http://hps.phil.pku.edu.cn/bbs/read.php?tid=338
http://hps.phil.pku.edu.cn/bbs/read.php?tid=339
NewStudioOldJiang
Selected Quotes from Feyerabend 5
“Catastrophes in the natural environment, war, the collapse of an ethical system that has been perfected, and political revolution, too, will transform human patterns of response, including important patterns of argumentation. Such transformation may well be a completely natural process, and the only function of rational argument may perhaps lie in this fact: it increases psychic tension, and this tension is the precursor of action’s eruption and the cause of that eruption.” (Against Method, 2)
“An analysis of the relation between thought and action also shows that, in the growth of our knowledge and the growth of science, the roles played by interest, influence, propaganda, and brainwashing techniques far exceed what people usually estimate. People often take it for granted that a clear and distinct understanding of new ideas is and should be predicated on their formulation and on their defining expression. …… Yet this is certainly not the way children develop. They use words, combine them, play with them, until they grasp a meaning previously unknown to them. And this initial activity of play is a necessary precondition for the eventual act of understanding. There is no reason why this mechanism should stop working in adults.” (Against Method, 3-4)
Gu Chi
“People often take it for granted that a clear and distinct understanding of new ideas is and should be predicated on their formulation and on their defining expression.”—It seems that the opponent Feyerabend has set up here is rather shallow… Defining expression, or what is plainly called “definition,” is of course not a “precondition” for grasping an idea; I do not seem to have seen any serious philosopher who would make such a claim. What some philosophers who emphasize logic and definition probably mean is closer to this: a clear and distinct understanding of new ideas is and should be taken as a “sign” of their formulation and of their defining expression. Such a “sign” is a capacity that manifests after you have “learned” it; it is a kind of “display” of how far your grasp of the idea actually goes. Just as fever is a sign of illness: the higher the fever, the more severe the illness usually is, but fever is not a “precondition” for being ill. (Addendum: people do not contract disease by means of fever; rather, through fever they display the fact that they have already fallen ill. Just as people do not obtain understanding by means of clear expression; rather, through clear expression they display the fact that they have already obtained understanding.) Therefore, those who value defining expression would rather say this: although adults and children do not differ fundamentally in their way of learning, the reason adults are said to be more mature than children lies in the fact that adults have “learned” more and mastered more, and this growth is reflected in the fact that they are better at using defining expression and clear logic.
“The initial activity of play is a necessary precondition for the eventual act of understanding”—Here Feyerabend still seems to regard the act of understanding and the act of play as two kinds of activity, or two levels. Yet “the act of understanding” is also a kind of play; how one expresses one’s understanding of language is itself part of language games.
In the philosophical tradition, “clear expression” is precisely the rule of the game of “understanding.” The way I display my understanding of some idea is by “clear expression,” by restating it in determinate language; this is the rule of the ancient game called “philosophy.” Of course, this rule can be changed—for example, one might take a determinate practical action as the sign of understanding an idea. But that depends on how one understands the meaning of “thought.” If one believes that the meaning of thought lies in guiding (real) action, then one’s understanding of thought will ultimately have to be settled by how one acts. But if one believes that the meaning of thought is just thought itself, or that thought is merely a depiction of reality, and so on, then the understanding of thought need not be carried over into real activity. Of course, understanding thought is still an action, still a game, but this game is still played through thought.
The way children develop is like this:
At first, they can only play the simplest games, with no rules and no variety. They just take a doll or any object and fiddle with it, turn it over and over, bite it, throw it, in short, keep messing with it, and in this game they begin to establish a relation with the world. (Animals’ way of playing is roughly the same.)
Later, the games they play become increasingly complex: they can join together a few wooden boards, place several dolls in the same scene (for example, letting them fight each other), and even assign roles to the dolls, playing house and the like.
Later still, they play even more complex games, games that can be composed of an entire rich and varied set of elements, and can also be played together with other friends.
Finally, they can play games such as chess that require highly developed thinking ability, and extremely complex forms of game such as mathematics, philosophy, and so on…
What lies behind this process of “growth”? What element makes games ever more complex and varied?—One word: “rules.” In the course of play, more and more rules are discovered and revised; the system of rules becomes more and more complete and complex, and therefore the game itself becomes more and more complex and varied.
People are always changing the rules in the course of play; yet if one merely negates rules without making them more complete through revision, the result can only be the degeneration of the game—although the existence of “rules,” or “dogma,” does limit the “freedom” of play, if one simply abolishes them without revising them, then the complexity and variety of the game will be lost.
Let me add a couple of words in passing~~
“Use words, combine them, play with them, until they grasp a meaning previously unknown to them”—this is undoubtedly the essence of thought. Thinkers are children who play with “concepts” as building blocks. When I read Gilles Deleuze saying that philosophy is love of wisdom, that philosophers are “lovers of concepts,” that they are artists who create concepts, that also sounds somewhat similar.
