapse obsolete distinctions when they stand in the way of inquiry. What I like about this account is that it provides so many ways of slicing up problems -- more than the dualisms, occasional triads, semiotic rectangles usually available to analytic thought. It seems a supple and capacious engine for making connections and marking inter-implicated differences.<BR/><BR/><I>One could assume that you suggest keeping these five categories absolutely distinct from each other</I><BR/><BR/>This only seems to be the case because I have been using this account to push against the grain of certain reductionisms that seem to me to impoverish our sense of the resources available to reasonable belief and value. But this surely isn't the only kind of analysis available to somebody sympathetic to this particular account.<BR/><BR/><I>I take your categories as i) being comprehensive,</I><BR/><BR/>I would be very surprised if this were true. I claim only that they reflect my own assumptions very well (that they align broadly with the traditional philosophical branches isn't exactly a coincidence given my training and temperament), and that I think these categories are more capacious and useful than dualisms and so on that seem to me to encourage pointless reductionism for no good reason and often at great cost.<BR/><BR/><I>any kind of research enterprise should be assignable to one and only one category.</I><BR/><BR/>Especially if we look at research programmes taking an historical view I think it will be unliekly that this kind of singular designation will be possible -- but I do think it will probably provide lots of interesting insights to chart the developments of a discourse with an eye to these categories and the historical contexts that opportunistically nudged them from one mode of warrant to another, with what consequences, and so on.<BR/><BR/><I>where does emotion research fit in?</I><BR/><BR/>I daresay this will depend on the uses to which it is being put in each case.<BR/><BR/><I>I am aware of all kinds of mistakes I may have made here,</I><BR/><BR/>Let's call them useful and provocative points of departure rather than mistakes -- that's ever so much more in the spirit of things as I intend them!Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-23890700700636142102008-01-07T23:11:00.000-08:002008-01-07T23:11:00.000-08:00To what extent are you equating psychology with th...To what extent are you equating psychology with therapy, or assuming that the former implies the latter? If I understood all of psychology to be mainly a therapeutic activity, I would have little trouble in agreeing that it is therefore a moral or aesthetic activity. I'm just not sure about that.<BR/><BR/>You caution against using the criteria of any one category to make judgments in another category. That is one specific way in which you say that the categories should not overlap. But I do not recall your having addressed other ways in which the categories might relate to, or overlap with, one another. One could assume that you suggest keeping these five categories absolutely distinct from each other in ways beyond that single consideration of criteria for belief -- but in making such a broad assumption, one might interpret your argument beyond what you have actually written (or what I remember your having written).<BR/><BR/>I take your categories as <I>i</I>) being comprehensive, ie, able to account for all kinds of beliefs, and <I>ii</I>) being completely separate from one another (at least with respect to criteria for belief). Those two assumptions lead me to conclude, further, that any kind of research enterprise should be assignable to one and only one category. So let's try a test case.<BR/><BR/>Consider the long-standing debate among emotion researchers about causality between mind and body in emotional experiences. (William James and Carl Lange had <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James-Lange_theory" REL="nofollow">one idea</A>.) Your essay demands the reader (or at least me) to categorize all conversations, debates, and genres of thought. So where does emotion research fit in? I see a scientific aspect to it, in addition to a potentially therapeutic one, and therefore a moral or aesthetic one, depending on what uses, interpretations, or appropriations one may find for emotion research. So if I am correct that emotion research is not <I>only</I> a therapeutic endeavor, and therefore not <I>only</I> a moral exercise or <I>only</I> an aesthetic experience, then emotion research obviously involves more than one category of belief. In this case, we have a contradiction with my assumptions stated above.<BR/><BR/>I am aware of all kinds of mistakes I may have made here, but hopefully it's good enough to elicit a clarifying response from you, if you care to offer one.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-81540793154898955712008-01-07T08:17:00.000-08:002008-01-07T08:17:00.000-08:00First off, remember that for me prosthesis comes q...First off, remember that for me prosthesis comes quite close to being a synonym for culture. <BR/><BR/>You say it doesn't feel quite right to you, but I think it is fruitful to entertain the possibility that perhaps not all therapy is best understood as a mode of science (even if some is) so much as a mode of aesthetics or morals... <BR/><BR/>Think of the therapeutic construal of Nietzschean and Wittgenstinian philosophy... meaning-of-life inquiries or instrumental projects? You decide. <BR/><BR/>I actually am not entirely cheerful about the metaphor of instrumentality either, tell the truth -- because the performative dimension of all five modes of belief ascription opens them to a broadly instrumental rationality that risks evacuating the connection of publication/ prediction-control that seems to me most key to instrumental belief.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-74721656850227333172008-01-06T19:29:00.000-08:002008-01-06T19:29:00.000-08:00I really like this post.How does psychology fit in...I really like this post.<BR/><BR/>How does psychology fit into this scheme?<BR/><BR/>A lot of American psychology of the last century probably goes into the "instrumental" category. But a lot of earlier (and really interesting) works by people like William James, Wilhelm Wundt, and Granville Stanley Hall seem much more philosophical, and less scientific, in character. (And I would say the same of Jaan Valsiner's present-day cultural developmental psychology.)<BR/><BR/>I guess you have phrased your definition of instrumental beliefs sufficiently broadly enough to embrace these varieties of psychology (especially with that crucial word, "relative"). I suppose what really bothers me is the grammar of domination implied in the word "instrumental". The metaphor of the "instrument" conflicts, in my view, with the ambitions of the meaning-of-life inquiries (occurring, for instance, in <I>Ganzheitspsychologie</I>) that have little to do with "instrumentation", but which nonetheless have no other place to call home among your five categories. For example, saying that cultural psychology -- and perhaps cultural anthropology, for that matter -- is an esthetic or ethical endeavor just doesn't seem quite right.<BR/><BR/>Perhaps it would be appropriate to simply rename that first category, to make its relationship to psychology seem less abrasive.<BR/><BR/>On the other hand, perhaps I've misunderstood your ideas. If so, I'm open to an alternate explanation.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-1164355319149038562006-11-24T00:01:00.000-08:002006-11-24T00:01:00.000-08:00Both of these worries, that influential bioethical...<I>Both of these worries, that influential bioethical and technoethical discourses tend to be insufficently responsive to the actual modal diversity of rational human normativity as well as insuffiently attentive to the actual historical diversity of concrete normative practices, are nudging me into a contrary and compensatory perspective I might as well describe as technoethical pluralism. </I><BR/><BR/>If I'm reading this correctly, I agree with it and share similar worries (or at least, I've noticed similar trends and have been attempting to determine how best to contribute to addressing them appropriately). I think that "influential" might be the key word in the text quoted above -- the good news is that there seem to be people with sufficiently complex understanding of important issues and concepts, but the bad news is that most of what makes it into more visible publication tends to be a bit heavier on the hand-waving than the material behind the scenes -- on e-mail lists, in private communications, in long, long papers that easily earn every word they use but that few have the patience to read.Anne Corwinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04940566603711834053noreply@blogger.com