Matt said to dmb: I don't struggle with radical empiricism per se. The part that strikes me as odd is how the notion of "pure experience" even survives once one becomes a pragmatist/radical empiricist. If we follow Dewey in thinking there's no difference between experience and reality (which I take to be the purest articulation of the contention of radical empiricism), then how does one wedge in a difference between pure and unpure experience/reality, one that doesn't look like the appearance/reality distinction? But more importantly, what would that distinction do if it wasn't leaning on the A/R distinction?
dmb says: For reasons that are probably obvious to you, Rorty will be among the last thinkers covered in my pragmatism class and so I think it would be better to save that part of the conversation for another day. At this point, I'll just take up some issues related to pure experience. It seems to me that James, Dewey and Pirsig all equate experience with reality and all three are quite explicit in attacking SOM. I was astonished once again, just yesterday, when I read a piece of Experience and Nature in which Dewey rejects it in exactly those terms, subjects and objects. And, as you know, the distinction between appearance and reality requires a subject-object distinction or something like it. As you mentioned elsewhere, the distinction we get instead is going to be along the lines of Pirsig's static/dynamic. Those are the terms James uses as well. Near the end of Lila's chapter 29, Pirsig says, "Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical: it logicall preceds this distinction. In his last unfinished work, Some Problems of Philosophy, James had condensed this description into a single sentence. 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing'." Granted, his opposition of "concepts and reality" here COULD be construed as an appearance-reality distinction, but its also easy to see how they're just different kinds of experience. Neither is priviledged as more real than the other. Dewey even says this about mistakes, illusions, hallucinations. Those are counted as real too. Mistakes, illusions and hallucinations are just as real as the subsequent corrections, disillusionments and the coming down from the acid trip. So anyway, pure experience is just the first and most basic kind within a whole range of experiences. Its that as yet undivided flow and flux and the concepts and words by which we know the world in the cognitive sense are that giant web of habits that have grown from it. I guess this is where language would fit into the picture. I'm not sure how, though. I don't see how its possible to have a world of nothing but language. Granted, as long as we're thinking and using concepts there is no escape, but in the hands of guys like Rorty this is not supposed to be some kind of idealism. I figure there must be some kind of scientific and materialistic assumptions at work here. There something about the refusal to do metaphysics that doesn't seem in sync with what looks like a rather totalizing attitude about language, you know? I'm getting way ahead of myself, but the idea seems to work much better WITH pure experience than without. As Ken Wilber points out, a diamond will cut glass no matter what words we use for "diamond", "cut" and "glass" whereas words can cut things only figuratively. This is at the heart of why pragmatist insist that experience be the test of our concepts. That's the reality check and you just gotta have one, no? This, I think, it what leads Rorty to assert agreement as possible truth, the only reality check we can have. I'm not so sure it just a matter of different idioms. The linguistic turn certainly nuked the myth of the given, but radical empiricism does too. Just for fun, here Dewey is saying what Pirsig said, that traditional sensory empiricism isn't empirical enough... Its from "Experience and Philosophic Method, which is the first chapter, I think, from his book "Experience and Nature". "Non-empirical metod starts with a reflective product as if it were primary, as if it were the originally 'given'. To non-empirical method, therefore, object and subject, mind and matter are separate and independent. Therefore it has on its hands the problem of how it is possible to know at all; how the acts of mind can reach out and lay hold of objects defined in antithesis to them. Naturally it is at a loss for an answer since its premises make the fact of knowledge both unnatural and unempirical. One thinker turns metaphysical materialist ..another turns psychological idealist ...schools pile one intellectual complication on another... The first and perhaps the greatest difference made in philosophy by adoption respectively of empirical or non-empirical method is, thus, the difference made in what is selected as original material. To a truly naturalistic empiricism, (Dewey's version of radical empiricism) the moot problem of the relation of subject and object is the problem of what consequences follow in and for primary experience from the distinction of the physical and mental from each other." Ooops. Gotta go. dmb _________________________________________________________________ Boo! Scare away worms, viruses and so much more! Try Windows Live OneCare! http://onecare.live.com/standard/en-us/purchase/trial.aspx?s_cid=wl_hotmailnews 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/
