Ron replied to dmb:
Experience, whether verbal or non-verbal is predicated on meaning. The main
point Aristotle makes. Meaning is largely culturally defined. Thus he
maintained how we understand experience is largely culturally defined.
Experience, for Aristotle was based on limit through limit unity through unity
understanding, so the understanding of experience is through complex relations
of very broad generalizations of meaning. I think that's the best any
Pragmatist can say about it.
dmb says:
Well, no. There's no such thing as non-verbal meaning or non-verbal
understanding. Generalizations are concepts and culturally defined meanings are
on the static side and are contrasted with the dynamic side.
Ron continued:I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that Dynamic Quality is
non verbal, it's too broad a generalization that supports a correspondance
viewpoint. Dynamic Quality as I understand the term, means the plural, the
unrecognizable, the defiance of understanding, the unlimited, flux, ect...
dmb says:
Well, no. Radical empiricism is all about rejecting the correspondence theory
of truth (wherein truth is defined as the subjective understanding matches the
objective reality). "By this he (James) meant that subjects and objects are not
the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are
concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as 'the
immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection
with its conceptual categories.' In this basic flux of experience, the
distinctions of reflective thought, as as those between consciousness and
content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms
which we make them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical or
psychical; it logically precedes this distinction. In his last unfinished work,
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY, James had condensed this description to a single
sentence: 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality,
because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and
flowing.' Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for
the basic subdivision of the MOQ." (Lila, chapter 29)
Ron said:
The Greeks had it together, Elenchus demonstrated how language is reduced to
such broad generalizations of meaning in experience. Pirsig, in my opinion
improves apon the whole Pragmatic enterprise with the division of the good into
four types. These four types of Pragmatic truths often conflict, but when they
support eachother in conflict or in harmony, we call it "true" in the general
meaning of the term. To me "Pragmatic truth" is to understand what we mean
when we term something as good or true and how we arrive at those meanings.
dmb says:
The pragmatic theory of truth and radical empiricism with its doctrine of pure
experience go together quite nicely but they are two different things. The
theory of truth is about what's good in the way of intellectual patterns. But
otherwise I think you're right. By introducing the distinction between social
patterns and intellectual patterns, this theory of truth avoids the problem of
endorsing truth as naked satisfaction of one's desires or the naked
satisfaction of a particular ethnocentric perspective. The social-intellectual
distinction prevents pragmatism from being used to support Nazism and other
forms of crass self interest. This theory is about static patterns, not DQ or
pure experience. "The idea that satisfaction alone is the test of anything is
very dangerous, according to the MOQ. There are different kinds of satisfaction
and some of them are moral nightmares. The Holocaust produced a satisfaction
among Nazis. That was quality for them. They considered it to be practical. But
it was a quality dictated by low level static social and biologic al paterns
whose overall purpose was to retard the evolution of truth and DQ" (ch. 29)
Ron said:
To recap, I feel to condemn the "we're suspended in language" as mere words
divorced of experiential meaning is overlooking how natural languages form the
understanding of immediate experiences, that even the most raw response of
stimuli is an understanding of experience based in memory of one sort or
another. Value requires it.
dmb says:
Not sure I understand what you mean here but I can tell you that these
doctrines do not condemn the notion that "we're suspended in language".
Unlike most forms of contextualism, however, the classical pragmatists insist
that our contexts (our particular conceptual categories) are derived from
something more fundamental. That's where value fits into it. "What the MOQ adds
to James' pragmatism and his radical empiricism is the idea that the primal
reality from which subjects and objects spring is VALUE. By doing so it seems
to untie pragmatism and radical empiricism into a single fabric. Value, the
pragmatic test of truth, is also the primary empirical experience. The MOQ says
pure experience is value. Experience which is not valued is not experienced.
The two are the same. This is where value fits. Value is not at the tail-end of
a series of superficial scientific deductions that puts it somewhere in a
mysterious undetermined location in the cortex of the brain. [Booo!] Value is
at the very front of the empirical procession. [Hurray!]" (ch 29)
But let me back up a little and say something about this idea that we're
suspended in language. Let me give you some context here. Broadly speaking,
this idea is what separates modernism from postmodernism. (I hope that the
Rorty fans are paying attention here because I think this is the at the heart
of where they go wrong.) According to Rorty, "the failure of the positivistic
project is central in such a way that it changes everything about philosophy"
and "the linguistic turn is the greatest thing to ever happen to philosophy".
As you probably already know, the positivists represent the purest form of SOM
and their project was predicated on the correspondence theory of truth. They
were empiricists of a very different kind than is James, Dewey and Pirsig. The
positivists thought subjects and objects were the starting points of experience
and so radical empiricism is an explicit rejection of their basic metaphysical
assumptions. The positivists were thoroughgoing realists who thought that
objective reality was given to us through the five senses. Rorty's fondness for
the linguistic turn expresses the great insight of postmodernism that reality
is not simply given to us but is instead a system of socially constructed
conceptual categories. That, in a nutshell, is contextualism. And the
conclusion usually drawn here is that "true" is only ever true within a context
and we can never use objective reality to support our truths because we can't
ever have access to such a thing. I think it was Ken Wilber who said Rorty
replaces subjectless objectivity with objectless subjectivity, resulting in a
kind of intellectually paralyzing relativism. It's a kind of linguistic
idealism wherein our conceptual understandings can never be justified by
experience. The tricky thing here is that he understands "experience" in terms
of traditional empiricism, in terms of what the positivists meant by it. He's
right to reject that. All the pragmatist have that in common and this
definitely includes radical empiricism, which employs the term "experience" in
a completely different way than the positivist. James and Pirsig criticize them
for not being empirical enough whereas Rorty rejects empiricism altogether.
That's why he says, "my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties
into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to move everything over
from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics". As Ramberg puts it,
"Epistemology, in Rorty's account, is wedded to a picture of mind's structure
working on empirical content to produce in itself items—thoughts,
representations—which, when things go well, correctly mirror reality." In other
words, for Rorty, epistemology is WEDDED to the correspondence theory of truth
so that when you get rid of SOM you automatically get rid of epistemology and
simply abandon all truth theories. This is what I like to call
all-or-nothing-ism. By contrast, radical empiricism is a reconstructed
epistemology and pragmatism is a theory of truth, both of which are predicated
on the rejection or traditional empiricism and a rejection of the
correspondence theory of truth. Or, to put it very simply, the classical
pragmatists reform epistemology whereas Rorty simply abandons epistemology.
This is why the Rorty fans are so confused about radical empiricism and the
pragmatic theory of truth.
Why do they supposed that a non-positivistic concept of "truth" or "experience"
is impossible? That's something you'll have to ask Steve or Matt because it
makes no sense to me. As I understand it, that's like saying that horses are an
obsolete mode of transportation therefore there is no such thing as a mode of
transportation. It simply doesn't follow. It's an invalid inference.
Thanks,
dmb
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