On the Poverty of Scientism, or: The Ineluctable Roughness of Rationality

Author: Code M.¹

Source: Metaphilosophy, Volume 28, Numbers 1-2, January 1997 , pp. 102-122(21)

Publisher: Blackwell Publishing

Key:

- Free Content

- New Content

- Subscribed Content

- Free Trial Content

Abstract:

If there is one rationality there must be a plurality of them. This conclusion follows, I argue, partly from the extreme and ineradicable vagueness of the fundamental concepts that every would-be rational explanation must presuppose. Logicistic/scientistic assaults on this vagueness are doomed to fail partly because they are unable to acknowledge the imaginative dimension of rational thought. Being limited to the play of “outward appearances,” scientific investigations are also dependent on “inward imaginings” on their speculative side. The upshot is that schools of philosophy should be characterized by the kind of imaginary they adopt rather than by their logics. In which case, every attempt to get and tell something right about the world is bound to incorporate mythopoeic elements in its explanations.

Keywords: Connectionism; Connectionist Network; Cognition; Cognitive Science; Computation; Dynamics; Dynamical System; Eliminativism; Folk Psychology; Foundations of Cognitive Science; Language of Thought; Mind; Neural Network