Hey Magnus, I apologize for the extravagant delay, but I can't keep up like I used to. I log this in just in case you or anyone else is still concerned with the subject material.
The story so far was roughly that I threw out these definitions of "metaphysics": 1) Metaphysics is the general framework, or understanding, or set of assumptions, that people unconsciously (with various degrees of self-consciousness) interpret, or see, or live in the world. As an activity, it is the attempt to make the unconscious self-conscious (this activity is also known in some circles as "philosophy"). 2) Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that attempts to display the basic, universal, ahistorical underpinnings of reality (this activity is also sometimes known in some circles as "Platonism," and in a few circles the acronymic "SOM"). Then I suggested that there was a difference between "using" the definitions and "doing" the definitions, such that we could have such reflexive contradictions as a person who uses definition 2 (say, while criticizing it) who at the same time is doing definition 1. I take examples of such people to be many academic pragmatists (particularly post-positivistic ones, so-called neopragmatists). I also suggested that Magnus both used and did the second definition, which from here on out I shall call Platonism. My hand is thus displayed: because I think a certain kind of definition of metaphysics is Platonic, and handily criticized by Pirsig, I was suggesting that Magnus was running counter to Pirsig in a major way (which should be a problem for a Pirsigian). He and I then went through a few clarification rituals. The first was that I pressured Magnus to distinguish what he was saying from the distinction between tigers and talking about tigers (rocks and words-about-rocks) and he said, paraphrasing a formulation of mine, "I mean something like 'causally-independent-of-physics'". I'm not sure what's supposed to be causally independent of physics. This seems to me to suggest that we cannot give a physical description of everything, but I'm pretty sure that if you can't give a physical description of a thing, it doesn't exist. But all that this physicalism excludes--so far as I can see--are kinds of magic, for instance a God that can willy-nilly interrupt the causal order of things, so-called miracles. God can exist, because as a pragmatist I think that as long as it is useful to talk about God, He exists--and we can give a physical description of our talking and writing. However, I suspect the main reason you would say something like the above is because you would like to say that there is more in this world than what science can describe. With this, I can agree, but would suggest a different formulation, something like "of course there's more in this world than what science can describe because we still need more descriptions than scientific ones." It's a fairly simple philosophy of science, but it's at the heart of pragmatism. To expand on his view of what metaphysics is, Magnus used the image of a circus tent: "Our reality is the inside of a tent, we can only see and interact with things on the inside. However, from the inside, we see that something is pulling the fabric at a few places. We have no idea what it is and can only hypothesize about it. Some may think that the fabric is pushed from the inside by some unknown force, others think there's a giant on the outside pulling the fabric, etc. "These different hypotheses are our different metaphysics models, and some may do a better job than others explaining the fabric's movements. However, I can never really let go of the thought of finding out how the tent is *really* held up." It's these "reallys" that upset pragmatists. However, being conversable fellows that we are, we're willing to go along with common sense and say that our hypotheses about how the tent, reality, hangs together, works, etc., these hypotheses _do_ tell us how the tent is really held up. The trouble with Platonism was always that it reduced to, not a set of hypotheses, but a method with which to tell the difference between the right ones and the wrong ones. But since philosophy kept spinning out different disciplines that worked out according to its own particular methods a good from a bad hypothesis, philosophy had to look for a job that it could do--looking for the way to tell the difference between a hypothesis that _worked_ (which is what a non-philosophy discipline would tell you) and a hypothesis that was _correct_--a certification procedure that had itself nothing to do with, say, what physics, psychology, or history did. Metaphysics (according to definition 1) is a broad account of how reality hangs together. It's a set of hypotheses. Platonism (definition 2) is a broad account that thinks it also needs to tell the difference between "how the tent is held up" and "how the tent is *really* held up." Pragmatists don't doubt that people still have the thought, the feeling, the intuition that this needs to be answered, that the question of how to tell the difference between a hypothesis that works and one that is correct is still a question that some people feel is a good one. But pragmatists think all thoughts, feelings, intuitions, questions come from somewhere, and we think these came from Plato and that if we got rid of Plato, we'd be just fine not answering those questions (since they are, after all, largely unanswerable). You say, "Regardless of whether this blueprint is outside of reality, or somehow built into the laws of nature of that reality, you are nevertheless assuming that there is *a* blueprint that would result in a reality like ours, so why not try to find *the* original blueprint? The notion of reverse-engineering better and better blueprints indefinitely without even thinking that there is an original blueprint, sounds quite futile to me, not to mention boring." Why not? Because we've spent 2500 years assuming that there is an original blueprint--that's what Platonism is. What you're responding to as boring, a pragmatist-like account that tries to dodge attempts to distinguish between *a* and *the*, is not how things have normally been, but a reaction _against_ how things have normally, traditionally been done in philosophy for the length and breadth of what we know of as philosophy, footnotes to Plato and all that. The only things those 2500 years have told us (on the story a pragmatist, bored with this endless controversy, would tell) is that we haven't the faintest idea of what this blueprint would look like, and _that_ is because we have no criteria for knowing if we'd found the blueprint, even if we _had_ found the blueprint. Does it work because it is true, or is it true because it works? Pragmatists think that's a pointless question, but it is basically what Platonism, over the historical dialectic of two and a half mille nnia, has reduced to. Why is it pointless? Because _how would you tell the difference_? That's why we suggest the first definition of metaphysics for the thing philosophers do. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Test your Star IQ http://club.live.com/red_carpet_reveal.aspx?icid=redcarpet_HMTAGMAR 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/
