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63 Chapter Three Symbolic Engagement I. Interpretation as Engagement The epistemology of Philosophical Theology derives from American pragmatism with a heavy influence from Confucianism. Knowing, according to this epistemology, is a natural interaction of an interpretive organism with an environment.The interpretation allows the interpreter to discriminate what is valuable (or disvaluable) in the environment so as to engage it better. Knowledge consists of the habits of interpretation an interpreter has ready at hand to engage the environment. Such habits are constantly amended by feedback when they come into play, and so “knowledge” is constantly being shifted. No starting point or foundation for knowledge exists:We always are working with the habits we have. Epistemology therefore is better understood as the study of “learning” rather than “knowledge” in any fixed sense. Some habits are so ingrained, so reinforced by experience, and so steadied by long use, that we do not doubt them and take them to be just plainly true and certain.1 Only occasionally are deeply ingrained habits of interpretation overthrown . The slow realization in early modern Western culture (and most other cultures) that Earth is not the center of the universe is an example of the overthrow of an idea that had been taken for granted for millennia and had seemed obvious and certain. So is the realization during the past two centuries in Western cultures that women are not inferior to men or in need of male domination. This pragmatic epistemology stands in sharp contrast with the representationalist epistemologies of much late modern and postmodern Western philosophy. Descartes proposed that mentality is a substance that is complete in itself, with infinite closure. He also proposed that physical reality is corporeal in the sense that it has geometric extension and patterns of movement and force that can be represented mathematically. For Descartes and the glori- 64 v Ultimates ous tradition that was persuaded by him, the problem of knowledge is to understand how the mind can represent the physical world. For, there would seem to be no place outside of but connected to both mentality and extension from which the representations in mind could be compared with the extensive properties they purported to represent. Some Cartesian descendants fixed on consciousness and attempted to understand the extended world through that; his present heirs in this line are to be found in Continental philosophy.2 Other Cartesian descendants focused on the material side, as conceptions of matter have evolved, and would be the scientific materialists of today. Neither line of development has given a satisfactory answer to the dilemma posed by Descartes, namely, to think together the physical universe that we are coming to understand through science and the mind which has such subtlety and complexity.3 Our pragmatic epistemology circumvents the dilemma of representationalist thinking. It construes knowing as a part of nature, evolved in animals, and evolved to a high state in animals with semiotic systems. By the same token, nature is taken to be that which is found, interpreted, and engaged by natural interpreters. The understanding of knowing is about how our natural cognitive faculties engage the environment. The understanding of nature is about what our cognitive faculties allow us to discriminate and appreciate concerning things in the environment, assuming that our cognitive and emotional apparatus is part of the natural environmental systems. Interpretation is by means of signs and what we can appreciate in the environment depends on the signs we have. Animals, including human beings, would not have evolved without the development of signs that distinguish predators from neighbors, food from toxins, and safe environments from the perilous. Signs are intimately tied to neural structures. Reptiles and amphibians lack the neural capacities to rotate images of objects in their imagination so as to plan to go around and sneak up on them from behind: a frog just sits on a lily pad and darts its tongue to catch the prey that comes within its vision. Mammals can plan sneak attacks; the attempt to envision frogs sneaking must be a primordial instance of mammalian humor. Human beings have signs that are arranged in semiotic systems so that one imaginative sign can mean another imaginative sign and that language is possible within which we can talk and think about things without directly engaging them. Far beyond sneak attacks, we can cooperate in complicated social living. Human cultures have semiotic systems that consist of networks of signs that are related in many ways. Many thinkers have taken language...

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