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Philosophy of action is chiefly concerned with human
action, intending to distinguish between activity and
passivity, voluntary, intentional, culpable and involuntary actions, and related question.
The field is often defined by the quote of Ludwig
Wittgenstein: "What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?"
The problems of analytical philosophy of action include:
- What are the temporal limits of an action? For instance, can an action end before its result occurs?
- Is an action the same as some bodily movement? Does one movement under different descriptions constitute different
actions?
- Is an action the same as some event? Does one event under different descriptions
constitute different actions?
A more fundamental school of embodied
philosophy are usually associated with advocacy, especially of feminism or postmodernism, but are difficult to
characterize in philosophers' terms - they often reject the traditional division into ethics, epistemology and metaphysics - as did the American William James. It is
insensible to consider seeing, saying, or doing without the bodies that perform these actions, so the feminist, queer, biological
or cognitive science based, and traditional descriptive styles of philosophy will be covered in this article together. The
broader critique that is concerned with the impact of language and society on body in general is usually called postmodernism - but it could be said to include many of the theories covered
here.
Replacing mind/body dualism with situation/action binding
A deep concern with the Cartesian Other and a rejection of mind-body dualism is a broadly shared by body/action philosophers. Often, the school traces
its roots to Ludwig Wittgenstein who asked "What is left over
if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?"
"Solving this equation is supposed to reveal what makes the difference between a mere bodily movement and an action; and the
difference between mere movements and actions is what the philosophy of action seeks to identify." - David Velleman
However, the body is not a uniform construct suitable to only one type of abstraction - there are plant, animal, and human
bodies, which Alfred Korzybski in his General Semantics described as binding chemical, spatial, and temporal
quantities. He tried also to "encourage the use of more actional, relational terms. Instead of saying what something "is" we,
instead, describe what it does or how it relates to a greater whole. He also developed visual tools to teach humans to
differentiate between non-verbal and verbal levels, descriptive and inferential levels, et cetera." - Steven Lewis.
This early work was later extended to political extremes by some of the French "situationistes" opposed (and still
oppose) even the doctrine of falsifiability on the grounds that it is
biased by capitalism and its situational inertia: prior investment in infrastructural capital (test equipment, computers,
universities, military hardware) and instructional
capital (culture that insists that this infrastructure is useful). This is hard to differentiate from the critique of
scientism, but is an example of how far the "action critique" can go - Postmodernism itself began to challenge the foundation ontology of particle
physics and other sciences as a fit basis for self-knowledge, body-knowledge, truth. From this common root of doubt, other
Philosophical
movements flourished as well.
This article will focus only on the situation/action/body binding problems, and their relationship to the dualisms of gender,
seeing, saying, and doing.
Unlinking words from action
Like the situationistes or Foucault, Korzybski developed a profound belief that seeing, saying and doing were utterly
different; "He advocated 'thinking' on silent levels in terms of visual images" focusing on "differences between verbal and
non-verbal levels, between descriptions and inferences, between descriptions(2) about descriptions(1), between inferences(2) from
inferences(1), between affect(2) about affect(1), between what we see and the external stimuli themselves, between my
abstractions and your abstractions, et cetera." Orders of abstraction were a major concern, of which seeing and doing were only two.
"Korzybski developed a training program to teach people how to burst through their language habits to properly evaluate the
unique characteristics of their daily experiences. His goal was to help people evaluate less by the implications of their
everyday language (by intension) and more by the unique facts of a situation (by extension)." - Steven Lewis
In a similar vein today, Judea Pearl seeks an "algebra of doing" that would
complement the "algebra of seeing" that we have been trained to use and to believe. His method seeks to eliminate the objection
that Simpson's
Paradox raises to causality, and perhaps making seeing, saying, and doing
somewhat better integrated. However, his work barely touches the body.
How did non-body, non-action philosophy fail?
Robert H. Wozniak
notes that "Rene Descartes had made epistemology, the question of the relationship between mind and world, the starting point of philosophy. By
localizing the soul's contact with body in the pineal gland, Descartes had raised the question of the relationship of mind to the
brain and nervous system. Yet at the same time, by drawing a radical ontological distinction between body as extended and mind as pure thought, Descartes, in search of
certitude, had paradoxically created intellectual chaos." Such chaos persists to this day in such fields as "artificial intelligence", a virtual mass grave of failed
models, each of which in turn had attempted to put a mathematical model in top-down control of a body.
Anne Fausto-Sterling notes that "some feminist
theorists, especially during the last decade, have tried -- with varying degrees of success-- to create a non-dualistic account
of the body....", one of which, Judith Butler, asks "why has the idea of
materiality come to signify that which is irreducible, that which can support construction but cannot, itself be constructed."
This echoes the concerns with scientism or with physics, describing particles
supposed material but too small for anyone to see, providing a foundation ontology for other sciences, or for society - even the term "Standard Model" can be said to be usurping a central position in the language that should perhaps
belong to "that which can be constructed".
Many labels
Like Butler, many body philosophers are most noted for their concern with gender and sexuality. Some are labelled "feminist
philosopher" but many reject that term, arguing that there is nothing inherently feminine about the ideas, which seek to unify
various economic and ecology and psychology ideas with general systems theory.
Some, like Carol Moore are associated with the anti-globalization movement, various strains of
anarchism, and the French situationiste movement of 1968 centering on Michel Foucault. It is often hard for third party observers to distinguish those movement from
postmodernism, indeed Foucault is often characterized as belonging to
multiple movements, e.g. the modern study of the biology of homosexual and "queer" behavior, e.g.Simon LeVay, Dean H. Hamer, Peter Copeland. According to
Fausto-Sterling, in the many debates around these complex behaviors, "both sides contrasted words such as genetic, biological,
inborn, innate, and unchanging with ones such as environmental, acquired, constructed and choice."
