Satisfying Reason pp 155-175 | Cite as
The Contrast Between Causal (Explanatory) and Experiential (Normative) Understanding and Its Ramifications
Chapter
Abstract
As the medieval schoolmen already recognized, two rather different issues arise according as we concern ourselves with the relationships of the world’s things to one another among themselves (quoad se) or with how they make an impact upon us (quoad nos). In our endeavors to come to cognitive terms with the world about us we correspondingly have at our disposal two very different modes of understanding, based on two very different cognitive perspectives — the explanatorily causal and the affectively experiential.
Keywords
Natural Science Typical Machine Free Agent Geiger Counter Causal Story
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Notes
- 1.See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, ed. by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (London, 1962), sect. 32.Google Scholar
- 2.For an excellent discussion of the philosophical issues involved in the mind- body problem see Martin Carrier and Jürgen Mittelstrass, Mind, Brain, Behavior (Berlin, 1991).Google Scholar
- 3.Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 1933), sect. 6.52.Google Scholar
- 4.As one acute writer has observed: “[Such a doctrine] is an attempt to consolidate science as a self-sufficient activity which exhausts all possible ways of appropriating the world intellectually. In this radical positivist view the realities of the world — which can, of course, be interpreted by natural science, but which are in addition an object of man’s extreme curiosity, a source of fear or disgust, an occasion for commitment or rejection — if they are to be encompassed by reflection and expressed in words, can be reduced to their empirical properties. Suffering, death, ideological conflict, social classes, antithetical values of any kind — all are declared out of bounds, matters we can only be silent about, in obedience to the principle of verifiability. Positivism so understood is an act of escape from commitments, an escape masked as a definition of knowledge…” (Lasek Kolakowski, The Alienation of Reason, trans, by N. Guterman (Garden City, N.Y., 1968), p. 204)Google Scholar
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© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 1995