0124 Phenomenology brings these statements to consciousness.

Section 2.7 introduces three phenomenologists.  Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961).  These academics resist behavioral approaches to human agency in a European civilization that is increasingly mechanized.  Indeed, mechanics serves as a metaphor… er… model for um… what the triumphalist biologists are saying that the noumenon must be.

Husserl develops a method for ascertaining what the noumenon must be.  The method brackets out both the mechanistic models of the natural sciences and popularized pseudo-models that seem like mechanisms, but really are not.  The method also brackets out common opinions.

So, I suppose that the phenomenalist intellect replaces the positivist intellect.

But, there is a caveat.

In order to retain academic respectability in the face of triumphalist scientists (who the phenomenologist co-opts), the rule of the positivist intellect still applies.  Metaphysics is to be treated as if it is not metaphysics.

0125 The result is the nearly the same as the nightmare produced when choice [habit] wish serves as the noumenal overlay.  The empirio-schematic judgment still makes observations and measurements. Novel disciplinary languagesare coined in order to build novel “mechanistic” models. 

At least, successful models no longer overlay their respective noumena.

Rather, each model sort of melds in with its noumenon, since the noumenon is a guess made by someone trained in the arts of phenomenology.

0126 I suspect that there are two ways to approach the art of phenomenology.

That is to say, there seems to be two ways to express the phenomenologist intellect.

Okay, there are actually three (F, G and H).

0127 One (F), section 2.8 covers the hermeneutic way.  The art of phenomenology involves interpretation.  Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Wilhelm Dilthey (1914-2006), and Hans-George Gadamer (1900-2002) are implicated.  These intellectuals push hard against the rule of the positivist intellect.  Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1927) goes as far as to say that the methods of the natural sciences do not apply to human phenomena.

0128 Of course, that doesn’t work.

Grants to government funding agencies require a section on methods.

And, the empirio-schematic judgment is the only method that sells.

After all, it is what ought to be for the Positivist’s judgment.

The truth be damned!

Or better, ignored.

0129 Two (G), section 2.9 covers all the implications of that last statement.  The truth of human subjectivity is the reason why empirio-schematic objectivity is well… dehumanizing.  Human subjectivity is how humans exist.  Without that “existence”, phenomenologists could not practice their methods.  The two intellectuals most implicated in the existentialist approach are Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973).

The truth is that humans cannot be broken down into mathematical and mechanical models.

But, they can be broken by them.

0130 Three (H), section 2.10 offers an alternative formulation, “What if humans can be broken down into automata?  If so, then being broken by automata is not so bad, because humans are automata, too.”

Isn’t that the truth?

0131 So, what are “automata”?

The word, “auto-” means “self”.

What about “-mata”?

Does that mean “governing”?

0132 With the cybernetic approach, the path to biosemiotics becomes obvious.  Even though cybernetics returns to the Positivist’s judgment for biologists, certain modifications have been made.  In a hat tip to phenomenology, the cybernetic intellect allows metaphysical mechanisms (corresponding to Aristotle’s formal and final causes) as long as they aren’t “metaphysical” (that is, associated to religious presuppositions).

Yes, the term, “metaphysical” has fallen on hard times.  Aristotle coins the term to mean the causalities that cannot be accounted for by material and efficient causalities.  Scholastics take the term to formulate religious doctrine.  Then, unscrupulous modern intellectuals confound Aristotle and the scholastics, in such a way as to discredit both.

Why?

How else is one to satisfy the rule of the positivist intellect?  Metaphysics is not allowed.

0133 Like phenomenologists, cyberneticists maintain the appearance of following the rule, while skirting around it.

For example, Claude Shannon (1916-2001) invents of a way to measure information based on the degradation of a signal between sender and receiver.  This theoretical advance takes formal and final causes as constants (so to speak), so the variable habit of transmission can be modeled according to the phenomena of a choice (to send a signal) and a wish (to receive a signal).

Or, is it the other way around?

0134 In 1948, Norbert Weiner (1894-1964) publishes a book titled Cybernetics, opening the door to systems and information theory.  How do we control (that is, habituate) communication in the animal and the machine?

Observe and measure their wishes and choices.

Then build mechanistic models of their habits.

0135 Here is a picture of how the biologist’s Positivist’s judgment gets modified.

For example, consider a computer that tells me that I have typed in a digital ID number that is not permitted by the Institute for Corralling Humans.

Well, my wish is to type in a number that will allow me to register for my daily allotment of feed.

And my choice is that I must type the number again, even though I am still hungry from my last paltry allotment.