Most philosophers consider it a mistake to consider feminist, queer or action philosophy separate from the more general
philosophical problems raised by the existence of the human body doing the seeing, the saying, or the doing:
The female body
However, it is also a mistake to avoid sexuality in this branch of philosophy:
Anne Fausto-Sterling, in "Sexing the Body", writes
"Euro-American ways of understanding how the world works depend heavily on the use of dualisms --pairs of opposing concepts,
objects or belief systems." and expands on "three related pairs --sex/gender, nature/nurture and real/constructed." Since some
actions (like impregnation, birthing, nursing) require many sustained bodily movements over time, and are exclusively associated
with one gender of body, the feminists often question whether "action" itself is real, or constructed.
Butler and Fausto-Sterling agree that "we have to talk about the material body. There are hormones, genes, prostates, uteri
and other body parts and physiologies that we use to differentiate male from female" and thus impose operational distinctions,
acting differently based on whether we perceive that body as fitting in the ontological categories of male and female, until "we
discover that matter is fully sedimented with discourses on sex and sexuality that prefigure and constrain the uses to which that
term can be put." But sexuality is only one concern - the embodied mind is another.
Embodied minds, volatile bodies
Elizabeth Grosz, in
"Volatile Bodies", thinks
out loud about how the body and the mind come into being together. To facilitate her project she uses the image of a Mobius strip
as a metaphor for the psyche. The Mobius strip is a topological puzzle, a flat ribbon, twisted once and then attached end to end
to form a circular twisted surface. One can trace the surface, for example, by imagining an ant walking along it. At the
beginning of the circular journey, the ant is clearly on the outside. But as it traverses the twisted ribbon, without ever
lifting its legs from the plane, it ends up on the inside surface. Grosz proposes that we think of the body --the brain, muscles,
sex organs, hormones and more as comprising the inside of the Mobius strip. Culture and experience, would constitute the outside
surface. But, as the image suggests, the inside and outside are continuous and one can move from one space to the other without
ever lifting one's feet off the ground."
Elizabeth A.
Wilson proposes that "Neural Geographies : Feminism and the Microstructure Of Cognition" are related to human minds in a
similar sense to the way that animal minds relate to ecologies - that epigenetics, especially the mother-child relationship, may be the proper place to study a mind's emerging. She seeks to
"develop a theory of mind and body --an account of psyche that joins libido to body ... incorporate into our world view an
account of how the brain works that is, broadly speaking, called connectionism." Many, e.g. Marxist feminist, queer and critical
theorists work by deliberately displacing biology, hence opening the body to social and cultural shaping. Wilson and
Fausto-Sterling reject this approach completely.
What to call them
A consistent problem in this school is that any label in any human language is dualistic: it "includes" those who use or
accept that label, "excludes" others, and becomes simply another dualism imposed by society upon bodies - describing actions out
of context of the situations in which they can arise.
The individual philosophers' views regarding body and action axioms are quite complex and difficult to summarize, in part
because many are embodied in specialized instructions, or because they deliberately exploit variance in language, reject prose or
academe, or deny the natural language dictionary as a foundation
ontology. Not all of these theorists accept the concepts of "model", "notation", "decision", "philosophy", "philosopher" or
(following Wittgenstein) "action" itself. Cooperation amongst these
theorists is generally confined to those seeking a reasonable method or an "algebra of doing", a study most identified with
Charles Ortiz and Judea Pearl.
A new way to see math?
Others focus on an refutation of falsifiability and of Number, in defiance of various academic and professional boundaries and conventions, as part of
a general critique of dominator culture and its categories, e.g.
that of John Zerzan, a major figure in the anti-globalization movement.
One influence of this "social constructivism" on the philosophy of mathematics has been to spark some closer investigation into the Erdös Number which tracks the collaborations of mathematicians writing
papers.
Like the questions Wittgenstein raised with Russell and with Turing, some of which Turing pursued into biology of neuron
expression itself, "the body questions" have also had some impact on the philosophy of mathematics, through semantics of cognition and counting by George Lakoff - originator of a cognitive science of mathematics, and Brian Rotman, author of "Signifying
Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero and Ad Infinitum", "The Ghost in Turing's Machine: Taking God out of Mathematics and Putting the
Body Back In", "Circa 2,000" and "The Technology of Mathematical Persuasion".
Body politics - the activists
The political science identified with body philosophy is that
of direct action and bodily commitment, and community grown based on shared risk of bodily harm, as practiced in the peace movement, e.g. the direct interposition of activists' bodies between warring parties. Some of these
characterize all morals not firmly grounded in bodies as profound evil:
"Jesus was murdered by people who were motivated by a contagious and pandemic emotional illness which had infected them. This
sickness has ravaged the human race for the past 5,000 years. It is the cause of patriarchy, rape, hatred and murder of gays and
lesbians, greed, loss of contact with, and destruction of, the environment, cruelty to animals, lust for power, Fascism, war, and
genocide." - Mark S. Bilk
Other activists, most notably Carol Moore, are less judgemental. She and
her followers characterize Gandhi as "an intuitive systems theorist"
and the process of satyagraha as an example of active defiance of Number and its implicit violence.
Certain feminist factions of the Green Movement, most notably those inspired by Jane
Jacobs and Marilyn Waring, exploit either or both of these views to
advocate bioregional democracy - which assigns ecoregions a status as bodies or actors, which they lack in the political science of a dominator culture. Or, some say, a patriarchy.
See also
References
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