Matt said to dmb:
The distinction between "had" and "known" experience: I have no problem with
that distinction. Never have. This is the distinction I've elaborated as
Rorty's distinction between the "space of causes" and the "space of reasons".
Knowledge (or at least, propositional knowing-that) occurs within the logical
space of reasons, of language, of reflective experience, which is different
than having an experience, being caused to move your arm because it was on a
stove and having a reason to move your arm ("It was hot!"). (I'll just
register here that I don't understand your problem with causation, which you've
shown every time I bring this Sellarsian distinction up: I thought Pirsig
showed us how to move back and forth between causation and pre-conditional
valuation.)
dmb says:
It seems to me that these two "spaces" are a modified version of the same
dualism we find in SOM. I had to look it up because I don't recall any of your
elaborations and don't recall any encounter with the terms before now. Feel
free to correct my embryonic understanding of this distinction, but I really
don't see how it can be equated with Dewey's "had" and "known" experience. For
example, I found this in Simon Blackburn's "Julius Caesar and George Berkely
Play Leapfrog":
1. Early in Mind and World we are introduced to the Sellarsian concept of the
space of
reasons, and made to face up to the idea that only conceptual items, things
within that
space, are capable of justifying or being justified. The idea of the Given is
the enemy, and
The idea of the Given is the idea that the space of reasons, the space of
justifications or
warrants, extends more widely than the conceptual sphere. The extra extent of
the space
of reasons is supposed to allow it to incorporate non-conceptual impacts from
outside
the realm of thought. But we cannot really understand the relations in virtue
of which a
judgement is warranted except as relations within the space of concepts:
relations such
as implication or probabilification, which hold between potential exercises of
conceptual
capacities. The attempt to extend the scope of justificatory relations outside
the
conceptual sphere cannot do what it is supposed to do.
McDowell goes on to elaborate:
What we wanted was a reassurance that when we use our concepts in judgement, our
freedom—our spontaneity in the exercise of our understanding—is constrained from
outside thought, and constained in a way that we can appeal to in displaying the
judgements as justified. But when we make out that the space of reasons is more
extensive
than the conceptual sphere, so that it can incorporate extra conceptual
impingements from
the world, the result is a picture in which constraint from outside is exerted
at the outer
boundary of the expanded space of reasons, in what we are committed to
depicting as a
brute impact from the exterior.
dmb continues:
Leaving aside the MOQ's re-conception of causation, the problem that concern's
me here is that Sellar's dualism doesn't really reject the Cartesian
problematic. In rejecting the myth of the Given, he is rejecting the
possibility of finding justifications in the causal realm. It doesn't reject
the gap between mind and world so much as declares it forever uncrossable. If I
understand what's going on here, Rorty's emphasis on intersubjective agreement
as a replacement for objectively verifiable truth is based on that declaration.
No?
This is from Simon Blackburn's journal article "Relativism and the Abolition of
the Other":
from p. 230 of the Investigations,
Wittgenstein says ‘Our interest certainly includes the correspondence
between concepts and very general facts of nature.’ I see this as a corrective
to the dualistic doctrine of the division between the ‘space of reasons’ and
the ‘space of causes’, a division which, far from helping to dissolve Kant’s
problem, renders it effectively insoluble. The enemy here is nicely summed
up by the Davidsonian formula that nothing can justify a belief except
another belief.
If we can generalize the moral of this kind of passage, we will approach the
position forcibly described by Richard Rorty:
There is no way in which tools can take one out of touch with reality.
No matter whether the tool is a hammer or a gun or a belief or a state-
ment, tool-using is part of the interaction of the organism with its envi-
ronment. To see the employment of words as the use of tools to deal
with the environment, rather than as an attempt to represent the
intrinsic nature of that environment, is to repudiate the question of
whether human minds are in touch with reality – the question asked by
the epistemological sceptic. No organism, human or non-human, is
ever more or less in touch with reality than any other organism.
dmb continues:
You've echoed this idea. I think I get it. Words are tools, like hammers and
guns. We use them to do certain things when we are interacting with the
enviroment, but we can NOT use them to "represent the intrinsic nature of that
enviroment". By way of these tools, we are in touch with the enviroment to the
same extent other organisms are in touch. Our linguistic tools can't represent
the intrinsic nature of nature because that would be a claim that the "space of
reasons" does offer a way to obtain closer contact with the enviroment than is
enjoyed by other creatures with their claws and teeth. Is that about right?
Rorty would say that words and concepts are already in contact with the
physical world. Don't try to mirror it in language, just use language to cope
with it.
Well, I think that Dewey's distinction between "had" and "known" says something
very different from all this. Dewey's distinction is between kinds of
experience or rather between phases in a developing series of experiences. He
uses "organism" and "enviroment" quite a bit and I can see how a guy could read
Dewey as Rorty seems to be reading him, but I don't think he's THAT kind of
naturalist. Dewey replaces the distinction between appearance and reality with
the distinction between "had" and "known". In “The Postulate of Immediate
Empiricism” (a chapter in his "Experience and Nature") Dewey says, “The content
of the latter experience cognitively regarded is doubtless truer than the
content of the earlier; but it is in no sense more real” but, he adds, “it is
only in regard to contrasted content in a subsequent experience that the
determination ‘truer’ has force”. The former is consummated or terminated in
the latter so that a sort of circuit is formed uniting the two. The same
experienced conjunctive relations that James describes in his essays on radical
empiricism is what connects the two types of experience.
