Matt said: A radical revolutionary isn't an official part of the political system--they are in the business of overturning the political system. And just so with James's radical empiricism.
Ian replied: I just know from prior experience that DMB is going to say that is misuse of the term "radical" here. (and I agree with him) Perhaps I missed your irony Matt, you old Rortian you ;-) ..The $64,000 question is how does this change the "values" and PoV's in the applied world of pragmatism. I guess it stops us falling into a few more conceptual traps, avoiding applying our day-to-day logic to mis-conceived objects more thoroughly. dmb says:Ian's prediction is right on. It is Rorty who says we shouldn't be doing epistemology and what to overturn the whole system. If I follow what Matt has said, Rorty just wants the whole thing to go away so that "radical empiricism" comes to mean "not empirical at all". This is approximately the opposite of what James and Pirsig are up to. For them radical empiricism is very, very empirical. It's empirical down to the roots so that all experience count as empirical data, not just what's given to the senses. They reject the traditional empiricism of thinkers like Hume in the sense that they want to overcome its limits, expand on what counts as "real" experience. "Nothing shall be admitted as a fact except what can be experienced at some definite time by some experiment and for every feature of fact ever so experienced, a definite place must be found somewhere in the final system of reality." "The MOQ subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion and metaphysics as unverifiable. The MOQ varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons." That Pirsig quote comes from the opening pages of chapter 8. But turning now to the distinction between direct experience and concepts we find Pirsig quoting James at the end of chapter 29. There he says that concepts are "derived from something more fundamental which he [James] described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.' " The river metaphor of reality is apt here. It's not that concepts get in the way of reality or that they are unreal. It's just that terms like "river" can never capture the richness and complexity of the river itself. There must be literally thousands of concepts that can and are derived from any particular river depending on who you are and what you're interested in, what you're capable of extracting from this inexhaustible phenomenal reality. If you're a farmer who depends on its water you'll see certain things about it and that will be different from what a trout fisherman sees. An environmentalist, a camper, a rafter, a painter, a scientist who studies water bugs, an escaped prisoner who needs to cross it, a thirsty dude, a river boat captain and a satellite photography analyst will all care about different aspects and will be able notice different things. And it's not that the scientist is more correct than the camper. Nobody is automatically wrong about it and nobody has THEE correct concept of a river. Each perspective is just as true as the next but they are all limited in the sense that they derive and use concepts that only capture a tiny fraction of all that a river is or can be. Even if you could somehow add up every perspective there is still the problem of how the river related to the surrounding landscape, the cities along its shore, the forest through which it runs, the rains and snows that continually feed it and everything else to which it is related. And so it is in this sense that the pragmatist can make a distinction between concepts and reality. This is what Pirsig meant, I think, in saying that our whole picture of reality is but a handful of sand drawn from an endless landscape, in saying that conceptual reality is derived from a more fundamental empirical reality. It is not any one particular concept that serves as the eye glasses through which we see the world but rather the whole web of conceptual language. This is what it means to say that our understanding of the world is always culturally derived, to say that we are suspended in language, to say that the world is analogy upon analogy all the way down. He does, however, insist that there is such a thing as pre-conceptual reality, which is just that immediate flux of experience before it gets chopped up into words and ideas. By the way, the fact that Doug Adams and Richard Dawkins were friends sure does explain a lot about why I don't care for the Hitchhiker's Guide. If I may use the expression Pirsig used with respect to Aristotle, geez what an asshole! _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ Hotmail®…more than just e-mail. http://windowslive.com/howitworks?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t2_hm_justgotbetter_howitworks_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/
