"In view of the experience that we have of another object, both things change---our knowledge and the object."

What is this supposed to mean? How can the object change? It remains the same regardless of our knowledge of it. Our knowledge is some internal mind representation and as such is a different object. One that obviously changes with new and different experience.

But the external object for which we arrange our internal objects is untouched by us. It does not change.

Gadamer is concened with meanings and understandings.

Take history. You can have a white racist or white celebratory account or one written from the experience of the indigenous people who were dispossessed by colonialism. Thus our knowledges changes

Our understanding of history--the object, the history of Australia ---changes--does it not? Even our understanding of what history is changes.

What confuses me is that much of the start of the Gadamer selection you link to is a critique of science for example his discussion of Bacon. In that context experience is empiricism and the objects are knowable unchangeable entities.

Then he gets to the part where the knowable objects are of the order you cite, and yet I feel that Gadamer has cheated me. He's elided very different types of knowing and entities and put them under the one discourse on experience.

With your example, the object is what happened in Australia. We cannot change that no matter who now gives an account of it. The history of Australia is not an object. It is a discourse. It is knowledge.

My perception of the world changes with my position. The world does not change. With all bases covered I can have perfect knowledge of the world. This is impossible practically but not theoretically. Importantly knowledge can get better and better and with better outcomes as we exploit this knowledge. As we cover more bases. As we listen to more viewpoints - as we share more information, as we learn to trust various sources, as we get better connected.

wbb:

There is a distinction between concept and reference because we *understand* such a distinction: it is part of our basic "grammatical" equipment. So, of course, we understand that there is an external world of causal processes independent of our perception and interpretation of it. But, equally, there is no reference without concepts to be referred, (including the concept of reference). What we experience of things is always codetermined by the concepts and their predications by which our references are mediated.

In that light, it won't really do to invoke the classical metaphysical definition of being as that which remains the same amidst all change, (something itself never directly experienced), and identify that with the supposed empirical object. The point here is that, though our concepts (pre-)inform our experience of things, further experience, whether "in the stream of life", through exploration, or through experimentation, can bring out hitherto unnoticed aspects of things, whereby our concepts of those things undergo revision, altering our interpretations cumulatively not just of particular things, but of the world of which they form a part. Further, this affects, as well, how we interact with the things of the world and how we go about in that world, which, in turn mediates and is mediated by our relations with ourselves and one another.

Hence to appeal to a singular invariant as an ultimate referent outside of our changing experience and knowledge of the world and of ourselves, what Gadamer calls "effective history", -(and the experience of an independently existent world and its implications is already fully a part of that)- is to appeal to an "x", an unknown, (paradoxically as the supposed basis or foundation of knowledge). Gadamer, in fact, fully includes sciences themselves within the purview of his hermeneutics, as all sciences presuppose a specific meaningful delimitation and interpretation of the object domain of experience to which their investigations apply, (which, being presupposed, is not independently and self-sufficiently supplied and justified by the science itself), and the development and "progress" of the science, precisely through the accumulation of empirical details, leads to revision of the basic concepts at the hermeneutical core of the specific science over time, such that science too is subject to the non-coincidence of arche and telos, of origin and end, that characterizes "effective history".

His point about Bacon was simply that the latter attempted to establish a conception of presuppositionless empirical experience through a discipline of methodical abstraction, when a) such a mode of experience is not the only, nor the primary mode of experience, and b) in attempting to establish unmediated experience as the presuppositionless basis of science, (which is very different from the way that Newtonian science was eventually to become established and operate), he could "succeed" only by forgetting the presuppositions at which his own methodical efforts where aimed, since there is really no such thing as "unprejudiced", unmediated, presuppositionless experience, no perspective on all perspecctives that is itself perspectiveless. Our basic experience is always informed by the "prejudices", really, pre-judgments, of our inherited stock of meanings, concepts and practices.

And there is no way out of this circle of "prejudices", other than to accept the perspective we inhabit by becoming reflectively aware of them to the fullest extent possible, which is not at all to say that there is no distinction to be made between rational and irrational, Enlightened and superstitious prejudices, but rather that rational Enlightenment occurs through the recuperation of the awareness and potentials of historical change. On the other hand, it won't do to rest the epistemic claims of science on the fact that "it works", on the crude pragmatic criterion of "success". Whereas one could argue perhaps that a true idea would have a greater probability of effectiveness than a false idea, one does have to look far and wide in history to find examples of the pragmatic success of false ideas, and their eventual failure scarcely compensates for the costs endured, nor offers a guarantee of the future immunity of our current endeavors.

But more importantly, such a view reduces science, against its own claims to epistemic validity, to a mere means, eliding all questions of ends. This is not at all to deny the fact that science "works", but only to raise the question of how it works and to what ends, to open up and render amenable to question its motivating sources and justifying reasons and their relation to other modes of experience, needs and ends.

Finally, invoking the Kantian ideal of the infinite progress of science carries with it and reiterates a fundamentally theological idea and heritage: the idea that we could somehow fundamentally, totally and wholely enter into truth as an absolute, if only as as an asymptotic ideal. But we shall never, at least not within any experience of this world, "enter" into absolute truth as such; we can never surmount the conditionality of our validity claims, however much we may struggle to hold on the unconditional moment intrinsic to the idea of validity as such. Whatever truths we might enter into with each other in this world will be partial and marked by finitude, fatally incomplete and without any guarantee of wholeness, satisfaction, or integrity.

But that awareness is precisely the criterion by which the promise of progress within the "political economy" of science, within the context of the struggles and conflicts to sustain and enhance a just and humane political community, should be measured.

Thanks John. I follow nearly all you say, and I think I can go along with it all, too. Especially thanks, for not using the word - dialectics - once.

I suppose I come at all this with a very pragmatic purpose. I do not know the ins and outs of the various philosophical concepts that you deploy here, but I am desperately looking for a defense of the very idea that "the promise of progress within the political economy of science, within the context of the struggles and conflicts to sustain and enhance a just and humane political community" is not only doable but still the main game round our parts.

I get the feeling that there is this schadenfreudistic post-modernist movement that would wish nihilism upon us all as punishment for the sins of our ideological and self-assured fathers.

I instinctively reject nihilism as I never see it in all the great works of the majority of people whose invention and stoicism continues despite the continuing carnage of history.

I feel that unless we can enthusiastically engage with each other to "enter into" truths in common, then our joint tenancy will be fatally combative.

I do not argue that science is the answer to everything, even if I do believe it is the way to get to the closest version of truth about material things. (And despite the presuppositions of its epistemology, its object of enquiry is unmoved, and so we constantly adapt the presuppositions even if not asymptotically at least in the right direction of that object.)

Ethics, though, which is what I'm interested in, is a thing that we can do much more with in my opinion. At least a regards ethics we can make some of it up, as we choose, as opposed to the material world. Ethics is a human possession/invention while also a part of our make-up and not entirely under our control. We have biological drivers that give core values as well as core problems.

A rational ethics would recognise that we are not individuals any more than we are only members of a human society and that therefore ethics is ordering our relations to balance the individual freedom with collective harmony.

Finding the word "infinite" with progress may betray our theological heritage, but strip that word and replace with "painful", and I think the Modernist project is viable.