Working Notes: Current Working Notes These notes are the contents of a whiteboard in Tinderbox that I'm using to map out my (more . . .)

The imbalance between formal arguments and substantive argumentation: Stephen Toulmin: "Return to Reason" Toulmin's book is an extended complaint about the creation of academic disciplines based on the (more . . .)

Embracing Uncertainty: My conceptual leap some years ago was to abandon the search for a Truth and to embrace uncertainty. Decision Theory (more . . .)

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Essays

Current Working Notes

My personal website is at ODBlog . I write about decision theory at my site On Deciding . . . Better . This site is a hyperlinked set of essays using Tinderbox.

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The reaction of philosophy to simple materialism has been to search for absolute truth. Toulmin's observation is that the more social instability there is the more philosophy tilts toward the rigorous. The academic hopes that rationality can succeed where diplomacy and war have failed. Its easy to see how the urge for absolute truth may lead to dogmatism, demonization of opposition and the excesses of war and oppression. Ironically, the desire for truth at any cost makes it impossible to see the truth.

I had a traditional liberal arts component to my college education at Columbia University. All students took a one year course which included philosophy. I still remember that when we read Plato, no one really "got" Plato's point in the parable of the cave. Plato argued that the world we see, the material world, is one of illusion, far from the real reality, like shadows projected on the wall of a cave. Outside the cave, in the light of the real world, where the wise may ascend, is the higher level of reality that Plato called the world of Forms. We couldn't really understand how anyone could consider abstract concepts, Forms, to have greater reality that material things. In what way could the idea of a table have greater reality than an instance of the concept of table?

I now understand that Plato had a dream. He didn't live in the world of the Forms. He experienced the material world just as you and I do. He dreamed of something eternal, unchangeable and certain behind the unpredictable, changing face of reality. Our reality is, on the face of it meaningless and devoid of meaning. To reveal the Truth behind the reality would be to be able to control it.

It is my view that this kind of truth lives only within formal systems that have limited predictive power in the real world. The variability and uncertainty that arises from the interacting parts of systems makes the results of our actions unpredictable.

By embracing uncertainty rather than seeking to abolish it, I think that a more realistic and pragmatic understanding of truth is possible. In the real world, we can have useful explanatory models of complex systems that can't be perfectly predicted. Our models and stories are useful because they come close enough to the behaviors that emerge from hard to predict reality.

Plato felt that the Forms, his abstract world was real. More real than messy reality. Is this pragmatic definition of truth also real? Because its uncertain and approximate, it has no unique claim on being singularly true.

I will argue that properties that arise from complex systems are real. These properties have no independent material existence yet must be treated as existing in a different, emergent sense. My best example of this is personal identity. I know that I have exist even though every atom in my body may be slowly replaced. I am an emergent property and if I am not for myself, who will be for me?

Copyright 2003 by James J. Vornov