Objective Knowledge Is Not Necessarily Objective Nor Knowledge

This is absolutely, absolutely, the day to bring this one back. https://t.co/dVzMbjdJnQ

— Liam Bright (@lastpositivist) November 12, 2021

Rudolf Carnap (via Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy):

This did not mean a rejection of the humanistic tradition, or of dimensions to values other than the scientific and engineering-oriented. Carnap took entirely for granted (so deeply that he hardly ever bothered to make it explicit) that literature, art, and music shaped people’s values and were closely connected with them. But these were for individuals to negotiate. Since his experience of the First World War, he had realized that the German intelligentsia’s political indifference, its overindulgence in humanistic individual values, had been partly to blame for the war. He had resolved, therefore, to attend more to the framework that all humans shared, and that formed the basis for their social and political cohabitation. Objective knowledge was, to him as to the Enlightenment, at the core of this shared framework. Practical (especially political) decisions should be informed ones, arrived at in the light of the best possible knowledge about the available choices and their consequences.

Sorry, I'm mostly making notes for later consideration.  I followed the Jacob Levy tweet about Kant (well, sorta about Kant) that was here and found that tweet above, which I followed to find the author of said tweet is a philosophy professor and student of Carnap (who didn't think much of Kant on the question of whether mathematics is how science is expressed; Carnap held it was how science is structured.  Trust me, it's a distinction with a difference, but a reminder to me why I prefer the "Continental" philosophers to the Anglo-American ones.  Carnap was clearly German, you will say.  Yes, he was part of the "Vienna Circle" which nobody bothers to mention in writing about Carnap that Wittgenstein blew up from the inside, and Godel finished off with his logic (Carnap was also a logician; Godel was just the superior logician, IMHO).  The Vienna Circle was fundamentally about logical positivism, which came largely from Russell and Whitehead, so the Anglo-American connection.  Stanford Encyclo. tells me a reappreciation of Carnap has begun since 2017, but so much of this sounds like WWI redux to me.  What's described in that paragraph above could, with slight changes of reference, be applied to Eliot, or Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, or any of the "Lost Generation."  And that's what intrigues me.

Carnap has a strong anti-metaphysical bent (and a strong anti-Heidegerian one, which against separates him from the Continental philosophers, who today almost all owe an acknowledged debt to Heidegger), according to Bright's twitter feed (I have no better authority than that, which information I offer only as full disclosure, not as argument).

The highlighted portion of the quote above, for example (getting back to my thesis), could apply to Hemingway, especially my favorite of his stories, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." Or all of Eliot's major works through "Ash Wednesday" (Prufrock, Waste Land, Hollow Men, if you're wondering; and all of them afterward, but with a different goal in mind). The italicized sentence after the bolded sentence is pretty much the po-mo enterprise in one sentence.  Objective knowledge was, per the writers and poets (and artists; Picasso's "Guernica" is the classic example, but Dada, Surrealism, etc.) blasted to bits in WWI (Yeats' "blood dimmed tide"), because that's where it had gotten everyone.  Eliot learned to rejoice having to construct something upon which to rejoice, a reconstruction he accomplished largely with the High Church of the Church of England.  Auden, who grew up in that church, remained a Christian (Eliot "converted", in a sense) and actually made more sense of Christianity in the modern world than Eliot ever did (who was constantly looking backwards on the subject.  "Murder in the Cathedral," anyone?  Auden never wrote anything so entombed in history.).  The last sentence in the quote, the underlined one, sounds good in theory, but in practice "the best possible knowledge" is pretty much determined by what knowledge you think best:  yours?  Mine?  A black American male's?  A woman's? A gay?  A lesbian?  Poor?  Rich?  You get the picture.  Aside from the fact that sentence sounds awfully close to "the greatest good for the greatest number."  And then we've arrived at Omelas. Or, as Wallace Shawn pointed out, following pretty much the same reasoning (because all reasoning starts with what we think is good, and that's always what is good for us first):

The perfectly decent person who follows a certain chain of reasoning, ever so slightly and subtly incorrect, becomes a perfect monster at the end of the chain.

And every chain of reasoning is "ever so slightly and subtly incorrect."  Alleging it is "objective" doesn't cure that defect, any more than trying to make it mathematical (the error of the logical positivists, as Godel and Wittgenstein established). And how does establishing mathematics as the structure of science, and science as the standard for all we can know about external reality, and eliminating metaphysics, help us with that?  In Tolstoy's deathless question:  "How should we then live?"

Everybody's looking for the answer to that question, and taking only the one that suits them first.