-----Original Message----- From: david buchanan [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 3:24 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [MD] Empiricism for dummies
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: 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. [Krimel] What is or should be over interest to all of the people you mention above is, what is there about the river that is common to all of them? What characteristics of the river are objective? Each observer bring their own unique history to the perception of the view but there are a set of properties that do not depend on one's personal history or point of view. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] Language is a tool of expressing and achieving the kind of objective consensus I mentioned above. Language is the instrument for creating objectivity. When the escaped prisoner explains his need to cross the river to the rafter, they can achieve a common if imperfect understanding of their diverse experiences. But vast portions of each of each individual's experience of a river are outside of language and can not be express in words. You are right that is analogy upon analogy. It begins preconceptually when the sense organs transduce, format, encode, create analogs of physical energy into neural impulses. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] You continue to voice this mistaken understanding. The immediate flux of sense experience is not chopped up into words and ideas, it is synthesized from the multiple modalities of sense experience. You continue to confuse sensation and perception. 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/
