CG44: Perception and Mind; some social angst
Shopping period again. Most of my classes are pretty certain already. I'm afraid of overspecializing. On the other hand, many of these course are directly addressing questions that have been burning me. There's a lot of thought surrounding most of them.
The first is CG0044: Perception and Mind.
Taking this is required for my major, and I'm not enormously psyched about it--I'm more interested in cognition than perception, by far. However, issues of perception keep cropping up in philosophical debates all the time. Often, each side has their own assertions about how perception and conceptualization are linked. I'm hoping that this class will point me towards an answer with some rigorous empirical credentials.
What's at stake is the answer to the question "What counts as a good reason to believe something?" This is also written "What is justification?" although this has different connotations. (Note: It's important to mention here that generally speaking, one can have good reasons for believing something, or be justified in a belief, even when that person could be faced with new information later that would change their mind, and even when the belief is not, in fact, true. But despite this relaxation of the problem of justification, it's still a doozy.)
One popular and old answer to this question is the foundationalist answer, which holds that we should only believe something if it is either a basic belief--meaning that it is somehow self-evident or indubitable or otherwise not requiring justification--or it is justified by virtue of some logical combination of other beliefs that we have determined that we ought to believe.
A metaphor that sometimes gets used for foundationalist answers to this question--foundationalist theories of justification--is that justified beliefs are like a pyramid, with a foundation (thus the name) of basic beliefs on top of which all other knowledge is built.
Those of you who are familiar with my somewhat skeptical nature might guess that I don't really like this. The idea that there exist basic beliefs about which one is simply not allowed to ask "Why should I believe that?" makes me throw a little tantrum.
Thinking that there really are no good candidates for basic beliefs--no Cartesian certainties, no analyticity, etc.--I've been hunting through various forms of "anti-foundationalism"--mainly coherentism and pragmatism. (No surprise there. How often do I mention these schools of thought on this thing? I don't even know.) I've been sort of cautiously settling into what I think is a stable epistemic position for a while now.
However, in testing this out in philosophy and real_philosophy, I was confronted by something I didn't expect (although I should have): foundationalists who are not rationalists, who I think are silly for reasons I don't want to get into right now. Basically, their angle was that direct perceptions of reality, or some other characterization of empirical input, works to create basic beliefs that can then serve as the foundation of the pyramid.
At which point I pretty much had to stop and think, since I still have a strong, intuitive hunch towards anti-foundationalism, but have been trying to search around for why.
At some point I realized that this problem depends a lot on the relationship between the mental process of perception and the mental processes of belief formation and reason. Depending on how directly the former plug into the latter, the empiricist position might have some merit.
However, there's is a deeper objection here that I've only started to express to other more recently: the perceptual system is informed by the conceptual and belief systems--it uses information about the world already stored to select which information about the world is relevant to the observer. Perception, Professor Tarr has said in the first couple lectures of this class, is NOT veridical--it is an extraction of useful information.
I'm going to start pushing an idea in the philosophy forums, I think, and check out its reception: that concepts themselves have a degree of truth value, are in themselves a kind of belief--they store information about the world that may or may not be 'correct' by some standard. Other classes I plan to take this semester will also, I expect, support this view. But I'll talk about that more later.
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In other news, I was just unfortunately reminded tonight of one of my big problems in life--how much I suck at weekends. I haven't noticed for a while since I've been either home, where I suck at life in general, or there haven't been enough people around for me to make me feel inadequate for not associating with them in larger numbers. But the frat next door, where a bunch of second-degree friends live was having one of their swinging jazz parties when I passed by, earlier, and I felt that familiar feeling again: one part longing to be a part of it, one part intractable, faceless anxiety, and spiced with the realization that, had I entered, I would have to change into semi-formal attire and pay the cover charge, but then would wind up wandering around looking for people I knew. When I found one, I would be uncomfortably conflicted between the desire to talk with them and avoid the feeling of awkward isolation and the fear that I was being parasitic, cramping their style and otherwise turning myself into a person to be avoided. Disaster.
So I came back and wrote about philosophy and perception for my Friday night. w00t!
I'm looking forward to next year, in which the plan is to construct a social life that is active and complete but that centers on a naturally occurring congregation of people I like and care about, rather than on what feel to me like artificial and alien social structures: the freshman unit, united under and then subsequently pruned by Toxie; the frats, still terrifying and monolithic to me despite their welcoming smiles (which to me, paranoid, seem like invitations to be a hanger on, a groupie, which my stubborn pride/need for authenticity/individualism won't let me willingly become); the Madhouse, which is just a line drawn in space around a group of people that really have nothing in common; going farther back, even, the AC-centered crowd and what they became.
Is it selfish to be such that I am only truly happy when I am in a group in which I am a full participant, which to me feels synonymous with being an in-part creator?
