Okay, here's the point, or part of the point: on the surface, it might seem as if the conclusions reached by the Minotaur's justice system are a bit crazy--and they are, except for one thing--to any careful and rational thinking reader, they're not. By the standards of conventional logic, the argument made by the Official Prosecutor is both sound and valid. In other words, the premises of his case (that you can't exist if you don't have a mother, that you can't create or give birth to something already in existence, etc.) are nearly beyond question. They are, by almost any rational account, true. And what's more, the conclusion he reaches is perfectly valid; it contains all of the premises. In other words, the premises are true and the conclusion, because it is valid, is also true. By the standards of formal logic, you can't argue with the Official Prosecutor's pronouncement that Mrs. Anderson doesn't exist. In additon, the Official Prosecutor's argument isn't limited only to the circumstances of the skit; you could apply the same deductive reasoning to yourself and reach the exact same conclusion: logically, you don't exist. (you can find the basis of the argument repeated here: nagarjuna).
And yet you do exist--I think. Logic, in this case, seems to go against what observation and ordinary sense tell us is factual. So does that mean that either logic or our observations are lying to us?
In a word, no. All it means is that the tool, logic, can't be effectively used in this instance. By the same account, addition is a great tool for determining how many chips you'll have after you win a big poker pot, but it won't be of much use in collecting rain drops. Two rain drops plus two more doesn't equal four raindrops; it equals a larger puddle. Observation, likewise, is a great tool for certain situations--such as assessing whether the current weather is suitable for a picnic--but it isn't very good, without the help of certain technologies, for determining the shape of the earth.
Even more to the point, logic didn't really fail in this case; language did. Language is simply too inaccurate to serve as a flattering vehicle for logical analysis. And that brings me to my thesis: language doesn't just express knowledge, it also inhibits knowledge. The key is to make language serve you rather than the other way around. The key is to make sure that you aren't becoming an addict. A drug used properly can cure you of a disease or even open you up to new creative insights, but once the drug starts to use you, once you become dependent, once you can't function without getting your fix, then the drug becomes a disease rather than a cure and it closes you off from, rather than exposes you to, new creative manifestations.
And in a world of addicts and pushers, somebody, a postmodernist writer, for example, has to be a voice of reason and reveal the modern drug-of-choice for what it is--a tool that is being misused and overly relied on. She has to demonstrate the limits and the drawbacks of the drug, which is exactly what certain post modern writers are trying to do with language; they're trying to prevent language from using you instead of the reverse. By exposing the failings of language, the postmodern writer isn't muddling the truth and she isn't doing scientists a dis-service, she's helping scientists and all other seekers of knowledge to see things more clearly and from less restricted perspectives. She's doing an intervention.
And while most scientists understand this, there are certain pseudo-scientists, Richard Dawkins foremost among them, who feel threatened by imprecise and creative uses of language because they're seeking a unifying singularity rather than knowledge; they're seeking confirmation for their own brand of fundamentalism, which they spread through the church of reductionist science. Like the Catholic missionaries of yesterday, the prophets of reductionism are hell-bent on spreading their gospel to anyone who will listen, or be forced to listen, and it isn't truth that matters to them, but ideology, an ideology that anyone can receive if he just opens up his veins, sticks the needle in, and gets carried away by the sense of certainty and cohesion.
The reductionists don't use Science as a tool; Science uses the reductionist to filter out knowledge that it doesn't like--as a means of minimizing what can be known so that everything supports a particular ideology. It's not surprising then that a reductionist would want to do the same thing with language that she has done with Science. Instead of seeing language's limitations and using it only in the limited circumstances in which it's feasible, and instead of trying to re-vision language to make it less able to undermine the truths of experience, the reductionist strives to purify language as a scientific instrument by putting its limitations onto the actual world--to make the world fit the language (and the Science) instead of vice versa.
Properly and narrowly applied, science, like language, can be a useful tool. I'm not questioning that. But I am questioning the value we place on scientific knowledge. It seems to me that by failing to acknowledge the limitations of science, we run the risk of defining science as a dogma rather than as a tool--we're setting it up to be our master, a master that we've managed to codify and embody in words. But words can't be mistaken for the things they represent. The moon is not the same as the finger that points at the moon, and scientific knowledge, which must be expressed through language, either the language of words or of logic and mathematics, is not the same as the truth it attempts to express. This, I believe, is what many post modernist writers are trying to make evident. So, while in certain circumstances, despite its limitations, I might find scientific knowledge extremely useful, even to the point of delegating to it my own less-informed judgment, I don't trust it as my master, and neither should anyone else. If either science or post-modern philosophy tells me, for example, that I don't exist, I'm not going to trust it, no matter how impeccable and accredited the reasoning and no matter how insistent others are that I use no other tool to make a verification.
Here's an article that further details the flaws in reductionist thinking:
Darwinian Fundamentalism
Empty Nest..
8 years ago
