[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
