DM said to dmb: What an odd blind spot you have about how language works. Ham is entitled to make a distinction any way he likes. A good dose of Rorty would help you here. Ham says he calls what we sense prior to conceptualisation a sensation and what we conceptualise experience-proper. I assume he has his reasons for doing this. You and I may decide it does not work for us, it has no use, we can make better sense of our sensations and experiences with different language but it is easy to understand the distinction, it might have its uses. It is up to Ham to show what that use is. If we are gonna walk the MOQ walk we need to use lines of argument and justification that don't contradict our MOQ take on language. That's my view. You damage debate with these lapses.
dmb says: Yes, I realize that Ham is defining experience as conceptual. That's what makes no sense and that's exactly my problem with Rorty. (The text is conceptual and its text all the way down.) As I see, this objection does not damage the debate. It IS the debate. Defining experience that way doesn't just fail to work for me, although that's true too, it doesn't work in the context of the MOQ. As I understand it, James and Dewey thought that definition made no sense and that defintion of experience excludes dynamic quality from the MOQ, construes it outside of experience. And in the MOQ that would put quality outside of reality. That is wildly opposed to the notion that reality is nothing but experience. That's why Ham's definition, my hair-brained friend, makes no sense. And neither does your defense of it. A dose of Rorty would help and you're sending Rorty to the rescue for Ham and the MOQ? Even if that were true, you gotta realize that is not going to persuade me. When have I ever said anything positive about Richard Rorty? I mean, dude, consider your audience here. This is so wrong that it becomes comedy. Reminds me of the time Ian took me for a bible-thumping Jesus freak. He confessed this just as I was about to deliver the "Fun with Blasphemy" paper. Or was it just after? In any case, it was funny and so is your advice here. Besides, just in terms of common sense and conventional definitions, it makes no sense to say that what we endure, enjoy or otherwise go through is not an experience. If sensations are felt or lived through in what sense is that not an experience? Whatever we feel, face, undergo is experience. The certainty Descartes could establish without the help of God was his own doubt about everything else. All he could know for sure was the experience of doubting. His existence is an iffy deduction compared to that. Can't Ham's distinction be made without refusing to admit that sensations are experienced in some way? Isn't it simply more intelligible to distinquish between cognitive and non-cognitive experience rather than assert that one is not experience at all? As Dewey says, knowledge is not the only kind of experience and the there is a big difference between having an experience and KNOWING you had an experience. If anything, we should reserve the word for the actual having of experience and we should say the subsequent reflections and conceptions are something else derived from the real thing. That doesn't really work either, but I'm just saying that if we really HAD TO exclude one or the other, I would still object to Ham's definition. But maybe that's just how I define the meaning of the phrase "makes no sense". And since you such a good Rortian, you'll allow me to define things however I like. _________________________________________________________________ Climb to the top of the charts! Play Star Shuffle: the word scramble challenge with star power. http://club.live.com/star_shuffle.aspx?icid=starshuffle_wlmailtextlink_oct 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/
