On Logos

On Logos

Raymond Tallis

The extraordinary character of the sense-making animal may be highlighted by contrasting a wild animal looking for the origin of a threatening signal with a team of scientists listening into space to test a hypothesis about the Big Bang, having secured a large grant to do so.

This suggests another way of coming upon the miracle of our sense-making capacity. Consider the relative volumes of our heads (4 litres) and of the universe (4 x 1023 cubic light years). In our less-than-pin-pricks bonces, the universe comes to know itself as ‘the universe’ and some of its most general properties are understood. That this knowledge is incomplete does not diminish the achievement. Indeed, the intuition that our knowledge is bounded by ignorance, that things (causes, laws, mechanisms, distant places) may be concealed from us, that there are hidden truths, realities, modes of being, has been the necessary motor of our shared cognitive advance. Man, as the American philosopher Willard Quine said, is the creature who invented doubt – as well as measurement, provisional generalisation, and modes of active inquiry.

It takes two to tango. The fact that the world is intelligible clearly cannot be just down to us, otherwise our stories about how things hang together would be somewhere between myths and an evolving consensual hallucination. The balance between the contributions of what is out there and what is in us, between the extent to which the mind conforms to the universe and the universe has mind-compatible properties, is an issue that has had a long history, shared between theology and philosophy.

On Logos

Raymond Tallis

This comes face-to-face with science, when the functioning of mind is modeled as a process of input and outcomes.

 Secularists may smile at such responses to the extraordinary fact that we make sense of the world. But when we think of the alternatives – such as Kant’s claim in The Critique of Pure Reason that the experienced world makes sense because we fashion that world through our senses and understanding, or an evolutionary epistemology that argues that the fit between mind and world is a Darwinian necessity – the smile may fade and wonder return. The endeavour to understand the sense-making animal has a long way to go.- ibid

I think that all biota does "sense-making", from microbia to us, seems obvious.  The logic of real-world meanings correctly detected bares on fitness.  Measuring "sense-making" should be science's first task.  Who knows how the study of psi will help explain the subject, such as; what is it to understand a (any) circumstance in a meaningful way

It jumps out to me the dislocation of language, from the time of Kant's framework, where THE "understanding" is an outcome where the specific activity of meaning-making takes place.. To modern cognitive terms, where understanding is a complex electro-chemical event.   Understanding seems to be unimportant to be ---- understood in the system of meaning-making..