Core Issue, a look at epistemology, science, math, and power

Notes written in 2002

Douglass Carmichael

We have reached a point where the combination of official

knowledge and public institutions is every bit as oppressive

in 2000 as the medieval and Aristotelian synthesis of 1500.

In 1600 Francis Bacon tried to break out of the grip

of conventionalized concepts by putting unusual stress

on the observation of individual facts. However individual

facts that are good at raising questions could not lead to theories

without some intervening mental scheme. And

the question was, where did they come from? Newton set

a model of using mathematics to derive what numbers aught

to do. From then on the conceptual system came before observation.

While there were squabbles about this, such as David

Hume's raising the issue of the impossibility of induction

from facts to theories, the procedure was To develop concepts

that could fit facts. But of course the facts were selected

to fit the theories. We did not look at green frogs in

order to understand stars. Preconceptions guided the choice

of observations. From the beginning this model was tied

in to social policy and governance. The individual cases

were not interesting but cases that supported generalizations

were. Instead of a search for truth there was a search

for manageability. if there was one of one kind of person

and ten of another that and where the basis for concepts

and one was avoided. This is the very opposite of the method

proposed by bacon.

The mystery of mathematics Is a major part of the problem.

Mathematics is fascinating and that it can be a description

of some parts of reality is a deep and abiding problem .

But the jump from surveying and architecture to the idea

that mathematics describes everything -- a step taken by

Plato -- has had severe consequences, such as imaginative classical

painting of the renaissance where fascinating characters

are acting out their dramas surrounded by extraordinary

rational architecture . What science has done is to keep

the architecture and to avoid the drama and to call the

resulting picture, stripped of humans, the theory of the

real world .

My own theory, based on the work of people like Helmholtz

and Piaget, is that mathematics is deeply related to the

motion of the body in space, and not just the human body. The ability of a dog to seemingly calculate the parabola of

a thrown ball makes a very deep impression. Piaget's view

is that a sounded symbol is attached to these actions of the bbody, muscles and bones in spce and their controlling nerves, and through internalized images and speech tie together

the internal representations of the movement of the body

and a group of these become the basis for mathematics and it's transformations.

The problem is that the body has many more parts than just

movement in space. There is the entire emotional life inherited

from our mammalian ancestors, and just as mathematics represents

the movement of the body in space, poetry and the arts represent

the movement of the body in relationships. Reducing architecture

to drama is as ridiculous as reducing drama to architecture.

Either way is taking a part for the whole, and such selection

is motivated by human ambition and perceived opportunities.

The need to count land , crops, and soldiers for Successful

governance created a style, in anticipation, that numbers

were the stuff of governance, while the inner life of the

persons being counted did not count. Ten soldiers were

ten soldiers. It did not matter if some were in love and

some were not, some were parents and some are not, that several

might be artists and several might have farms that needed

attention. Ten soldiers were necessary to fight the war. England lost most of its younger artists in WW1, and the United States, much of its culture in the Civil War.

The mathematics and the machine are deeply entwined. The

preferences in what has been called science is to prefer

the mathematical and the mechanical to the dramatic. This

history is very complex and recent works such as Mirowski's

book Machine Dreams: how economics became a cyborg science,

and Mary Poovey's The History of the Modern Fact, subtitled

problems of knowledge in the sciences of wealth and society

, provide an extraordinary grounding for seeing how mathematics,

commerce, war, and bureaucracy form a tight fabric every

bit as oppressive and conventional as the stalled occasion

they resulted from the medieval synthesis.

The modern

Achievement, built on the medieval, were the result of highly

creative acts at a moment in a highly creative culture ,

but institutions and mental habits

got in the way of fresh observation and critical thinking.

In both cases the ideology supported power rather than

individual conscience or the quality of life for the community. The promise

of science offended power through new knowledge and those we call

scientists for the last few hundred years have narrowed the scope of questions.

