Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

stronger and stronger forms of emergence — of which, at the moment, we may only be dimly aware. Emergence currently seems still sort of magical, if not actually supernatural. But I think that if we got a better grip on emergence then this would move things forward.

Pragmatism

Pragmatism — the view that some particular ‘truth’ is only adopted so far as it is useful for some particular human project — has only been touched on briefly in earlier chapters. Pragmatism might seem like it is the most straight-forward way to look at the world — if it works, then it must be right — but pragmatism itself is a narrative. For one thing, there’s an underlying presumption that something being ‘useful for human projects’ is always going to be morally acceptable. We have to dig down deep into what is considered ‘pragmatic’ and ask what exactly makes a viable human project and how exactly should truth and knowledge be modelled to make sense of this? When we ask these questions I think we start to see that pragmatism is a rather questionable agenda and not the common-sense, straight-forward view of things it claims to be. There seems to be a need to appeal to a broader standard of morality in order to prove a theory that itself denies that broader standards exist. Pragmatism may even try to appeal to a broader standard of truth — which, at the same time, is never made explicit.

Post-modernism

I did not include post-modernism in the

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