drutwo.net

Summer Projects

Mon, 5 Apr 2010 14:09:14 -0600

This summer I need to begin research for my master’s thesis. In addition, I would like to begin working music again. I seem to have dropped my guitar-playing ways when I moved to Missoula and I’m not pleased about it.

Things I’ve Learned

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:50:12 -0700

One of the first major epiphanies of this semester came from spending 3 hours a week in a class studying Descartes and Hume. For some reason, I’d come out of my undergrad Early Modern survey course with the belief that realists are by nature inclined to be empiricists, and that idealists tend toward rationalism. This is not true at all.

First, for those who don’t know those four terms, here’s some brief explanation. Realists believe that there are things “out there” in the world (not just our perceptions of things). Idealists believe the opposite. We only have proof that our ideas exists, and perhaps that is all that does exist. Empiricists believe that all knowledge comes from experience. Rationalists believe that knowledge is founded on reason in the mind. Now, these four viewpoints are easily arranged into two poles of two related debates. Specifically, what is the world we think we know about, and what is our knowledge of that world founded on?

The mistake I’ve corrected this semester is in how they’re associated. I used to believe that realism naturally sided with empiricism as a team in answering the compound question above. After all, if our knowledge comes from experience in the world, why not believe that there is a world? Additionally, it made some sense that idealism and rationalism would be mutually congenial. If what exists are ideas not objects (or at least not for sure), then belief that knowledge comes from some ideas (reason being a big one) seemed to fit nicely. This semester however, I discovered how wrong those intuitions are, and in that discovery made my own world make a small bit more sense.

In studying Hume (a famous empiricist) and Descartes (famous rationalist), I’ve come to see that my allegiances were crisscrossed. In fact, an empiricist (if they are a strict empiricist as Hume is) should be more inclined toward idealism, while a rationalist has a better shot with realism. A strict empiricist wants only to go on things which are available for being gone upon. For example, Hume tends toward idealism because our sense experience is all we have, and thus he’s not interested in talking about the external world. Yes, there’s a bunch of scholarship on Hume saying the opposite, but in essence, he says that the world probably exists “out there,” that we certainly believe it does, but also that none of that is a knowledge claim. Descartes on the other hand wants to postulate things we know to exist, such as the cogito and reason. Therefore, he’s much more comfortable postulating that we can know the external world exists.

Realigning these viewpoints has helped me immensely in grappling with my ever-tenuous opinions on science as a human project. I’ve always taken the scientific method to make both empirical and realist assumptions. Empirical because of the obvious reliance on empirical data, and realist because it attempts to make claims about laws of nature, not laws of thought. Of these two, I still believe that the scientific method has an underlying realist assumption. However, I’m more inclined to believe science makes a rationalist move than an empiricist one.

A scientist is likely to claim that there is a system to the world, and that the correct formulas could model that system. This is, in a sense a concept of innate ideas — there are innate relationships between things (whatever those things may be), and science can eventually describe them with an acceptable proximation of accuracy. This is an inherently rationalist point of view. Founding all of this is a problem solving mentality that there are puzzles to be discovered and worked out and that we have the capability to do exactly that.

My reservations about such a worldview have always been troublesome, because they stem from a phenomenological bias on my part. However, I (along with my phenomenological bias) find empiricism very appealing. This was very concerning when I thought that scientists must by nature commit to empiricism. While I’ve come no closer to an opinion about whether science overall is a useful project, this realization has greatly increased my ability to explain just how unsure I am.

Ego Boost

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:39:24 -0600

I just wanted to brag a bit. Since I haven’t put anything up here in over a month I figured this was a good excuse...

I was just complimented on the quality of my writing sample by one of my professors. Apparently (at least some of) my professors remember what I wrote and what they thought of it. Given that they read it sometime last spring, that’s an amount of academic respect/clout that has caught me off guard in each case I’ve encountered it. Today I heard not only that my writing sample was good, but that it put me near the top of the list of accepted students at U of M. That blew my mind, as I’ve spent most of this fall feeling as if just about everyone in class is more in practice and more astute than I am.

However, the news did inspire me to go back and reread what I wrote to get in here. If you haven’t read it yet please do sometime. It’s pretty reader-friendly and I’m actually quite proud of it. It’s probably the clearest example of both my own thought and my own voice as a writer which I’ve ever produced. I was surprised when I noticed that it’s only 7 pages.

The other thing I noticed is that I’m certainly a better writer than my 101 students, though I somehow didn’t capitalize “American” in my paper.

If you ever read it, let me know what you thinks.

.:dru:.

On Re-entry

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:56:17 -0600

As of today I can say that coming back to school is the smartest thing I’ve done in a while (at least 15 months or so). It’s so invigorating to have discussions with students again, particularly with engaged and informed people who are passionate about things that matter: truth, evidentially justified paradigms or whether you can ever have a clear and distinct idea of God. You know, the important stuff. The type of stuff which should make everyone choke on their morning coffee every once in a while.

Getting back into examining the problems I hide in the back of my mind has in one month drastically overhauled the unmotivated misanthrope I’d become in Seattle. I now sort of wish I could be back there to see that city with eyes that embody my own consciousness better. With eyes that I own rather than eyes that I use.

In the event that you read this, I encourage you to look back where the cobwebs are in your thoughts and see what’s gathering dust. Today at least I can say that the detritus of significance is still a far cry better than the newest and shiniest of the mundane.

.:dru:.

Treatise on Hume-an Nature

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 12:35:18 -0600

Two weeks into being a grad student and still largely optimistic about it. I don’t remember any time in my life when I’ve done so much reading in two weeks, save perhaps when writing my essay for admission. But the reading differs in one key way from my undergrad; so far, I have been assigned close to no reading. I am taking only one 500 level class this semester, however I’ve had less reading for that class than I have for my 200 level or my 400 level.

Still, most of the reading I’ve been doing has been unassigned, specifically to get ahead of schedule on my research for papers. My experience writing my essay for admission has shown me that I tend to need a series of weeks to digest my thoughts after diving into research. Thus, in hopes of actually achieving decent grades and perhaps of producing papers worth submitting to conferences, I am getting into the down’n’dirty as early as I can — quite the departure from my usual methods.

To me it seems that, since I’ve made this decision to pursue something I can hopefully be proud of and find satisfaction in, there is little reason to let simple idleness or lack of discipline defeat my goals — and at this stage at least, I’m still prepared to claim rather lofty goals.

.:dru:.