Re: Simple Question

[bobbie silk <bsilk@keller.clarke.edu>]

Thanks for this, Beth.  I was struggling to think of a way to explain to
my own satisfaction exactly what you're saying here.  To your fine
message, I'll just add the questionable fruits (fruitiness?) of my
struggle: 

In a view of the world that is not "scientific," we might say that
traditional scientists and mathematicians allow themselves the illusion of
certainty. 

The philosopher Wittgenstein (sorry, I've had to read a lot of his stuff
lately) asserts that science and mathematics do not "prove" something
about reality so much as they "prove" the internal consistency of their
own structures of perception.  (Wittgenstein calls such structures "games" 
because they have specific goals and sets of rules, but he takes them very
seriously.)  For example, if I use a ruler to measure the height of a
sapling, I'm not going to discover anything about the "real"  nature of
the sapling;  rather, I am going to identify the place of the sapling in
the game of measurement and mathematics.  Thus, I don't understand
anything more *about* the sapling except that it relates in such-and-such
a way to the arbitrarily decided measurer we call a "foot"  (or a
"meter").

That's all pretty abstract, isn't it?  BTW, Wittgenstein said that he
didn't do theory--just observations of the rules of the games.

I guess what I'm getting around to saying is that I'm not ready to accept
the scientific concept of theory as better than the loose concept of
theory in composition and literary studies. 

  --Bobbie
    bsilk@keller.clarke.edu


On Tue, 28 Jan 1997 EBOQUET@FAIR1.FAIRFIELD.EDU wrote:

> Paula--
> 
> I was interested in your juxtaposition of theory in the sciences with theory in
> the humanities, but maybe for a different reason:  I've recently befriended
> several colleagues in the "hard" sciences and in math, and we've been having
> interesting conversations on theory, but one really stands out for me.  A
> colleague in the math department gave a talk at our monthly faculty research
> symposium entitled "Looking for Your Keys Where the Light Is Better."  He
> talked about the ways that mathemeticians' hang-ups with theoretical
> "certainty" have, in recent decades kept them from making the advances that
> were going on in other disciplines.  According to this colleague, once
> mathematicians hooked up with other scientists, specifically with physicists
> (in conjunction with quantum mechanics), the field of mathematics became more
> willing to suspend certainty and entertain probability, and that has taken the
> field farther than it had gone in years.
> 
> So the title of the talk was cool, I thought, because it refers to that old
> joke about the guy who lost his keys and he's looking for them under the
> streetlight.  When he's asked about where he lost his keys, he points to a
> place farther away, in the darkness.  When asked, then, why he's looking where
> he _is_ looking, he responds, "Because the light is better here."
> 
> This might approach Cyril's question of a definition of theory, and it echos
> one that Sara and others have forwarded.  Theory helps me to entertain
> probabilities at the same time that it, admittedly, determines the
> probabilities that I will entertain.  So I think, instead of feeling as though
> we should be looking to the sciences for a more narrowly circumscribed
> definition of theory, we can maybe instead be happy that those blasted
> scientists are finally catching up with us!
> 
> --Beth
> eboquet@fair1.fairfield.edu
>