Hey DMB, In your response to my post that took up some of the things I think we agree on, you said:
"I'll go to James again here. ... His complaints were about absolute idealism and I'm not sure if the radical subjectivity you suggest above is quite the same thing. ... "Maybe this is a long way to go about it, but here I'm saying that James, and I think Pirsig too, does assert that there is something like "a reality that exists beyond" what our minds can concieve, namely pure experience. This is the 'stuff' around which we form the static patterns of beliefs. Its not objective in the usual, material sense, but it offers resistence in experience such that the idea of matter is quite workable. It makes sense to classify experience that way but the real reality check is experience and pure experience is definately part of that equation." Matt: I'm not sure what kind of "radical subjectivity" you're attributing to me here. I was simply taking a couple metaphysical examples, "pure idealism" and "scientific realism," and trying to show how the pragmatist outlook we agree on shoves them aside. The reference to a Matrix-like outlook was simply to point out that the only way Cartesian-paradigm skeptics get their force is by imaging that there might be a reality beyond our experience. (Neo only experiences the Matrix, until one day he wakes up sees reality as it really is. What if our reality is really like that, the Cartesian skeptic says, what if reality is totally different from the appearances of our current experience?) I'm certainly not advocating that there is no reality outside of our minds. I'm suggesting that the opposition between what's in our minds and what's "out there" is one of the false dichotomies that James and Dewey and the rest want to get rid of. If you accept the Cartesian dichotomy between our mind and the rest of reality, then the Problem of Other Minds that still attracted attention throughout most of the last century still looks like a real problem. And like you said, for most people all you need to do is to talk to somebody to alleviate that concern. That's the pragmatist outlook we both agree on. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Help yourself to FREE treats served up daily at the Messenger Café. Stop by today. http://www.cafemessenger.com/info/info_sweetstuff2.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_OctWLtagline Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
