Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Mathematics, Science and Epistemology by Imre Lakatos
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Lakatos stands at the edge of a vast tradition, and in his conservative way, decries those who would draw demarcation lines along those of community or traditional ideas of how discovery, math and science should be drawn as they always were. In seeking truth that is independent of human observation or valuation, Lakatos would fall along the same issue that Zizek would bring to many others — the lack of a transcendence. This much is so; Lakatos is as much a former Hegelian as much as it is a decrier of non-useful knowledges (like vulgar Marxists). What I admire most about Lakatos is that he isn’t afraid to approach the former basis of the formulation of math and science — in philosophy, and tackle the Cartesian synthesis as a modality of providing the basis for its own verification. This ties together the many aspects of Lakatos’ careful research work, his scholarly devotion to what others have said, and how they said it, and how they were (un)able to understand and respond to one another.
In other to be able to understand where Lakatos comes from we need to be able to understand that (ir)rationally he would have to disavow himself of those who he was most like in order to be distinguished from them, essentializing them by a singular disavow he found distasteful (or superfluous, thus discarding them as being superfluous). In this manner, his rejection of Marxism appears to be because of the implicit use of their historiographical techniques in order to highlight the logical difference their ideology makes, a technique he often uses to highlight competing and often contemporaneous schools of science. By revealing the shifting of sense making demonstrated by the cuts of history, we will always be able to detect minor unaccountable differences in understanding that question any possible aesthetic validity to the foundation that the use of human reason can be independent of superstition and wholly reliant on the strictest of causation.
Lakatos notes this is the unanswerable question of Hume: Can there be causation that is not mere induction? This is a question whose answer is to show its own impossibility, that human laws seem wholly immanent on itself rather than on principles that are consistent and surjective to the universe itself.
In fact, this lack of assurance is the very project Lakatos wishes to show, marking him as a philosopher of science, an inability to know what real in the naive classical sense is (should we encounter it). Many of his longer essays are devoted to this subject matter — the instability of the acceptedness of a theory despite or even because of its foibles and its refutations as understood from various points from its inception.
One of Lakato’s favorite mentions is that new theories are always immediately refuted before they are accepted. In other words, there is a lag between when a theory is too new to be validated or even understood before it is accepted as unequivocally true. There is a lack of resolution in this issue because we have no real way of measuring what was accepted only what at least a few individuals were saying at various times. So the question becomes even more precarious because what we know of a theory and what we know of a theory differ from each other depending on context. The unaccountableness of this change is where Lakatos organizes his conception of truth and epistemology in response to other’s certainties. In fact, where he is alike with Popper and structuralists, is that Lakatos is formulate an immanent critique of various logics, such as Newtonian, or mathematics, or Quine or Tarski or Toulmin in order to lead us to grasping what is excessive in their ideologies, as the overriding weight/basis for a judgement on verisimilitude. This requires a more rhetorical formalistic reading on Lakato’s part, in order to understand a curve in reason as being local to itself rather than to the material at hand; given the possibility at various points of inflection to determine opposite alternate possibilities. This is perhaps his greatest lesson from (and disagreement with) Karl Popper — that falsification of science can happen alone at a plateau detached from any concordance with induction. (Lakatos wanted at least weak induction, Popper thought that induction was not necessary).
If we were to believe that progress was in fact measurable, it would be the in theory detectable since there would be a steady retreat of the amount of uncertainty of the nature of nature as time progressed. We might expect that with the retreat of uncertainty we would find more concordance — but this has been shown to be untrue as the very nature of the universe is still to be questioned, as to what we can expect of it or how we should understand the nature of time or space itself (not to mention quantum mechanics and so on). In a way, Lakatos should have written a book, as his ideas criss-cross in a variety of manners, showing an immanence of understanding and relevance that this nest of ideas’ connectedness is nearly sustaining (Although no one essay really encapsulates the entire range).
What we see here, is the most nihilistic of philosophers, one whose field is technology itself — knowledge which is useful, and we get that not even from the point of view of knowledge can knowledge maintain consistency with itself. Lakatos gets that science is impacted from the outside, as all knowledege is, and because of this, insists that science be accountable to society even though science itself is amoral.
In a strange way, Lakatos nearly refutes himself, as his search for validity on the order of its own logic (and impossibility) becomes negative as he understands the aesthetics of the search to be about more than some academic scholarly immanence. Rather, our understandings become an allegory of itself, tainted with the atmosphere of its origins. In this strange way, we might understand this as a formalism of knowledge, if that expression is Hegelian or otherwise centered on its own difference. Lakatos can never find his own answers to his own questions by looking within just like he can never fully justify the lemmas of hard research programmes that came to be completely acceptable and then suddenly out of favor. Marred with this in-transience between different fields, Lakatos may be ranked with many post-structuralists as being trapped outside or inside a tradition, for if they speak from the outside it is because they, in the mystifications of Lacan, are “Cogito ergo sum,” ubi cogito, ibi sum. I am not, there where I am the plaything of my thought: I think of what I am where I do not think to think. In this same way Fichte was right to point to Antoss as the cogito’s inability to think where it is, but by pointing it out, Zizek demonstrates that Fichte too was not where he could think to think, meaning Antoss was but petit object a. In this same manner, Lakatos finds himself settled in “the third way” in the interstice of what can be nameable, in the (in)articulated depths of Wittgenstein’s language games where its successful performance is autonomous, detached and wholly invaluable/invalidable because they are strict reference points to absolutely itself.
Lakatos then, if we were to fling him from his comfort-zone, would be speaking of various inarticulable truths that appeared as marked events throughout history. Each zone is distinguishable only by itself, and wholly uncapturable by each other. We see zones of interference and resistance, characterized by contingency itself, when it reaches the highest levels of verification only by being repetitious enough to become a thing, a difference unto itself.
We end up with territories of language genres, a truth that perhaps Lakatos wouldn’t have wanted to acknowledge as being the strong version of science’s fallibility, that its champions, its expert-elite should get the acknowledgement they want, for their being individuals rather than for some autonomous process that could be drawn in the sand when in fact, that rockstar elitism can only insist on a community’s shared immanent ideology, a pack of thieves among any other pack of thieves, a distribution system that sustains itself, only this time with the indebtedness of verisimilitude. Lakatos was rather that we were impersonal, cut throat and yet responsible to more than just science when we be a philosopher and a defender of science from its own communal excesses.
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