Comments below:
> DM said:
> Not adding anything to experience seems a bit
> problematic to me. Because anything we might
> imagine, think, conceive, etc, is also experience
> and also real. If I imagine an orange elephant with
> green spots that is an aspect of my imaginative
> possibilities of experience. Is there such an
> elephant anywhere in the cosmos? Probably not. But
> if there is such an elephant in a UFO travelling to
> earth as we speak and then turns up for us to see,
> smell, hear and maybe ride, then such an elephant
> would be an actual elephant that can be experienced
> as such. Clearly we need a distinction between what
> is experienced in imagination and thought and what
> can be experienced as actual. I wonder if James'
> worry about adding things to experience is confusing
> the actual with the experienced? Of course what is
> only imagined and latter becomes actual can be very
> important, just take Einstein's ideas about
> relativity before he got round to putting them to
> paper.
>
> dmb says:
> Radical Empiricism doesn't deny the power of
> imagination, the usefulness of abstractions or the
> formulation of scientific theories. But until your
> colorful elephant lands and gets out of that UFO,
> we're not allowed to include it in our philosophical
> accounts.
Who said we're not allowed? This is similar to
your mirages are not real. Wouldn't colorful
elephant's in UFO's be a philosophy on fictions or
imaginations? We can clarify with distinctions here.
Works of fictions, the imagination, and thought
experiments are pointing in the same direction of a
certain classification. Philosophers, scientists, and
artists can do each of these.
[dmb]
> And its a good thing too. Einstein's
> mathematical efforts were checkable by
> mathematicians but most scientists also saw that the
> theory had to be tested by an actual experiment.
Einstein was a scientist. Don't see what your
point is here.
[dmb]
> As you know, one was finally devised and Einstein's
> theory was put to the test. But how does one test
> for the existence of an Absolute Spirit? Plato's
> Forms? Orange elephants with green spots or the
> space ship that carries it? Western Philosophy is
> apparently full of such untestible nonsense. And it
> looks like these fictions are almost always
> abstractions from life which are then given as the
> cause of that life from which it was abstracted....
I would say this goal of equating abstractions
with "...cause(s) of that life..." is a S/O paradigm.
Your focused upon fictions being only in the head, and
contrasting these fictions with 'out there'. The moq
is a philosophy and has a category for these fictions
that are only seemingly intellectual. Yet, the moq
equates intellectual patterns with static patterns,
and these are definitions of dynamic quality. This is
a philosophy that can discuss fictions without deeming
them unphilosophical due to the moq philosophy even
including these fictions in its' philosophy on the
intellectual level. Wasn't Lila somewhat fictional?
Did that whole story actually occur? Is there a
person named Phaedrus that went on a boat with a Lila
and they talked with a Rigel and a doll was buried
near the ocean? Matt has a good point about
redefining or redescribing reality with the use of a
certain philosophy. That's what philosophy does.
woods,
SA
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