a few philosophical conclusions

by Sebastian Benthall

  1. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are a converged epistemic paradigm that is universally valid. Education in this field is socially prized because it is education in actual knowledge that is resilient to social and political change. These fields are constantly expanding their reach into domains that have resisted their fundamental principles in the past. That is because these principles really are used to design socially and psychologically active infrastructure that tests these principles. While this is socially uncomfortable and there’s plenty of resistance, that resistance is mostly futile.
  2. Despite or even because of (1), phenomenology and methods based on it remain interesting. There are two reasons for this.
    1. The first is that much of STEM rests on a phenomenological core, and this gives some of the ethos of objectivity around the field instability. There are interesting philosophical questions at the boundaries of STEM that have the possibility of flipping it on its head. These questions have to do with theory of probability, logic, causation, and complexity/emergence. There is a lot of work to be done here with increasingly urgent practical applications.
    2. The second reason why phenomenology is important is that there is still a large human audience for knowledge and for pragmatic application in lived experience knowledge needs to be linked to phenomenology. The science of personal growth and transformation, as a science ready for consumption by people, is an ongoing field which may never be reconciled perfectly with the austere ontologies of STEM.
  3. Contemporary social organizations depend on the rule of law. That law, as a practice centered around use of natural language, is strained under the new technologies of data collection and control, which are ultimately bound by physical logic, not rhetorical logic. This impedance mismatch is the source of much friction today and will be particularly challenging for legal regimes based on consensus and tradition such as those based on democracy and common law.
  4. In terms of social philosophy, the moral challenge we are facing today is to devise a communicable, accurate account of how a diversity of bodies can and should cooperate despite their inequality. This is a harder problem than coming up with theory of morality wherein theoretical equals maintain their equality. One good place to start on this would be the theory of economics, and how economics proposes differently endowed actors can and should specialize and trade. Sadly, economics is a complex field that is largely left out of the discourse today. It is, perhaps, considered either too technocratic or too ideologically laden to take seriously. Nevertheless, we have to remember that economics was originally and may be again primarily a theory of the moral order; the fact that it is about the pragmatic matters of business and money, shunned by the cultural elite, does not make it any less significant a field of study in terms of its moral implications.