dmb said to Krimel: To answer your question, no, he [James] 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.
Krimel "replied": Call me names all you want but this is insulting. The various incarnations of the mind body debate echoing across the history of philosophy? Who knew. This epic debate gets reduced to the SOM strawman in Lila. I know the tale. I think James is consistently advocating empiricism over the kind of rehashed and regurgitated idealism/romantic/rationalism you keep peddling under guise of 'radical empiricism'. dmb says:Call you names? Huh? I think you've misread that James quote and was explaining how and why. Sorry if that hurt your feelings, but it's just not reasonable to compare such a correction with something as juvenile as name-calling. And it's not childish playground behavior to correct what you've written in response either. You're conflating empiricism with reductionism, the rationalism/empiricism distinction is not at all the same thing as the mind body problem, if SOM is a straw man a large number of famous philosophers have been mistaken for over a century and, because of your confusion, you have no idea what I "keep peddling". You keep confusing and/or avoiding the philosophical context in which radical empiricism makes sense. In that context, it is a solution to the very problem you're calling a strawman and as a rejection of Hegelian idealism. Pirsig explicitly denies the comparison between Hegel's Absolute and his own notion of DQ. As you must have noticed, the difference between Royce and James had quite a lot to do with Royce's proximity to Hegel, which was too close for James's comfort. Dewey, another radical empiricist, started out as a Hegelian of sorts but then but distance between Hegel and himself. I mean, that's one of the points of the James quote I was correcting, that guys like Hegel are opposed to any kind of empiricism by temperament. The radical empiricists are rationalists. They differ from traditional empiricists like Hume by being MORE empirical, in some sense even TOTALLY empirical. Once again, you've got things all mixed up, if not backwards. Krimel said: By the way I was responding to your comment, "If a guy were interested in distinguishing traditional sensory empiricism from radical empiricism, he would read what James had to say about Hume." I quote what James says about Hume and you act surprised and then try claim his obviously bottom up view is somehow not reductionist. How are we to take this seriously, Dave? dmb says:James had a lot of things to say about Hume and the quote you offered up was a fragment. It lists examples of what he was saying but you forgot to include the part where he's actually saying it. He's illustrating an idea with examples but the idea itself is absent. I can guess that he is talking about the continuity of experience. And that is a part of radical empiricism too. A big part. It goes along with the idea that every kind of experience counts and James thought that the relations between "things" were just as important as anything else in experience, that ignoring led to all kinds of metaphysical problems, including your strawman, SOM. In any case, the meaningless fragment you dished up certainly doesn't refute the idea that you're trying to refute. As you saw (three times) in the Pirsig quote on the MOQ's difference from traditional empiricism and in the James quote in Lila, the difference between sensory empiricism and radical empiricism goes to the basic metaphysical assumptions, the basic starting point or framework of understanding. In one the basic starting point is the physical structure of objective reality in which experience occurs and the other starts with experience itself. Obviously, this goes way beyond adding sensation to perception. That idea is simple and not in dispute. I only dispute it's centrality in radical empiricism and it's relevance to the difference between these two kinds of empiricism. The "bottom up" approach of empiricism is not reductionism. It simply insists that abstractions are just that. They are ideas abstracted or taken from experience. The classic idealist, like Plato, will say all experienced things are fleeting manifestations of an eternal a priori form or idea. I mean, as I see it, the empiricist isn't a reductionists. He just thinks its a bad idea to make claims about metaphysical entities that can't be known in experience. Abstractions are useful and true so long as they serve to guide future experience, but they are drawn from experience and tested in experience. In fact, the difference between traditional empiricism and radical empiricism also entails two entirely different theories of truth. In SOM and traditional empiricism it is known as the correspondence theory of truth, where truth means that your subjective understanding corresponds with the objective reality. The radical empiricist subscribes to the pragmatic theory of truth. Here ideas still have to agree with experience but it drops the assumption that experience means subjective experience of an objective reality. Like I tried to explain already, reductionism is when you explain complex things in terms of their simpler constituent parts, usually physical structures. Like I keep saying, my specific complaint is aimed at the way you reduce experience to