Krimel said to gav: I have said that "objective" means intersubjective early and often on this forum. I'm sorry if there was some misunderstanding. But what I have said about it is, that objective reality IS intersubjective reality. That is the only meaning the term can have.
dmb says: Like gav says, these are two very different things. Intersubjective facts are created while objective facts are discovered. That's why I asked about your assumptions concerning an external reality existing independently of our perceptions. An objective reality is discovered rather than constructed. [Krimel] I hardly think I am unique in having an idiosyncratic usage for some words. It's not like I make up my own language and I have stated and restated this point anytime I thought it was a source of confusion. This is from about my third post on this forum more than three years ago. "...language succeeds or fails, as you point out, depending on the whether or not a word holds the same meaning for the hearer as the speaker. In SOM terms: there is intersubjective agreement. Before reading ZMM that notion of intersubjective (I swear I did not make up that term) was the only sense in which objectivity made any sense to me. You can work this all out in Venn diagrams were my perception of a tree overlaps yours (correspondence) but there are areas unique to each of us (ambiguity)." But I think you have it backwards intersubjective reality is "discovered" through shared communication. We have to discover where our individually constructed realities overlap. [dmb] One can maintain a weak, watered-down version of intersubjectivity while still holding onto the assumption of objectivity. In that case, it only refers to the area of agreement about that objective reality. Apparently, you think you're off the hook just because you make no particular claims about the nature of things-in-themselves. But the MOQ goes way beyond this weak form of intersubjectivity. There are no things-in-themselves as such. This is precluded by the radically empirical principle that we can't say anything about what lies beyond our experience. [Krimel] I don't see how individuals could discover overlap in their experience if they were not sharing experiences of something as yet undefined and external to each of them. As each of them is external to the other, each accepts an external world by accepting the other. Other individuals and other minds are no less a part of the external world than rocks and plants. Some assumption about their independent of existence has to precede achieving intersubjective agreement with them. [dmb] The MOQ would say that experience is the cause and things are the effect rather than the other way around. [Krimel] Experiences is the "cause" of "things"? This just turns "experience" into the infamous "Quali-god". You put "experience" outside of even Radical Empiricism. We can only have an experience that is classified in some way. Even mysticism is just like any other experience in this respect. Your pure experience evaporates the way TiTs do. Are you implying that pure experience does not exist? [dmb] This does not mean that physical objects pop into existence the moment we think of them. It means that "physical objects" are a creation, a meaningful reference to certain kinds of experience. [Krimel] A creation of experience? How then does your "experience" differ from Ham's "essence"? It doesn't seem to be outside of space/time so perhaps it just has a shorter shelf life. We have made a world where many things depend entirely on our conceptions for their existence; from Chihuahuas to microwave ovens. But there are still a few things in the universe that are what they are regardless of what we think of them. Our mutual understanding of the planet Jupiter has changed over time. Do you seriously doubt that there is a planet out there regardless of how we think about it. Actually I think your claim that, "experience is the cause and things are the effect" is misguided. What Pirsig says is this: "By this he (James)meant that subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.'" James says the we derive subjects and objects from our experience, not that experience creates them. He also says we derive this from reflection on our experiences and that sometimes in our deriving we see ourselves as subject and sometimes as object. The same can be said of inanimate objects. Many here would like to see photons as subjects for example. The point is that experience doesn't happen and subjects and objects are not derived in a vacuum. They occur within entities capable of making distinctions. [dmb] There is experience and analogy upon analogy within our intersubjective world. The "objective reality" is not the basis of this intersubjective agreement. Intersubjectivity is the basis and "objectivity" is an analogy within that larger creation. [Krimel] The mutual overlap in experience is the basis for intersubjective agreement. In order to achieve agreement each of us must be able to encode our own experiences in a way that can be decoded by others. This encoding and decoding is most often through language and the transmission of experience in this way is best described as "lossy." There is a certain lack of precision on both ends. But the fact that there is a consensus at all and that it seems to cover a wide range of phenomena certainly points in the direction of a independent source of experience. Things in themselves are thus inferred. Pure experience is also inferred. While what we know of them is limited to our individual and shared experiences there is no reason to suggest that either are phantoms. This is where the idea of an undefined reality arises. "Reality" is in constant flux. It does not hold still. The information we have about it is limited individually by our sensory systems and collectively by our negotiated shared meanings. Meaning is the key term. Meaning is negotiated with others. Meaning is reduction in uncertainty. Meaning is static. To the extent that we can derive meaning from experience, we call that learning. Almost all animals can learn. This occurs when experience of the past alters behavior in the present. What separates humans from animal is that we have much greater neural capacity. This allows us to envision the future. We are able to reduce uncertainty across a larger span of time that includes our past experience, present circumstances and future dreams. 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/
