Saturday, October 20, 2012
How do different language games (a la Wittgenstein) interact with each other? For example, while we think of various models of the universe as all "true" to the extent that they are accurate, and they enable prediction - especially about future events - the most difficult sort of predictions to make of course, and further that each model is coherent we run up against the difficulty of seeing how they can all be true at the same time. In short, they really are true. But at the same time it is easily apparent that they are in radical conflict. The heliocentric model, the geocentric model, the vacu-centric model, Einstein's Light Cone model, Brian Greene's Frozen River model (from "The Fabric of the Cosmos") and my favorite http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82p-DYgGFjI or if you like really great music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6jBK1ZV-qs&feature=related which look at the Sun's motion through the Galaxy as the frame for the model. I am sure there are many other models that are also true that I am not even thinking about or that have been dreamed about yet. But notice even in the presentations on the Galactic model - great music and all - they make a serious mistake in thinking we have been lied to all these years since the preferred model is true and so all the others must be false! But actually, we do say each model is true and the worst mistake is thinking one model is true and the others false. Following Hegel we can see that the Truth is the Whole - which I interpret to mean our models are never the whole thing we are trying to describe in nature. Rather, we are thinking abstractly in order to think at all and conceptual models are tools that enable us to accomplish the "work" that the tools are designed to enable us to do, but mislead us if we think that is all there is to the phenomena as it is in its entirety - or as it is "in itself".
So how do we relate these various complex systems, or models, to one another in a way that it is easy to see how they remain coherent in themselves without interfering with the coherence of each other? How do we see that each is true without thinking other models must be false?
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