physiological processes and brain states. As much as you like them to be, those processes and states are not in dispute. The problem is that experience also involves social and intellectual components. To re-visit an old analogy, it's like explaining the joy of a road trip in terms of gas consumed and conversion into mechanical energy. Nobody is saying you can go on a road trip without gasoline or a working engine, but is that really an appropriate way to assess the road trip? Of course not. If somebody complained about the meaninglessness of assessing such a thing in terms of miles per gallon, would it make any sense to then argue about whether or not fuel is consumed on road trips? Of course not. Nobody disputes the necessity of a working vehicle but road trips are measured in terms of road trips. Oh, and here is the fragment out of context I was just complaining about: "...Hume's statement that whatever things we distinguish are as 'loose and separate' as if they had 'no manner of connection.' James Mill's denial that similars have anything 'really' in common, the resolution of the causal tie into habitual sequence, John Mill's account of both physical things and selves as composed of discontinuous possibilities, and the general pulverization of all Experience by association and the mind-dust theory, are examples of what I mean." Again, Hume's statement, Mills denial and account of things and selves, the pulverization of experience are all examples of what he means, but the quote has been chopped up so that we have to guess what these examples illustrate, the point that he means to demonstrate. His rejection of "Mill's account of both physical things and selves" sure looks like a rejection of SOM to me and, like I said, I suspect he's talking about the continuity of experience. That's pretty close to what you said about it, but it sure would be nice to have more than a sentence and a half. Krimel said: You are the one claiming James is Pirsig's sock puppet. I think it is clear that sensation was never off the table except in your head. Perception is the addition. I would even grant that James' expansion includes all of the "unconscious" and emotional processes that occupy us for about 90% of our lives, all of the automatic things, from the breathing, to driving a car. dmb says:Well, leaving the sock puppets aside, yes. James and Pirsig both call themselves radical empiricists and so, obviously, it's perfectly legitimate to claim that they share something in common. Objecting to that is just plain laughable. And how could empiricism include the unconscious? By definition, the unconscious is not something we experience. I guess you mean dreams and other effects of the unconscious, which are actually known in experience. And I think you're also confusing James' idea of Pure Experience with the raw sense data traditional empiricism. And I'm still baffled that you want to talk about the relation between sensation and perception, as if that has anything to do with my objections to reductionism or the distinction between the two kinds of empiricism. It's just so hopelessly confused that it would be a huge drag and a chore to untangle it. No thanks. Krimel said:You say reduction is bad and yet Pirsig doesn't. He says it is a form of generalization that allows theorizing to occur. Pirsig in essence reduces everything to Quality. dmb says:Oh, good god! Just the other day we saw Stanley Fish explaining how an anti-reductionism is built right into the structure of Pirsig's books and philosophy. Just the other day you saw Hilary Putnam and Sandra Rosenthal, who also share some major positions with James and Pirsig, denounce the reductionism of you some of your intellectual heros, some of today's top scientists. If you can ignore all that and still claim that Pirsig is a reductionist, you're just an incorrigible fanatic who won't listen to anyone. Jeez, have you been taking Platt lessons or what? Krimel said: ...But if you think you have answered a single charge or refuted a single statement I have made in several rather lengthy post you are simply delusional. Blah, Blah ...more pretentious pandering to your peanut gallery. Your failure here is pretty obvious but I admire your nerve in trying to act smug about it. dmb says:Yea, your post are way too lengthy. I'm bored by it and can only imagine how boring it is for everybody else. I suspect the excessive length is a kind of bury-him-in-paperwork tactic. You're trying to bore me to death with trivial irrelevancies and disputes against points nobody made. Just make sure you stick with neurology and avoid the philosophy. That'll ensure that your responses continue to be free of actual philosophical content. And god knows there is no better way to compare one form of empiricism with another or to contrast them with rationalism. Yea, ignorance is your golden key to never being wrong about anything. Yea, you know better than Pirsig, Putnam, Rosenthal and James but I'm delusional. Oh, that's richer than a triple-layered cheesecake. _________________________________________________________________ Insert movie times and more without leaving Hotmail®. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/QuickAdd?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_QuickAdd_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/
