Back on Monday, 15 Feb 2010, Ron said to dmb:
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... [And later] I think
it's important to remember that the value Pirsig speaks of is pre-intellectual,
That can be taken that to mean dominated by social patterns of value.
dmb says:
I've been meaning to comment on this for a while. Yes, the value (DQ) Pirsig
talks about is pre-intellectual but this only means non-verbal or pre-verbal or
pre-conceptual. In this case, the term "pre-intellectual" refers to the cutting
edge of each moment in experience, not the historical era prior to the
evolution of the intellectual level. See, the reason it defies understanding
and can't be defined is that understandings and definitions are conceptual,
verbal or intellectual while DQ refers to experience in the moment before it is
chopped up, refers to an undifferentiated aesthetic awareness, a feel for the
whole situation. This pre-intellectual awareness AND the static patterns we
inhabit "are both implicated in the constitution of experience", as Hunter
Brown put it.
Ron said:
I guess I have trouble agreeing with a universal foundation for truth that
isn't colored by social level patterns of value. The way VALUE is used above,
suggests a universal fundamental reality that we experience purely before
social/ intellectual values are imposed. Value is at the front of the
procession, but it is hardly a bottom for truth, it extends biologically and
inorganically. Value as the test of the true speaks more about four levels of
"true."
dmb says:
Well, the pragmatist doesn't offer a universal foundation nor does he deny the
social context of our truth claims. The pragmatic theory of truth doesn't say
in advance what is and is not true. It is just a method for testing our truth
claims, our ideas. As you probably noticed when I was making the case to Steve,
James held that truth is not an inherent property of an idea but rather that
truth is something that happens to an idea in the course of experience. Testing
a theory means putting it into practice, means actually trying it out. This
basic formula can refer to what goes on in science labs or it can refer to
motorcycle repair jobs. For a pragmatist, the "truth" can only ever refer to
the quality of an idea and that quality is measured by actual experience. I
think Pirsig is making a case that the pre-intellectual cutting edge of
reality can be used to improve and enrich our conceptualizations, to expand our
forms of rationality and even to guide the process of discovery and innovation
in the sciences, but truth claims have to be made in conventional terms, with
the static patterns at hand.
dmb had said:
... 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.
Ron replied:
Isn't that what's being suggest by "pure experience"? the interpretation of
verbal truths correspodance with dynamic experience?
dmb says:
Nope. The correspondence theory of truth is rejected and replaced by the
pragmatic theory of truth. The idea that there is an objective material reality
that is what it is apart from what anyone thinks about it is rejected as
primary and replaced by a picture an ever-changing experiential reality that's
too rich, too thick, too overflowing and too dynamic to be conceptualized. In
this view, our ideas are derived from experience and they can be used to guide
future experience but they are talked about in terms of "takings" from reality
rather than reflections or representations. And the idea here is that our
takings can never exhaust the experiential reality from which they are taken.
One classic example is the number of ways that a spot on a college campus can
be taken. Say a bunch of different people are sitting in the central quadrant
each taking it in their own ways. The security guard notices stuff that the
history professor doesn't and vice versa. The student council president doesn't
see what the captain of the football team sees. The cocky senior sees it
differently than the intimidated freshman. The architect, the physicists and
the geologist are all looking at it in material terms, basically, but they
could each point out things the other two aren't seeing. They all have an equal
shot at justifying their claims about that spot. They're all going to base
those claims, at least partly we hope, on what's actually been experienced
there at that spot. So which perspective is the right one? Can we even say
there is only one correct perspective? Can we hope to somehow add up all these
perspectives and try to know everything that's knowable about that courtyard?
No, we can't pick just one view over the others. We can't privilege one kind of
perspective over the others. We could never hope to add up all the points of
view because the courtyard itself is constantly changing and new perspectives
will come along that we haven't even imagined yet. The only thing we can do is
test any given claim against experience itself. If it pans out there, that's
all it means for an idea to be true. In this example, every one of the
observers can be right or wrong within that perspective. The view of the
physicist is best challenged by another physicist, not by the view of the
football player. Not that these things are so discreet as to be untranslatable.
We could blend perspectives to produce a hybrid perspective but this too would
be subject to the test of experience and, like any of the other claims, could
be shown to be true or false on that basis. This test asks if there is
agreement between concept and reality, but differs quite dramatically from
correspondence theory of truth wherein there can be only one correct concept
that matches reality in a one-to-one sort of way, where I think the cat is on
the mat and it's an objective scientific fact that the cat "really IS" on the
mat.
dmb had said:
Rorty 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.
Ron replied:
I understand now. Because ultimately, Pragmatism is nothing if it isn't
epistemological. Therefore Rorty is an influentual character in the
understanding of the reformation of epistomology, "pure experience" then, is an
epistemological point of beginning. An epistemological first principle. In fact
it takes redefining the term "empirical" from an ontological point of view to
an epistomological one...
dmb says:
Well, yes. Pragmatism is a theory of truth and radical empiricism is an
epistemological position. Epistemology is the investigation of what counts as
knowledge and truth. Ontology is about the nature of being, about the nature of
what exists. Within SOM, for example, reality is dualistic so that mind and
matter are two separate ontological categories. The correspondence theory of
truth goes with this dualism and holds that truth is a matter of matching mind
to matter, of correspondence between subjective beliefs and objective states of
affairs. By contrast, radical empiricism says this so-called objective
ontological is actual just a secondary concept derived from the recalcitrances
felt in experience. I mean, the whole idea of an objective material reality is
based on the way experience pushes back. It really does hurt to stub your toe
or to fall off a horse. If you think you can fly and jump off a building to
test that theory, the existence of a pre-existing material reality is going to
seem quite real just as hit the pavement and your belief in human flight is
disproved. I mean, there is a reason why this view is so widespread. Most of
the time, it works. The pragmatist says it works because most of the time it
agrees with experience but he also says it is just a useful idea, not an
ontological reality. That's what it means to say that subjects and objects are
secondary, to say they are the products of thought and experience rather than
the conditions that makes experience and thought possible.
As I understand it, the term "empirical" was always an epistemological term but
the radical empiricist is so radically empirical that ontology evaporates
almost entirely. It is a position that says experience IS reality. We don't
come to know reality through experience so much as reality just IS that
experience. The distinction between DQ and sq might suggest an ontological
dualism if you simply put them in the place where subjects and objects used to
go but that would be a misconception, I think. The idea here is that they are
both forms of Quality but they are not two different ontological categories so
much as phases in experience. Likewise, truth and knowledge are obtained by
passing through the various phases of experience. This is a constant ongoing
process but it all happens within stream of experience so that thoughts and
things are already connected to each other by the transitional experiences that
bring you from one to the other.
He said, two weeks later. Better late than never, I guess.
dmb
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