Krimel said: Regardless of the alleged advantages of radical empiricism, it builds on sensory empiricism. We can not experience relations between our sense impressions if we have no sense impressions. ...James is not overturning sensory empiricism in the slightest. He is adding the connectedness of our senses; our ability to match faces and voices. It is the appreciation of figure ground relationships, innate rules for constructing faces and seeing how things relate. He is expanding empiricism to include both sensation and perception. But he says time and again that concepts or ideas or rationalism are derived from experience or perception.
Later, Krimel quoted William James as support: "Empiricism is known as the opposite of rationalism. Rationalism tends to emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts in the order of logic as well as in that of being. Empiricism, on the contrary, lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the element, the individual, and treats the whole as a collection and the universal as an abstraction. My description of things, accordingly, starts with the parts and makes of the whole a being of the second order. It is essentially a mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts, like that of Hume and his descendants, who refer these facts neither to Substances in which they inhere nor to an Absolute Mind that creates them as its objects." dmb says:To answer your question, no, he doesn't sound "a bit like a reductionist". And it shouldn't come as surprise that James "doesn't sound all that pissed off at Hume" because they are both empiricists. The difference is important but they both emphasize experience as the test of truth. The difference between rationalism and empiricism is like the difference between Hegel and Hume, Plato and Aristotle or even the romantic/classic split in ZAMM. The phrase "Absolute Mind", for example, comes from Hegel's philosophy. As James saw it, these were the two main categories throughout philosophy and he thought one's preference for one or the other was largely a matter of temperament. It's one of his grand themes. Anyway, you're apparently oblivious to this and so, as we see in your comments above, you're taking "rationalism" to mean "concepts or ideas". This misunderstanding, in turn, leads you to read believe James is "expanding empiricism to include both sensation and perception". You're right about one thing. Radical empiricism IS an expansion of traditional empiricism. The quote from Pirsig was supposed to show you HOW it expands upon traditional empiricism. As I see it, you're misreading James in such a way that his expansion would be pretty trivial. It wouldn't really merit a separate name. And will you puh-leeze stop pretending that gav or I or anyone else is a making a case that we can think without brains or see without eyes. That would be beyond goofy and that's not what it means to expand on sensory empiricism. The quote was suppose to offer a concise statement about the nature of this expanded empiricism.... dmb quoted Pirsig on the MOQ's empiricism: "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. They have been excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that all the universe is compose of subjects and objects and anything that can't be classifieds as a subject or an object isn't real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is just an assumption." Krimel replied: I see nothing in this statement to contradict my original statement above. Apparently, Dave doesn't either. dmb says:Well, here I've just spelled it out and repeated the quote again. You say the expansion is about including sensation and perception and I think anyone should be able to see that the expansion is about including all experience regardless of whether or not it involves the senses. Obviously, that is a much more dramatic move than the one you suggest. I'm not picking nits here, dude. Your misunderstanding of these issue is really quite epic. For (another) example... Krimel said to dmb: Back to the bitching about reductionism, huh Dave. You have a lot of balls to bring it up after refusing to address the issue previously. But since Pirsig is trying to reduce everything to Value here it seems an especially silly point to try to sneak in. dmb says:I'm a bitch with a lot of balls to sneak in a silly point about reductionism? Are you seriously that oblivious? Dude, reductionism is the name of the thread. Reductionism is the name of my complaint. Your reductionism is the topic of this debate and has been for many moons. If explicit use of the term "reductionism" genuinely strikes you with surprise at this point then you really are quite lost. You see, the old form of empiricism is all tied up with scientific objectivity, SOM, materialism and the loss of values. It is that sort of empiricism that has us looking for values in the brain, which is your kind of reductionism. But now I can see that there is one simple reason your responses to this charge seem so irrelevant to the charge. You don't really understand the problem that Pirsig has identified and so naturally the solution is even further from view. So of course you hardly know what is and is not relevant. How could you? Maybe you're even sincere and don't see these explanations and supporting quotes as a real argument but rather just an attempt to characterize your "position with broad generic meaningless labels", as you put it, "without showing how or why" and offering "nothing at all explicit". It's possible that this is not just face-saving bullshit and that you honestly don't think I'm saying anything worth listening to or anything that makes sense. That is possible. But I just don't see why. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to grasp this stuff. I don't think anybody in my class flunked out over it. But me thinks thou does protest way too much. Me thinks you cannot be serious. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ SkyDrive™: Get 25 GB of free online storage. http://windowslive.com/online/skydrive?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_SD_25GB_062009 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/
