Krimel said to dmb: You seem to be saying here that truth is judged on the basis of how well one's beliefs correspond to one's experience. Isn't that just another version of a correspondence theory of truth that you not so long ago gave me a huge ration of shit about? dmb says:Good question. In fact, Richard Mullin's example of the cow path is meant to illustrate the difference between the traditional correspondence theory of truth and the pragmatic theory of truth. Just prior to that example he says, "a belief hold true if it agrees with reality. This formula sound like the traditional correspondence theory of truth, But James carries it further by asking what it means for an idea to correspond to reality. ...They correspond if they lead us to a satisfactory relationship with reality. Truth is a LEADING. James provides an anecdote to illustrate the meaning of truth as a leading. A lone hiker in the mountains gets lost..." As you know, Pirsig says experience is reality and in terms of the cow path example the hiker's true belief led to a happy ending at the farmer's warm house. His belief agreed with experience, was proven true in that particular experience.
Krimel continued: "So called subjective"? Isn't that a strawman knocking at your back door? Aren't vision, hearing, taste, touch and smell "so called subjective" experiences? Don't the relations between "so called sense objects" present themselves through the "so called senses"? Aren't whatever qualities that are missing from the sense data supplied by the thoughts and beliefs we use to process them? What specifically do you think radical empiricism adds that can't be derived from plain ol' empiricism? dmb says:Unlike sensory empiricism, radical empiricism doesn't limit experience to the kind we can potentially all agree on, the stuff anyone can see. It says that things like dreams, visions, mystical experience, feelings and emotions are just as real as the things that are known through the senses. I recently used Jung's attitude to illustrate this. He says these are psychological facts that ought not be dismissed simply because they aren't universally accessible. Or, as Pirsig puts it, these things are dismissed for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. Traditional empiricism will dismiss them because they're "just" subjective. Yea, he says, they're subjective but why do we say they are "just" subjective? Or, as James says in his essays on Radical Empiricism we have to account for everything that is experienced. Krimel said: I believe what James was objecting to was the introspective method. Introspectionism developed starting with Wundt and was put into hyperdrive by Titchner. The hope of the introspectionists was to engage in self examination and refine the process in an effort to identify "so called atoms" of thought. They believed that this would somehow put a science of inner life on a par with the science of the external world. James' view was that there are no such atoms in the same way that he thought consciousness was a process not a thing. dmb says:Hmmm. I didn't know that but it makes a lot of sense out of what I've been hearing at school about Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. He was trying to get at internal things in a similar way but became famous for his concepts of "intentionality". He hoped to stick with the "subjective" experience of consciousness but soon realized that consciousness is always ABOUT something, always has an intention, a focus. And I think James get at this with his idea of the continuity of experience, which includes a continuity between knower and known. They say Husserl was the last great Cartesian, which is why James was so much better at the business of phenomenology. He was refuting the Cartesian duality between mental substances and extended substances. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t1_allup_explore_012009 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/
