Ron said: Cultural derrivation being a given in this matter. dmb says: Right. It obtains in all matters.
Krimel said: The real point is that the cogito is NOT based on SOM assumption; in fact it is the result of doubting and discarding all assumptions and looking straight at what cannot be doubted. So far other than muttering about SOM assumptions I have heard no cause to doubt the original statement. dmb says: Well, right. If you can question your own existence then it's a bit silly to question your own existence. That part is not in dispute and in fact Pirsig says that Descartes was correct to begin with his own experience. And it wouldn't be quite right the say that Descartes didn't ASSUME the subject/object dualism so much as it established it. This is why they say modern philosophy is essentially Cartesian philosophy. But more to the point, Descartes' radical skepticism, extravagant skepticism as he called it is one of the notions most vigorously attacked by the classical Pragmatists. Dewey says this level of doubt is just paper doubt, fake doubt and by contrast talks about experience in terms of transactions. Descartes' extravagant doubt is also what makes him the classic case of solipsism. The dictionary will tell you that solipsism is the belief that the self is the only thing that can be known to exist. Or, as you put it, "I have no direct experience of anything outside of my nervous system". Krimel said:I think the problem is that Dave, like Ham and Bo favor the Greek style of deductive reasoning. They start with general principles and reason towards specifics. dmb says: Not at all. Quite the opposite. I can't remember the last time I agreed with Ham or Bo about anything and, as I was saying to MP the other day, all abstractions are just that. They are abstracted from the concrete realities and only serve as shorthand references to those actually experienced realities. In philosophy, when abstractions are taken as real in and of themselves, given ontological or existential status - as opposed to seeing them as useful conceptual tools - it is called reification. James was quite keen on killing these reifications and you might have guessed which ones he and Pirsig most interested in killing. Yep, subject and objects. That's what it means to say that subjects and objects are secondary, that they are concepts and NOT the STARTING POINTS of experience. This is what it means to say they're derived from experience. In other words, they're abstractions. They're abstracted from actual experience. Krimel said: My point was that Dave says, "In the MOQ there is no "out there". The idea of an independent external reality is just that, an idea." That sounds like solipsism to me; dmb says: If, if, if your basic assumption is that subjects and objects are the starting point of experience, then such a statement will sound like solipsism. Or, less narrowly, it will sound like a complete denial of materialism in favor of idealism. But it's not. It's radical empiricism which is neither materialism nor idealism. Both of those views are held within SOM. As Pirsig puts it in that quote I keep trying to impress upon you, "pure experience cannot be either physical or psychical; it logically precedes this distinction". You see, this is why I think that you misread James. And me and Pirsig. You keep interpreting this anti-SOM stuff in terms of SOM stuff. That's never gonna work. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® goes where you go. On a PC, on the Web, on your phone. http://www.windowslive-hotmail.com/learnmore/versatility.aspx#mobile?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_WL_HM_versatility_121208 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/
