Estado Sentido

Charles Taylor, "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man": 

Common meanings are the basis of community. Intersubjective meaning gives a people a common language to talk about social reality and a common understanding of certain norms, but only with common meanings does this common reference world contain significant common actions, celebrations, and feelings. These are objects in the world that everybody shares. This is what makes community.

(...)

Common meanings, as well as intersubjective ones, fall through the net of mainstream social science. They can find no place in its categories. For they are not simply a converging set of subjective reactions, but part of the common world. What the ontology of mainstream social science lacks is the notion of meaning as not simply for an individual subject; of a subject who can be a “we” as well as an “I.” The exclusion of this possibility, of the communal, comes once again from the baleful influence of the epistemological tradition for which all knowledge has to reconstructed from the impressions imprinted on the individual subject. But if we free ourselves from the hold of these prejudices, this seems a wildly implausible view about the development of human consciousness; we are aware of the world through a “we” before we are through and “I.” Hence we need the distinction between what is just shared in the sense that each of us has it in our individual worlds, and that which is in the common world. But the very idea of something which is in the common world in contradistinction to what is in all the individual worlds is totally opaque to empiricist epistemology.

Da minha dissertação de mestrado, Do conceito de liberdade em Friedrich A. Hayek, p. 61:

Uma economia socialista, ao acabar com o sistema de preços, impossibilita o processo que permite tornar explícito o conhecimento prático disperso, visto que os preços incorporam um conhecimento holístico, sistémico, “desconhecido e incognoscível por qualquer um dos elementos do sistema do mercado, mas dado a todos estes através da operação do próprio mercado”. Não existe qualquer outra forma de organização da economia que consiga rivalizar com o mercado enquanto gerador de conhecimento, já que é o único mecanismo que consegue utilizar eficazmente o conhecimento prático disperso tornando-o holístico – e é este conhecimento que é destruído quando se tenta planear ou corrigir os processos de funcionamento do mercado.

Um excelente artigo de Brandon Harnish, "Alasdair MacIntyre and F. A. Hayek on the Abuse of Reason", para o qual chamo em especial a atenção dos interessados nas temáticas do racionalismo, tradicionalismo, modernidade, epistemologia, filosofia da ciência e Iluminismo:

«Hayek likewise expresses concern over the division between the humanities and the social sciences and the new approach to which this division gave rise. He quotes Albert Einstein to illustrate his point that science without epistemology—insofar as it is thinkable at all—is primitive and muddled (1956, 131). This approach is epitomized by the German sociologist Torgny T. Segerstedt, whom Hayek quotes: “‘The most important goal that sociology has set for itself is to predict the future development and to shape the future, or, if one prefers to express it in that manner, to create the future of mankind’” (in Hayek 1970, 6).

MacIntyre expresses this search for a formula of social development as, tellingly, a hunt for the position of God. “[O]mniscience excludes the making of decisions. If God knows everything that will occur, he confronts no as yet unmade decision. He has a single will. It is precisely insofar as we differ from God that unpredictability invades our lives. This way of putting the point has one particular merit: it suggests precisely what project those who seek to eliminate unpredictability from the social world or to deny it may be engaging in” (2007, 97). How the Enlightenment shift toward constructivist rationalism profoundly affected the social sciences or, perhaps more fundamentally, how the shift in the way man confronted questions of value and questions of fact changed his approach to the study of human action begins to become clear. MacIntyre and Hayek see utilitarianism and emotivism as two results of the Enlightenment shift (Hayek 1970, 14; MacIntyre 2007, 62). As manifestations of rationalism, these philosophies fostered the new social science ideology and made mankind feel the full and practical consequences of the Enlightenment Project’s failure.»

Em tempos o Cardeal Manning afirmou que "todas as diferenças de opinião são teológicas no fundo". Eu arrisco-me a dizer que todas as diferenças de opinião são também epistemológicas e metodológicas, pelo que importa sempre religare, ou seja, voltar ao início, para perceber e validar qualquer construção teórica e conclusões posteriores. Não é possível passar da doxa para a episteme quando nos deixamos enredar em manuais de pronto-a-vestir ideológico, servidos como verdades absolutas, sem procurarmos saber quais as bases epistemológicas e metodológicas destes. Compreender isto é a chave para tornar o debate público em qualquer sociedade aberta minimamente racional e inteligível, diminuindo as possibilidades de acrimónia exagerada e expurgando o ruído de que normalmente enferma, que, na política, são essencialmente o resultado da hemiplegia moral de ser de esquerda ou de direita.

Na sequência desta notícia, Neutrinos and Appomatox, por Steve Landsburg:

Scientists at CERN have found apparent evidence that neutrinos can travel faster than light.

 

Suppose that tomorrow historians at Harvard find apparent evidence that the South won the American Civil War — not in some metaphorical “they accomplished their goals” sense, but in the literal sense that it was actually Grant who handed his sword to Lee at Appomatox and not the other way around.

 

Question: Of which conclusion would you be more skeptical?

 

Of course your answer might depend on exactly what this new “apparent evidence” consists of. So let me reword: As of this moment, which do you think is more likely — that neutrinos can travel faster than light, or that the South won the Civil War?