DMB, Matt, David, et al (Some really good stuff here I agree with, and great to learn the James / Dewey story along with you.)
Somewhere earlier in the thread Matt said "[Your diferences] are around the area of the notion of "pure experience," but I'm still not convinced that it makes landslides of difference." And you continue to debate and contrast pure and impure forms of experience with the help of James and Dewey (and Pirsig). I probably sounded dismissive earlier when I suggested I couldn't really see what was so "radical" about radical empricism, but I guess I'm saying what was radical when James envisaged it doesn't seem so radical in a post-Pirsig light. Radical empricism or not, this is ultimately a pragmatism where, as you quote Dewey saying, the distictions may be moot, and the consequences that follow are what really matter. Consequences rely on communication - interactions and/or language. DMB, you said later "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 can understand that. I know I often appear to reduce things to language - use of language and metaphor, as opposed to definitional issues - but clearly the world IS more than language. Pragmatically though, communication of subject/object interactions through higher level subject/subject language or mental represetation must involve concepts. That's where the (consequential) action is. PS an aside - earlier DMB you railed at the suggestion that from the perspective of what's real, there is no difference between illusion and reality. Here you quote Dewey saying "... illusions and hallucinations are just as real ..." Interestingly that thread continued into a reference to Bergson suggesting that the negation "not real" (as in what might be called illusory) said nothing about ontology / existence in reality, but said everything about one subject communicating with another. In a word - language. Regards Ian 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/
