Misunderstandings and Theories for Epistemic Integration

   

  In the preface to the Princeton Companion to Mathematics, the editors state that the aim of the book was to improve the communication among modern mathematicians which frequently do not understand the papers of one another even if they are from areas that appear to be quite close. They do recognize that it is not a healthy state of affairs though it is the unavoidable result of the overspecialization of the mathematical science. Such precariousness of the science it is even more unsettling since mainstream epistemology still considers the mathematization of all and every science its ultimate goal. The idea is the development of a Characteristica Generalis- in the Leibnizian tradition-, a general language that would unify our intellectual experiences. Obviously we cannot have it both ways, for the unconnected character in praxis of the different fields of mathematics and the further mathematization of all fields of knowledge, which would break up in new mathematical approaches (like those that today are developing from life sciences) would only finish with any possibility whatsoever to understand each other in the more basic epistemological terms; by these I mean, beyond basic arithmetic. In fact, in the so poorly called humanities (for mathematics is divine), we are past misunderstandings thriving in an endlessly schizophrenic discourse of mythologization of identities which has no epistemic interest as it is presented, although it has a clear cathartic value.

   The traditional contempt with which modern science has treated philosophy since the XX century, laughing at the incapacity that philosophers have shown through the centuries to understand each other or agree upon the more basic principles, contrary to the orderly and undisputable character of proper geometric argumentations, has burst in the face not only of the laughing scientist but also in the very core of epistemology. The need for different methods when thinking different matters was already discussed by Aristotle. Logic was the common tool for thinking, but only to a point, for there was a more general heuristics, rather implicit in the philosophical approach to experience which involved an inquisitive mind, and more important, a belief in the capacity of human mind for thinking and finding solutions for the problems of our life and the unveiling of the structure of the universe. Logic is a necessary condition of our thinking, not the formalized calculus, but the logic implicit in our syntax, in the inductions of experience, in the analogies that spontaneously we trace in relations and the need that we have for no contradictions. It is easier to proceed consistently in calculus and closed games, as long as we do not forget basic semantic catches, as the one exemplified by Tarski’s theorem, while in the Lebenswelt, the old city of our languages has grown in so many contradictory and twisted directions by mere diachronic aggregation that we can hardly trace minimum consistent map of our experience.

   The integration of our experience in consistent and encompassing myths is a must for our mental health and the survival of our civilization. It obviously has to be an epistemic linguistic construction, though not a general theory from which we could deduce any other theory, as it is the persistent (and expensive) dream of reductionist physics, with all its aporiae, but rather a theory about our narratives of construction of meaning, which would include the economic actions of our own mythico-ritual axis as basic valuations for the metaphysical ones. Such construction has to be critic and ludic, in order not to step in self-contradictions or become another narrative of domination.