“Like “theory,” knowledge is a semiotic entity, consisting of clear, simple signs that stand in for a chaotic abundance experience and reality. What determines the signifier? When does a scientist declare the emergence of knowledge? No matter how empirical her process, the declaration of success in the process is an aesthetic declaration. The aesthetics isn’t merely a problem at the level of journalists and magazines and the public who read them; it begins with the scientists’ statement “it is time for the next experiment” or “it is not yet time for the next experiment.”
What makes that judgement aesthetic? To me it seems the production of knowledge in the scientific sense is wrapped up in politics: who gets the grant, which board has money to spend on what projects, what board gets funding by what administration, who do you know, how good are your connections. The declaration of success doesn’t seem so much aesthetic as pragmatic, especially in the realm of cutting-edge research (which would seem to be the field most heavily involved in discovery, rather than verification). The next experiment is declared when the funding arrives. The end is reached when knowledge acquired can stand up to rigorous peer-driven critique, or the experiment is over when losses are cut and the researchers must move on or suffer professional loss—either material or social.
“it is essentially a mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts […] neither admitting into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude any element directly experienced […] the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.”
What if we instead say that there is no object, and that really all we have is conglomerations of process? Processes acting on processes?
why then my soul was prophetic, and my idea must be, and by common consent would be, called cognizant of reality. That percept was what I meant, for into it my idea has passed by conjunctive experiences of sameness and fulfilled intention. Nowhere is there jar, but every later moment continues and corroborates an earlier one.”
Just a fancy way of saying scientific predictability? How can one completely know anything? One can predict certain aspects of things accurately through knowledge, but other aspects of the thing known can be incorrectly apphrehended, such as with Newtonian physics and general relativity. There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.
In James’s system I feel like I understand the process, but I don’t understand how it has end. Is he treating only with discrete statements? When we reach the end of a certain thought then knowledge can be proven or disproven about that object based on my predictions? It seems too that what would be more accurate is to say that each object has domains of knowledge associated with it that we target through thought and speech, but we never encapsulate everything about the thing itself, only those details that are useful to us at that moment. In the example he brings up with the hall in giving directions, he never mentions that it has windows. But he knows it has windows. Why doesn’t he mention it? Because it’s not useful to the communication he’s engaging in at the moment. It’s probably also assumed by his audience that the building has windows. If we take that stance of utility and apply it back to the cognition, that seems plausible to me. I may know more than is immediately apparent even to myself about a certain thing, but unless utility demands I engage it on that level, then it’s more efficient to let that lay dormant until needed. However, I may have my pre-conceptions challenged or overthrown, in which case that knowledge will have been proving ill-based.
I felt like there were a lot of territories in James’s argument being filled with other things I don’t know about, so I have probably mis-interpreted something. But one thing this did also bring to mind for me is the idea of
Object-Oriented Ontology, which at first blush appears to be how objects exist independently of conscious observation, and that their relata are distorted by each other in a manner equal to observational distortion, even in the absence of a conscious observer. That makes me wonder how it could be used to complicate this. Perhaps some sort of indelible situational context.
“To continue thinking unchallenged is, 99 times out of 100, our practical substitute for knowing in the completed sense.”