A focal text for my current Plato seminar:
To anyone who has followed Plato’s critique of the phenomenon of sophistry, it is evident that psychologism is not merely a dubious hypothesis to be corrected by distinguishing between logic and psychology. It is a basic deformation of the understanding itself, which penetrates into every branch of philosophical endeavor, distorting both the elaborate procedures of academic philosophizing, as well as those less articulate, but more primordial, modes of apprehension by which man, as such, always, to some degree, understands the word and his station in it.
ha, as if there is some undistorted version of (thing as) understanding itself, we are just kluged together collages of cognitive-biases, not so much Fallen as walking with bad backs…
http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/1537
‘Kluged’: you’ve used that word a number of times lately. It is new to me, and an interesting word. Thanks for it. –I find the apparently ubiquitous role of ‘cognitive-bias’ in your thinking somewhat puzzling. In fact, dmf, I have to admit it strikes me as itself a piece of psychologism.
Do you know this paper of Everett Hall’s: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2180468?&Search=yes&searchText=%22Everett+W.+Hall%22&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FSearch%3DSearch%26Query%3Dau%3A%2522Everett%2520W.%2520Hall%2522%26wc%3Don&prevSearch=&item=25&ttl=65&returnArticleService=showFullText (Perception as Fact and Perception as Knowledge)
or this paper of Lewis White Beck’s: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2252009?&Search=yes&searchText=lewis&searchText=motives&searchText=white&searchText=beck&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoAdvancedSearch%3Fq0%3Dlewis%2Bwhite%2Bbeck%26f0%3Dau%26c1%3DAND%26q1%3Dmotives%26f1%3Dti%26acc%3Don%26wc%3Don%26fc%3Doff%26Search%3DSearch%26sd%3D%26ed%3D%26la%3D%26pt%3D%26isbn%3D&prevSearch=&item=1&ttl=1&returnArticleService=showFullText? (Conscious and Unconscious Motives)
You might also find this useful: Thomas Ricketts, “Objectivity and Objecthood” http://philpapers.org/rec/RICOAO
well in a spirit of hermeneutic generosity one might take such occurrences/repetitions as performative, akin to showing/saying, but yes we are a mixed (and often mixed-up) bag of bones at best, I’m not opposed at all to sorting thru and mapping out, even trying to ‘hack’, our buggy habits, but certainly am opposed to calls to some kind of purified state, perhaps even confusing prescription with description.
There is likely a whole anthropological family of resemblances in the apotropaic/pollution complexes at work behind the modern trends in cybernetics, algorithms, AI, singularities, Esperanto, analytic philo, etc. but may a thousand flowers bloom and all.
Thanks for pulling together those links, sadly I’m outside of the paywall these days, and sorry if my own quirks are just tangents in this context.
Oh, nothing to apologize for at all. I am always glad to have your comments! I will see if I have hard copies of these papers; maybe I can email them to you.
i spell it with a ‘d’, ‘kludge’, and know it from my computer nerd youth.
it’s funny to think of how anathema kludges seem to the philosophical spirit. a paper/book that is an inelegant mess that gets the job done all the same – must have something to do with how little purchase ‘working’ has in philosophy.