From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Fri Jun 06 2003 - 11:58:39 MDT
[rhinoceros]
I have often found that going back to older pieces of original thought and rereading them in retrospect, always with a critical eye, can provide new intuition.
Jean Piaget: Genetic Epistemology (1968)
http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=32&action=display&threadid=28601
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Let me repeat once again that we cannot say that on the one hand there is the history of scientific thinking, and on the other the body of scientific thought as it is today; there is simply a continual transformation, a continual reorganisation. And this fact seems to me to imply that historical and psychological factors in these changes are of interest in our attempt to understand the nature of scientific knowledge.
[Another opinion, often quoted in philosophical circles, is that the theory of knowledge studies essentially the question of the validity of science, the criteria of this validity and its justification. If we accept this viewpoint, it is then argued that the study of science as it is, as a fact, is fundamentally irrelevant. Genetic epistemology, as we see it, reflects most decidedly this separation of norm and fact, of valuation and description, We believe that, to the contrary, only in the real development of the sciences can we discover the implicit values and norms that guide, inspire and regulate them. Any other attitude, it seems to us, reduces to the rather arbitrary imposition on knowledge of the personal views of an isolated observer. This we want to avoid.]
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I should like to go on now to a second example and to raise the following question: how is it that Einstein was able to give a new operational definition of simultaneity at a distance? How was he able to criticise the Newtonian notion of universal time without giving rise to a deep crisis within physics? Of course his critique had its roots in experimental findings, such as the Michelson-Morley experiment - that goes without saying. Nonetheless, if this redefinition of the possibility of events to be simultaneous at great distances from each other went against the grain of our logic, there would have been a considerable crisis within physics. We would have had to accept one of two possibilities: either the physical world is not rational, or else human reason is impotent - incapable of grasping external reality. Well, in fact nothing of this sort happened. There was no such upheaval. A few metaphysicians (I apologise to the philosophers present) such as Bergson or Maritain were appalled by this revolution in
physics, but for the most part and among scientists themselves it was not a very drastic crisis. Why in fact was it not a crisis? It was not a crisis because simultaneity is not a primitive notion: It is not a primitive concept, and it is not even a primitive perception. I shall go into this subject further later on, but at the moment I should just like to state that our experimental findings have shown that human beings do not perceive simultaneity with any precision. If we look at two objects moving at different speeds, and they stop at the same time, we do not have an adequate perception. that they stopped at the same time. Similarly, when children do not have a very exact idea of what simultaneity is, they do not conceive of it independently of the speed at which objects are travelling. Simultaneity, then, is not a primitive intuition; it is an intellectual construction.
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Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures. That is, when we are doing logic or mathematics, we are simply using general syntax, general semantics, or general pragmatics in the sense of Morris, being in this case a rule of the uses of language in general. The position in general is that logical and mathematical reality is derived from language. Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures. Now here it becomes pertinent to examine factual findings. We can look to see whether there is any logical behaviour in children before language develops. We can look to see whether the coordinations of their actions reveal a logic of classes, reveal an ordered system, reveal correspondence structures. If indeed we find logical structures in the coordinations of actions in small children even before the development of language, we are not in a position to say
that these logical structures are derived from language. This is a question of fact and should be approached not by speculation but by an experimental methodology with its objective findings.
The first principle of genetic epistemology, then, is this - to take psychology seriously. Taking psychology seriously means that, when a question of psychological fact arises, psychological research should be consulted instead of trying to invent a solution through private speculation.
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[rhinoceros]
I have pasted the full text in the BBS
http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=32&action=display&threadid=28601
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