I miss last summer, that way. Thus the symbolic importance of the potluck.
The first is CG0044: Perception and Mind.
Taking this is required for my major, and I'm not enormously psyched about it--I'm more interested in cognition than perception, by far. However, issues of perception keep cropping up in philosophical debates all the time. Often, each side has their own assertions about how perception and conceptualization are linked. I'm hoping that this class will point me towards an answer with some rigorous empirical credentials.
What's at stake is the answer to the question "What counts as a good reason to believe something?" This is also written "What is justification?" although this has different connotations. (Note: It's important to mention here that generally speaking, one can have good reasons for believing something, or be justified in a belief, even when that person could be faced with new information later that would change their mind, and even when the belief is not, in fact, true. But despite this relaxation of the problem of justification, it's still a doozy.)
One popular and old answer to this question is the foundationalist answer, which holds that we should only believe something if it is either a basic belief--meaning that it is somehow self-evident or indubitable or otherwise not requiring justification--or it is justified by virtue of some logical combination of other beliefs that we have determined that we ought to believe.
A metaphor that sometimes gets used for foundationalist answers to this question--foundationalist theories of justification--is that justified beliefs are like a pyramid, with a foundation (thus the name) of basic beliefs on top of which all other knowledge is built.
Those of you who are familiar with my somewhat skeptical nature might guess that I don't really like this. The idea that there exist basic beliefs about which one is simply not allowed to ask "Why should I believe that?" makes me throw a little tantrum.
Thinking that there really are no good candidates for basic beliefs--no Cartesian certainties, no analyticity, etc.--I've been hunting through various forms of "anti-foundationalism"--mainly coherentism and pragmatism. (No surprise there. How often do I mention these schools of thought on this thing? I don't even know.) I've been sort of cautiously settling into what I think is a stable epistemic position for a while now.
However, in testing this out in philosophy and real_philosophy, I was confronted by something I didn't expect (although I should have): foundationalists who are not rationalists, who I think are silly for reasons I don't want to get into right now. Basically, their angle was that direct perceptions of reality, or some other characterization of empirical input, works to create basic beliefs that can then serve as the foundation of the pyramid.
At which point I pretty much had to stop and think, since I still have a strong, intuitive hunch towards anti-foundationalism, but have been trying to search around for why.
At some point I realized that this problem depends a lot on the relationship between the mental process of perception and the mental processes of belief formation and reason. Depending on how directly the former plug into the latter, the empiricist position might have some merit.
However, there's is a deeper objection here that I've only started to express to other more recently: the perceptual system is informed by the conceptual and belief systems--it uses information about the world already stored to select which information about the world is relevant to the observer. Perception, Professor Tarr has said in the first couple lectures of this class, is NOT veridical--it is an extraction of useful information.
I'm going to start pushing an idea in the philosophy forums, I think, and check out its reception: that concepts themselves have a degree of truth value, are in themselves a kind of belief--they store information about the world that may or may not be 'correct' by some standard. Other classes I plan to take this semester will also, I expect, support this view. But I'll talk about that more later.
----------------------------
In other news, I was just unfortunately reminded tonight of one of my big problems in life--how much I suck at weekends. I haven't noticed for a while since I've been either home, where I suck at life in general, or there haven't been enough people around for me to make me feel inadequate for not associating with them in larger numbers. But the frat next door, where a bunch of second-degree friends live was having one of their swinging jazz parties when I passed by, earlier, and I felt that familiar feeling again: one part longing to be a part of it, one part intractable, faceless anxiety, and spiced with the realization that, had I entered, I would have to change into semi-formal attire and pay the cover charge, but then would wind up wandering around looking for people I knew. When I found one, I would be uncomfortably conflicted between the desire to talk with them and avoid the feeling of awkward isolation and the fear that I was being parasitic, cramping their style and otherwise turning myself into a person to be avoided. Disaster.
So I came back and wrote about philosophy and perception for my Friday night. w00t!
I'm looking forward to next year, in which the plan is to construct a social life that is active and complete but that centers on a naturally occurring congregation of people I like and care about, rather than on what feel to me like artificial and alien social structures: the freshman unit, united under and then subsequently pruned by Toxie; the frats, still terrifying and monolithic to me despite their welcoming smiles (which to me, paranoid, seem like invitations to be a hanger on, a groupie, which my stubborn pride/need for authenticity/individualism won't let me willingly become); the Madhouse, which is just a line drawn in space around a group of people that really have nothing in common; going farther back, even, the AC-centered crowd and what they became.
Is it selfish to be such that I am only truly happy when I am in a group in which I am a full participant, which to me feels synonymous with being an in-part creator?
I miss last summer, that way. Thus the symbolic importance of the potluck.