| Ah! I see. Perhaps I was misjudging your argument, after all. I can't disagree with your criticism--except to say that it's a criticism of all science as far as I can see. And in the absence of a solution to the problem of naturalizing semantics, one as to work with what one's got. You run up against the same issues in interpretations of quantum mechanics other than the Cophenhagen interpretation. If what Lakoff's got is reproducible empirical data of how humans think about math, then it is up to his detractors to produce a coherent account that also fits the data, rather than merely arguing it away. (I'm reminded of that story about the Sophist school in ancient Greece. A young initiate walked in to find the elders arguing about how many teeth there were in a horse's mouth. He piped up with "Why don't we just walk out to the stables and take a look?" He was kicked out of the school.) The lack of another interpretation of the data or falsifying experiments is what I'm not seeing coming from your corner. In other words, yes the philosophical problems still remain, but that most emphatically does not mean that it's not possible to look in the horse's mouth.
Consider this: it may be impossible to naturalize semantics. I tend to believe that this is the case, but we don't know. (To be specific, I accept Nietzsche's argument that if meaning doesn't exist, then neither does illusion; saying that meaning is simply an illusion is obfuscatory, or, more exactly, rhetorical.) Should we wait until the debate is complete before we continue doing cognitive science? Or, perhaps, should we continue doing empirical studies but simply lock up the results without interpreting them, even if they overwhelmingly point in one direction? I'm with Niels Bohr on this one: you cannot escape having a "loaded interpretive apparatus"--ever. All you can do is to acknowledge that apparatus as a component of your observations.
In other words, observations of the material world have as much force as philosophical arguments, but said observations always come with a philosophical perspective coloring them. I understand this; so does Lakoff. The problem you face is that there is no large-scale account of the meaning of scientific knowledge, and yet science gets done. Forget cognitive science: the lack of a naturalized semantics cuts through all of empiricism. But science gets done. When I said above that "you can continue to believe in Platonism if you want to", this is what I meant. You can continue to believe in the Creation, or in spontaneous generation of organisms, if you want to--because all of science lacks the account of meaning that you're asking for. Yet science continues to draw conclusions about the nature of the world. This is a crisis, but it's not a crisis for science.
So my personal view is more restricted than you might be assuming: I'm with Bohr on how empiricism works--it is limited in its ability to make statements that are "true"--but if I interpret him right, then Lakoff and I are able to believe that empirically, the Platonic mathematical model is disproved, even though we lack a connection between this empirical understanding, and any sort of philosophical "truth".
"Nonetheless, it moves."
|