The numbers folks , while claiming to be aligned with science,

are deeply unscientific. The brutal issues of population

increase , the spreading misery among the increasingly large

number of people who are marginalized , and the collapse

of much of the environment do not have a systemic effect because

the scientists and the managers are living in enclaves . If

they would allow more openness to their own experience nand live close to others and daily lives, broader theories cold be made to work and to feel the clean air of fresh thinking

and direct observation .

If we go back into the eighteenth century and even much

of the nineteenth we see that most people lived in a world

that was different from that of commerce and money . A biography

such as Fraser's on Charlotte BrThe onte shows a conscious

world of religious concerns that permeated every moment

of daily life as much as market forces consciously do today.

Of course commerce has always been an important. Just as

mathematics could describe it important aspects of life.

But there were other aspects , and that is the point. and

I will not let pass the opportunity to suggest that science

as it is practiced , and the resulting worldview of technology

and reductionism is an absolutely as much a religion with

its rituals and it's priests as the church never was .

Cigarette smoking is so addictive because it weaves together

the hand, the eye, the nose, the mouth, the lips, and the

social gesture, the smell of smoke, the flow of light through

the rising column and integrated into the biochemistry of

the nervous system. The market, money, technology, status

, and welfare are also of a complex interweaving and I think

the two bear some similarity as models of compulsive and

rewarding addictions.

Money, as part of quantification, tends to give the illusion

that things are equal that are in fact not equal. 12,000

oranges=one horse , a fifth of a car , a tenth of Some people's

annual salary the luges and is of a manageable equivalencees.While

the trick can be done, the cost is very high. When a person

is very anxious they tend towards compulsive activity. The

strategy is to deal with something small that can be mastered

while denying the existence of the large forces that threaten

the personality . . Money of course works, but to the extent

that it moves into the foreground and real differences are

lost it is a symptom and a strategy of the nation's that,

because it closes off enquiry, is neither scientific more

pragmatic and is not a suitable basis for long-term effective

governance .

Elites want a system that pays off for them and they will

use with partial understandings anything they can get hold

of . It is not surprising because each person does this

in their own personal life . But this doesn't preclude the

possibility of keen observation, critical thinking, and

creative design . But currently we are so trapped in our

mainstream thinking with its castles and of unreality that

there is no research program, no institution, and almost

no person who stands outside flow .

The situation is fascinating and full of opportunity to

to the strategy that began modern science , that of going

outside and looking to see what is there, and working our

thought from what we find rather than only looking to find

what we thought.

The background: my own path is somewhat idiosyncratic

it starts in my experience of New York City growing up as

a child going to a good school and living in poverty. This

took me to physics as a safe place and while it Caltech

I found relief in the Hallett Smith's course on Yates, Thomas

Mann , Joyce, And Eliott. I also took a course from Alfred

Stern on the to me obscure philosophers Ernest Cassirer, Hans Vahinger , and the Spaniard Unamuno. In graduate

school at UC Berekeley I was first affected by the developmental school of Heinz Werner . But soon took up with the developmental

work of Piaget which rooted epistemology in organic development. That exploration was supported by Cassirer's philosophy

and symbolic forms . I moved further into the human and

social side through Kenneth Burke's application of the understanding

of drama to human life.

Secondarily I was supported by the work of Lewis Mumford, Eric Voegelin, Arthur Lovejoy, and personal contact with Paul Feyerbend . When I went to Harvard at the Center

for Cognitive Studies with Jerome Bruner I also meant Erik

Erikson and David Riesman who were in many ways the first

real men on the social science side in my life . I was very influenced

by Jerry Letvin and his mix of drama and biology . Feyerbend

introduced me to Giorgio deSanillana (not the philosopher

but the historian of early science) and I met Michael Maccoby, which led me to study psychoanalysis At Eric Fromm 's

institute in Mexico, and taught me social character analysis

Since then and there have been new influences. Increased

interest in Eric Voegelin , Mircea Eliade, Simon Schama, Mirowski,

MaryPoovey, and Henrik Ibsen, to name a few . I

do believe in cross fertilization , and, however much of

a burden it is, it also creates freedom and responsibility

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