In “Dewey and the Aesthetics of Human Existence”, Thomas Alexander offers
further explanation. “Classical and modern theories presuppose that all
experience must be ultimately cognitive”, he explains, but, “Dewey believes
that this is one of the greatest mistakes made by philosophy. There are many
types of experience” and experience “is not even primarily cognitive”. “For
Dewey”, he says, “the term experience refers to a vast body of talents and
capacities that connect an organism intelligently to its world. Experience
ranges from subconscious drives and memories to habits to prereflective
consciousness to highly refined acts of deliberation, analysis, and creative
synthesis”. Naturally, had and known experiences would both be found within
this range but, roughly speaking, they’d be on opposite ends of the spectrum.
And yet they are connected insofar as the latter is a transformed or corrected
version of the former. “Without the precognitive and emotional side of
experience, the cognitive would never arise and could have no meaning if it
did” and, Alexander adds, “To characterize pragmatism apart from the
precognitive …(as is commonly done) misunderstands it completely”.
We also see this circuit in the case of aesthetic experience. This serves to
illustrate the connections between "had" and "known" insofar as aesthetic
experience is a heightened form of experience in general. Dewey says, “In such
experiences, every successive part flows freely without seam and without
unfilled blanks, into what ensues.” “There are pauses, places of rest, but they
punctuate and define the quality of movement. They sum up what has been
undergone and prevent its dissipations and idle evaporation”. This quality of
movement and the summing up that goes with it provide the whole affair with an
extra dose of coherence that holds it all together. “The existence of this
unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in
spite of the variation of its constituent parts. This unity is neither
emotional, practical, nor intellectual, for these terms name distinctions that
reflection can make within it”. Here we see a distinction between the single,
unifying quality and the subsequent acts of reflection. Thas is parallel to the
distinction between the precognitive "had" experience and the cognitive acts of
reflection in experience as it is "known". Like James's "pure experience", this
unifying quality is only “virtually classifiable” as emotional, practical or
intellectual and that classification is developed in subsequent experience.
James wants experience to define the limits of what can and cannot be included
in a philosophical system. In that sense it is not the experience that is
“pure”. Instead, the world is purely empirical. Reality is nothing but
experience or they are not two different things. On the other hand, James
describes “pure experience” or “the instant field of the present” as
“experience in its ‘pure’ state, plain unqualified actuality, a simple that, as
yet undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only virtually classifiable as
objective fact or as someone’s opinion”. Both hands work together, if you will,
against the same Cartesian problematic. I should say that Dewey's notion of
experience had its inception in James's work and is considered a radically
empirical pragmatists and his book on aesthetics "Art as Experience" was based
on a lecture series by James. I get the impression that Dewey practically ran
from the lecture hall to his typewriter.
Matt also said:
Well, granted that psychological nominalism was adumbrated in a specific
context that you may not understand the background of,.. Psychological
nominalism arose as a response to the Myth of the Given. As you say, we refer
to "had experience" all the time but it is functionally ineffable. That's what
Sellars was saying in response to old-school empiricists who thought that our
"had experiences" _gave_ us justifications. Justification, Sellars said, is
something that only happens in the logical space of reasons, which can
certainly refer to these "had experiences," but they don't come pre-encoded in
English. Rather, we bring English, the logical space of reasons, to bear on
"had experiences" to help us deal with them.
dmb says:
Okay, I looked up "psychological nominalism" too and I still fail to see how it
could be relevant. It seems to be a form of verbal behaviorism or
epistemological behaviorism but Dewey is insisting that felt qualities are real
empirical data. Substituting that, let alone cognitive content, for whatever is
observable in external behavior is just about the opposite of what Dewey does.
His distinction between "had" and "known" was invented as an alternative to
old-school empiricism and is diametrically opposed to their notions of "had"
expeience as raw sense data. In "Experience and Nature" responding to critics
who take him for an old-school empiricist and object that, "to view experience
naturalistically is to reduce it to something materialistic, depriving it of
all ideal signigicance", he responds, "If experience actually presents esthetic
and moral traits, then these traits may also be supposed to reach down into
nature, and to testify to something that belongs to nature as truly as does the
mechanical structue attributed to it in physical science. To rule out that
possibility by some general reasoning is to forget that the very meaning and
purport of empirical method is that things are to be studied on their own
accont, so as to find our what is revealed when they are experienced. ...They
are FOUND, experienced, and are not to be shoved our of being by some trick of
logic. When found, their ideal qualities are as relevant to the philosophic
theory of nature as are the traits found by physical inquiry." All that put
together makes me think that we can't even compare the "space of causes" to
Dewey's "had" experience, let alone equate them. They have about as much in
common as does the physical reality of science and the dynamic Quality of
Pirsig's metaphysics, which is to say almost none at all.
_________________________________________________________________
The best games are on Xbox 360. Click here for a special offer on an Xbox 360
Console.
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/wheretobuy/
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/
