Thursday, September 5, 2013

Confirmation bias and bad fits

You know that human propensity to make everything fit your worldview whether it does or not? It's called confirmation bias. We all do it but some are more apt to change their worldview when confronted with facts contrary to it. (Remember these studies?) This is what I often see even in so-called evolutionary circles when we might expect them to be more open to changing views on the basis of new evidence, since they tend toward the more educated and more 'liberal' orientations. But this is overirdden by our lower evolutionary impulses especially when we adopt metaphysical systems that arose in those wordspaces. So it is with Wilber's mixed bag of both metaphysical and postmetaphysical enactments. And those trying to incorporate and recontextualize metaphysical frames into the postmetaphysical.

One example is Joseph commenting in this IPS post. My response follows:


"...however, she makes an understandable mistake."

Only if what she says has to fit into a magical-mythical formulation like the Sepher Yetzirah and Cube, as if they were laid down by the immutable law of God. Oh yeah, that is how they both started...

On a more mundane level, I think Semetsky's notion of 0 being Peirce's Firstness makes sense, as I noted about it earlier in the thread (here and following). That is, if it is more akin to the withdrawn c(h)ore(a) of all aspects of semiotics, from signifier to signified to referent which should be the 'center' of a model as in Bryant's Borromean diagram. True, it doesn't 'fit' into the Cube that way. But it wouldn't fit into Peirce's Firstness either if it was taken not as the withdrawn but correlated with one of the 3 aspects of signs. Same goes for Wilber trying to fit the referent into the LL quadrant. We get too attached to our models so that everything must fit nice and tidy whether they do or not. If not, then the model should change to fit the facts on the ground,* not the other way around.

* Aka postmetaphysical enacted worldspace, if we must speak kennilingus. Allelujia for (earlier) Bhaskar and Morin (and Derrida and DeLanda and Deleuze and Bryant etc.) entering into the debate.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.