[Matt] What I think we've learned from this historical movement, though, is that Platonism doesn't care _what_ the terms of discussion are, be it reality, experience, or language. Simply taking the linguistic turn does nothing. The appearance/reality distinction, knower/known distinction, dialectic/rhetoric, necessary/contingent, etc., etc., all of these distinctions can be constructed out of whatever materials you're building with. The Greeks talked about reality, but Plato had the Sophists, his antithesis. Descartes and Locke talked about inner experience, but Hume and Hegel began decomposing the residue of Platonism, the problems of the separation between experience and reality that the Thomists warned of. The logical positivists said that we needed to get straight about language, but Carnap and Quine both slid towards pragmatism and the destruction of the tenets logical positivism needed to purely distinguish between language and experience.
[Krimel] One thing that strikes me about you comments here is that as you describe it and whatever form we give to reality or our conceptions of reality it eventually assumes a kind of binary form. Extremes are indentified. I can not account for why this is but this bifurcation seems nearly universal. Our concepts seem to always assume this binary polarity. Why not triads or quartettes? To me this strikes at the heart of the Taoist metaphysics that Pirsig adopts. We see patterns in terms of their extreme manifestations; their poles. We construct opposites out of whatever phenomena present themselves to us whether actual or conceptual. I am torn as to whether this is a metaphysical or a psychological principle or whether a distinction between the two is even possible. Ron: I don't think the distinction between the two is possible, language and Intellect sort of grew up together. This is why I think you see the Linguistic turn as fundamentally wrong somehow but can't define how. We are so accustomed to intellect that it does not seem possible That it follow the rules of language. Natural language brings with It a natural intellect. If you really think the natural perception of man is polar, you Side with Ham and Bo in this aspect. I tend to think that it is not, I think that when distinction for descriptive purposes comes into Play it does so linguistically and therefore intellectually. Language requires context. Hot means nothing without cold. High is meaningless with out low. "When all understand beauty to be beautiful ugliness appears".-dao te ching [Matt] This seems like a cheat: the sentence "It is snowing" is true if it is snowing. When I say "purely semantic," I mean that the reason why disquotationalism is unsatisfying is because we feel as if an explanation of truth should tell us _how we know_ X is true. The semantic answer just tells us what it means for a sentence to be true--it tells us how language functions. However, what Tarski and Davidson have told us is that the only way to explain truth is to decouple it from epistemology. As soon as you want more than "'X' is true iff X", you've injected epistemological concerns into a semantic explanation. [Krimel] Excellent explanation of the flow of all of this but I remain deeply suspicious of all of this emphasis on language. The whole idea that truth and language and thought are all of a piece seems fundamentally wrong to me. And if I can say exactly why or even that I am committed to opposition, the suspicion lingers. Certainly language is what we use to communicate and how we communicate will influence the form of our thinking right down to the process itself. But language is thought objectified. It is the summation of our interior musings rendered symbolic. Regardless of how we render our symbols, verbally, gesturally, or musically, something it lost in the rendering. Mathematics or symbolic logic are as close as it gets to unambiguous communication but the very lack of ambiguity limits the range of expression. POP!: Ambiguity versus Range of expression; the duality bubbles like fizzy water. Ron: I think you are leaving out that thoughts and language like emotions And physiology are symbiotic they develop together, they are not separate Entities. Logic is thought objectified not language. Language, our language, creates "truth" or certainty by creating An objective logical argument to establish possession of a statement. As in a court of law, the truth or certainty of a statement such as "Tom murdered his wife" must be proven using evidence and witnesses creating An objective logical argument tying all of it to a specific person or entity. Math is an argument, building plans are an argument. They must be proven to function before it is built. Science is based in developing formal arguments to support hypothesis. Verifiability is part of it's "proof". "Truth" is a matter of creating the most solid objective argument for a belief. [Matt] Pragmatists thought analyzing truth in terms of justification would bridge the gulf between experience and reality that both the correspondentists and coherentists held to. What we've learned, however, from Tarski and Davidson is that _languages_ wouldn't function properly if truth was the same as justification. Truth is a primitive notion: it can't be analyzed into anything else, nor can it be explained outside of its function in the language. Matt: Sure, absolutely. Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature used a sci-fi story about an alien race, the Antipodeans, that we'd learned to talk to had no conception of an inner space called the "mind" because they'd happened to have made scientific breakthroughs in neurophysiology before physics. He used this story as a means of suggesting how we might talk without a pernicious conception of a mind that gets in between us and reality. This was a means of suggesting that Cartesianism is optional, not inevitable. The whole idea behind the creation of "eliminative materialism" was not that the "mind" is fake, but that we might someday come to speak without reference to it, thus effectively eliminating it. We could conceivably be nudged into becoming Antipodeans, though I doubt we ever will be. [Krimel] I just don't think the distinction between your pain and my pain is artificial or avoidable. There is a qualitative difference between my experience of my own nervous system and my experience of that which is other than my nervous system. Ron: I think because you are looking at the problem objectively In a universal format. Experience is experience the differentiation Is in the descriptive terms you use. I'm surprised Ham hasn't jumped on Your statement supporting a "self-other" dichotomy! What I find odd in your statements Krimel is your argument for Objective distinction yet you disagree with Ham and Bo about The same issues. 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/
