> On Aug 18, 2025, at 12:17, Jon Zingale <[email protected]> wrote: > > In many ways, I am happy to see the fraying edges of the Enlightenment map, > that project that served as an existence proof for constructive ontologies, > but ultimately was never able to escape its religious beginnings.
This is an interesting claim, and something about it feels right to me. In the direction of: the Enlightenment included a kind of belief that its own worldview had a kind of reliable self-evidence that would make the transition into it one-way, or stable, or inevitable, or something. That wasn’t true, ever, but whatever it is that made people think it was true seems very close to the thing that makes people believe they understand what empiricism is now. My argument isn’t that there is no such thing as empiricism — I think there should be such a thing, and it’s good to have a placeholder term for it that we can attach insights to — or even that the things people believe they understand about empiricism aren’t “onto something”. But it floats more in mid-air than they recognize, and whatever they do possess, which they view as “actual empiricism, as it is and as it must be”, won’t carry as much weight as “the real thing” would if they actually possessed it. So when things are going easily and comfortably, we get drafted along in the current and think they are going well because we are driving. Then the current shifts, and we all get drafted in some very un-well direction. And the fact that we didn’t understand what was going on before, which made things okay for a while, leaves us without the tools to understand why the new direction is different from the old one, what is actually driving, and what the options or right responses are to a situation one would like to change. (And again, I don’t mean this in a reductio sense of “we don’t understand anything”. I think there is tons of low-hanging fruit that we do sort of understand and that could direct helpful action. But it is very partial, and not enough on its own to precipitate sea changes.) > The habit that to all appearances became over-specialized and ripe for > exploitation. While notions of limit and continuity are beautiful discoveries > or manifestations of the Enlightenment, they strike me as profoundly > idiosyncratic with respect to what perceptual tools/skills may exist to > better know the world. I am imagining how close Church and Von Mises got to > describing randomness. I am imagining the liberation energy Per Martin-Lof > would require to eventually develop his extension of their theses. Eric
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