However, any “writer,” any field of study, is nothing other than playing a game with concepts as building blocks. Where, then, does philosophy’s special character lie? The distinguishing feature of philosophy as a game lies precisely in the fact that it takes the revision of the rules of the game itself as the game—ordinary scientists merely play the game and compete under ready-made rules, whereas what philosophers compete over is this: who can revise a better game?
Here “philosophy” does not refer to a fixed profession. In fact, anyone who plays games may, while playing, modify the rules, and philosophy is precisely something that permeates any field of study. But as a specialized discipline, philosophy’s proper task is to revise the rules of the game. The contest among different philosophers is not a mutual competition under the same set of rules; rather, each produces his or her own way of playing and thereby measures superiority and inferiority—whose revised game is more fun? Whose revised game is more durable? Whose revised game has richer possibilities for further revision? … Some games are hard to master yet highly durable; some games are extraordinarily simple yet not worth much prolonged study. The players can judge the higher and lower, the winner and loser, but in any case, the philosopher can delight in his or her own game.
The formulation of rules of the game must pay attention to clarity and consistency. If they are obviously self-contradictory or obscure, the game cannot be played well. But this is not an absolute requirement. Wittgenstein once gave an example: a game of chess that has been played for hundreds of years suddenly, by chance, turns out to fall into a contradiction among its rules under a certain specific situation. Does the emergence of this contradiction mean that the games played over the previous hundreds of years were all meaningless? Of course not. The earlier games were of course still games, and in the future, if people do not deliberately seek to reproduce this contradiction, the game can still be continued; or we may consider revising some rules so that the game becomes more complete. But if overly cumbersome rules cause the playability of the game to decline, we can also choose not to revise it. So rigor and consistency are indeed among the important requirements for formulating rules, but they are not absolute requirements. The key of keys is always this: make the game fun.
Philosophers are game designers, revisers of game rules. Wittgenstein pointed out that rules cannot possibly be invented out of nothing; rules always have their source, and are always obtained by organizing, revising, and combining preexisting rules. Moreover, we are always already obeying certain rules, and only then are we able to discover rules and change rules. An existing rule system may be unfair or unreasonable, and thus make those forced to participate in the game feel indignant. And if they cannot follow unreasonable rules and play contentedly on the board, then they may simply have to overturn the board: “I’m not playing anymore!” But a true philosopher cannot stop there; rather, he or she must always think: how can I revise a richer, more enjoyable game? One person may say: I oppose growth; I just want to retreat to the most primitive game—for example, fiddling with dolls is enough for me. But this is a negation of humanity’s process of growth, a veto of the richness and variety of the game, and it cannot attract people to follow such regression. For from the developmental process of children alone we can see that play is human nature, and establishing order within play, making games ever more complex and varied, is also people’s natural demand.
NewStudioOldJiang
Chalmers: “Boundary Patrolman” of the Scientific Frontier
○Wu Yan (Department of History of Science, Shanghai Jiaotong University)
(omitted)
To express his dissatisfaction with the introduction of a sociological perspective into the study of scientific knowledge, Chalmers uses a football match as a comparison. He says that if a ball falls at the feet of a player standing unmarked by the other side, we would not think that the player’s act of kicking the ball into the goal needs explanation; or rather, we would think that given the rules of football, this is a self-evident “internal” explanation. But if the player does not kick the ball into the goal and instead takes out a knife and fork, preparing to eat the ball, then this behavior, which is utterly meaningless in the context of a football match, makes it necessary to introduce some external explanation. “In the context where agents participate in practices with special goals, when their behavior contributes to their goals, there is no need to introduce explanations that seem to lie outside the practice itself.” As a spectator of football, when I read this passage, I could not help but interject: first, the rules of football themselves are also part of football; second, under the rules, different players may also have different ways of kicking at the crucial moment, and the latter is very much related to a player’s temperament. To ignore these two points and focus only on achieving the goal under the rules seems, to some extent, a little conservative, and thus becomes one of the regrettable aspects of this book. Still, considering the professional ethics of football commentary, Chalmers’s position is also not hard to understand.
Gu Chi
The characteristic of this football match called science is that, whether as spectators or insiders, we are in fact not very clear about exactly which rules we are following. The game has some written, explicit rules, but there are also many unwritten, uncertain rules, and even those written, definite rules are constantly being modified in the course of play—changing the rules while playing. Philosophers must stand at the boundary and contemplate the whole football match, so the first thing they need to observe carefully is what the rules of this match actually look like; then they can ask: where do these rules come from? Are these rules reasonable? Are the written rules really being followed in practice? Or do the written rules conflict with what happens in actual activity? How can the rules be further revised so that they better fit the actual situation of the football match, or further promote the match to become more fun? …
Thus, philosophers need to examine what is happening in the match from various perspectives. To say that some behaviors can be sufficiently explained by internal explanations and others require external explanations—but the premise of such a statement is that we have already made certain rules clear. The problem is precisely the opposite: the philosopher’s task is not to use existing rules to explain certain behaviors, but to discover and organize “rules” from the observation of all kinds of behavior. Therefore, before this, the philosopher has no idea at all which behaviors are internal and which are external; the philosopher’s task is precisely to distinguish between “internal” and “external.”
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply