Ham-
[Ham, previously]: > But your "pattern" is itself Value, is it not? So you have > value sensing value, which is [tautological]. Experience > must differentiate otherness in order to perceive objects. > How does one differentiate value from value? [Ron]: > If you use the old Greek rhetorical meaning of the word tautology- "Everything that is a proposition of logic has got to be in some sense or the other like a tautology. It has got to be something that has some peculiar quality, which I do not know how to define, that belongs to logical propositions but not to others."- Bertrand Russell Ham: I should not have used the word "logical", and have corrected my comment above to avoid it. We cannot "prove" anything by logic alone. The proposition A = A does not prove that 'A' exists or does not exist. Logic is only useful for justifying theories within the context of language, where the terms are well defined, which is what Russell and Wittgenstein were mostly about. I'm mostly about concepts, as I believe you are also. So, as far as we can help it, let's try not to get mired in word games. [Ham, previously]: > Your concept has a nice ring to it, but this epistemology doesn't > hold up logically [epistemologcally?]. Ron: O.K., then conceptually you level the charge of value sensing value as tautological which I argued, so is everything in epistemology. the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification. Which brings us to Pragmatist epistemology and continental Philosophy which I have followed via Pirsig from Pierce to Quine's Work on naturalized epistemology, which Pirsig supports with his Concept of certainty in immediate experience but this method yields Objections. To do away with normatives is to alter the very meaning and goal of epistemology, since all statements without the normative are purely descriptive. One product of these objections is cooperative naturalism which holds that empirical results are essential and useful to epistemology. That is, while traditional epistemology cannot be eliminated, neither can it succeed in its investigation of knowledge without empirical results from the natural sciences. Which Pirsig supports. Yet to produce any form of truth or rational thinking It is the idea that there can be no truths without a conceptual scheme to express those truths. Pirsig follows Schiller who sought to undermine the very possibility of formal logic, by showing that words only had meaning when used in an actual context. The least famous of Schiller's main works was the constructive sequel to his destructive book "Formal Logic." In this sequel, "Logic for Use," Schiller attempted to construct a new logic to replace the formal logic he had just decimated in "Formal Logic." What he offers is something philosophers would recognize today as a logic covering the context of discovery and the hypothetico-deductive method. "Whereas F.C.S. Schiller actually dismissed the possibility of formal logic, most pragmatists are critical rather of its pretension to ultimate validity and see logic as one logical tool among others"-wiki "Stephen Toulmin argued that the need to distinguish between reality and appearance only arises within an explanatory scheme and therefore that there is no point in asking what 'ultimate reality' consists of." Ham: I disagree that a "metaphysic" is only a perspective that "initiates critical thinking of the everyday world." The changed perspective should arise on reflection of the proposition, after it has been subjected to critical thinking. Ron snips wiki once again: Dewey, in The Quest For Certainty, criticized what he called "the philosophical fallacy": philosophers often take categories (such as the mental and the physical) for granted because they don't realize that these are merely nominal concepts that were invented to help solve specific problems. This causes metaphysical and conceptual confusion. Various examples are the "ultimate Being" of Hegelian philosophers, the belief in a "realm of value", the idea that logic, because it is an abstraction from concrete thought, has nothing to do with the act of concrete thinking, and so on. David L. Hildebrand sums up the problem: "Perceptual inattention to the specific functions comprising inquiry led realists and idealists alike to formulate accounts of knowledge that project the products of extensive abstraction back onto experience." (Hildebrand 2003) And "In "The Fixation of Belief" (1877), C.S. Peirce denied that introspection and intuition (staple philosophical tools at least since Descartes) were valid methods for philosophical investigation. He argued that intuition could lead to faulty reasoning, e.g. when we reason intuitively about infinity. Furthermore, introspection does not give privileged access to knowledge about the mind - the self is a concept that is derived from our interaction with the external world and not the other way around." Ham continues: For example, when you say "We are Quality", I need to know if you mean this literally. Also, I believe the "fathers" of quantum physics were limited by the empirical data available, not "conceptually". Pirsig analyzed this enigma quite well in his SODV paper: "Bohr saw that the quantum theory's mathematical formulation had to have a connection to the cultural world of everyday life in which the experiments were performed. If that connection were not made there would be no way to run an experiment that would prove whether a quantum prediction was true or not. ...Yet as I read through the material even I could see that this was not primarily a quarrel about physics, it was about metaphysics. And I saw that others had noted that too. ...It is only in the last hundred years or so that our measurements are showing that the objects we are studying are apparently impossible. Since the phenomena from the measurements are not about to change, Bohr concluded that the logic of science must change to accommodate them. ...This view, known as phenomenalism, says that what we really observe is not the object. What we really observe is only data." Ham: My own answer to this is that because the physical world is constructed by experience, the dynamics and order of the universe are limited to a magnitude perceived by human experience. Human beings are equipped to deal with a macro world, not a quantum world. So, when we push investigation beyond this point, the empirical data become fuzzy and contradictory, and the conclusions drawn by physicists are mostly speculative. Metaphysics, however, must deal with "all possible worlds", so the precise arrangement of energy particles and their dynamics can't be its primary concern. More important to the philosopher are the questions "What is the stuff of existence?", "From what is this stuff derived?", and, perhaps most important, "WHY?" This is where I'm coming from, Ron, and what I've tried to address in my website and book. Ron: If " the dynamics and order of the universe are limited to a magnitude perceived by human experience." And " the conclusions drawn by physicists are mostly speculative." Then the questions "What is the stuff of existence?", "From what is this stuff derived?", and, perhaps most important, "WHY?" are meaningless in a universal normative sense. Thanks for a superior discussion Ham. -Ron 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/
