Prof. Alexander Kanev will present his research proposal on the topic: "Human Understanding: Finitude, Incommensurability, and Plurality" on 26 November 2015 (Thursday) at 16:30h at CAS Conference Hall.

Summary:

The aim of my project is to shed some light on human understanding by discussing the nature of its limitations. There are diverse practices of understanding of the world, viz. science, art, religion and philosophy. I shall suggest that all of them have substantial limitations but I shall deal mostly with the confines of scientific discourses. Furthermore, I shall trace the bounds of the different forms of understanding of reality back to the fact that any finite way of making sense of things tends to conceal fundamental conditions and possibilities of existence. As a result, there emerge discrepancies between our understanding of what is (im)possible and what is (im)possible in reality. I call the phenomenon of these discrepancies modal incommensurability. It was beautifully captured in John Haldane's famous thought that "the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." I argue further that the limitations of our practices of making sense of things are not immutable but flexible and historical in nature: we do make progress in our understanding of reality. In order to facilitate intellectual and social development, we need to embrace a thoroughgoing pluralism about the diverse practices of understanding – not only in political and cultural life but also in hard sciences and religion. Importantly, pluralism has to be clearly distinguished from relativism. It does not relativize truth to conceptual schemes or points of view and does not deny that science moves toward objective truth. Rather, pluralism insists that (1) even the most successful theories and discursive practices are still limited in important aspects and thus are only partially true and (2) that the best way to realise and overcome their limitations is to have a plurality of competing accounts of the same domain of objects. Pluralism is thus the best way to avoid both the pitfalls of relativism and the trap of dogmatism.