Questioning and Understanding the World:

Can we know our world?

Liberal Studies 1: Human Dilemmas

Fall 2004

Professor Michael Steven Marx

1 Corinthians 13.11-12

11   When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as achild, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put awaychildish things.

12  For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face:now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

King James Version

Charles Sanders Peirce There are Real things, whose characters are

entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are. (14)

Plato, “The Simile of the Cave”

. . . the final thing to be perceived in the intelligible region, and perceived only with difficulty, is the form of the good; once seen, it is inferred to be responsible for whatever is right and valuable in anything, producing in the visible region light and the source of light, and being in the intelligible region itself controlling source of truth and intelligence. And anyone who is going to act rationally either in public or private life must have sight of it. (24-25)

Perception

The process whereby sensory stimulation is translated into organized experience. That experience, or percept, is the joint product of the stimulation and of the process itself.

Thus, perception iscomplex mediated

active

Language

Language is a mode of communication

A Symbolic Mode of Communication

Language

• Symbolic• Arbitrary • Systematic • Powerful• Productive

Language symbolizes knowledge.

Language

Cassirer holds that reality can only be experienced through the symbolism of language. Is reality, then, not defined and redefined by the ever-varied symbolism of the innumerable languages of mankind? (Herskovits 33)

[From Prof. Youndt’s presentation: Benjamin Whorf & Edward Sapir: Culture and language shape each other and structure the way we perceive the world; thus there isn’t a single reality.]

Frankenstein

Nameless

Creature

Monster

Weapons of Mass Destruction

There are those who still say that there was no reason to liberate Iraq. They ask about weapons of mass destruction. On September 11th in New York we learned that in the hands of a monster, a box cutter is a weapon of mass destruction. And Saddam Hussein was a monster, a walking, talking weapon of mass destruction.

It is good for the world that he is gone.

Remarks by Gov. George Pataki at the Republican National Convention. Thursday,

2 September 2004 10:39 PM

Language and the Environment

Protecting the environment Global warming

Climate change Climate crisis Climate collapse Suffocation of the earth

ANWR v. Artic Refuge

Culture

The summation of the behavior and habitual modes of thought of the persons who make up a particular society. (Herskovits 34)

Culture is flexible and holds many possibilities of choice within its framework. (Herskovits 35)

Ethnocentrism

The point of view that one’s own way of life is to be preferred to all others.

(Herskovits 38)

The Dilemma

Humans live in a dual universe: the physical “real” world that we cannot see, and a symbolic “unreal” world of meaning that we can see.

Professor Gerald Erchak. Anthropology Department. Skidmore College.

Can we “see” the world?

Cultural Relativism A scientific, inductive attack on an age old

philosophical problem. . . Judgments are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation. (33)

The Scientific Method

• Measurement

• Reproducibility

The Platonic Struggle ‘And if,’ I went on, ‘he were forcibly

dragged up the steep and rugged ascent and not let go till he had been dragged out into the sunlight, the process would be a painful one, to which he would much object, and when he emerged into the light his eyes would be so dazzled by the glare of it that we wouldn’t be able to see a single one of the things he was now told were real.’ (Plato 23)