Ron said:
If one believes that truth statements are predicated on
agreement then rhetoric is indeed the trump card.
but
If one believs that truth statements are predicated on
meaning in experience then empricism trumps rhetoric,
since Socrates, for the most part practices the destruction
of the rhetorical notion. hence the utility of distinguishing
the difference btween preconceptual predication and
conceptual predication.
Ron also said in a different place:
This is where the preconceptual/conceptual distinction is
useful in determining the kind of analogues one is talking
about. What types of meaning are we ascribing to "truths"..
are they predicated on immediate experience or the
experience of social persuasion?
John said if response to the first:
If one believes truth statements are predicated on meaning
in experience, then one agrees that truth statements are
predicated on agreement since meaning is predicated on
agreement.
That's not merely a rhetorical trump card. It's a trump Ace.
Matt:
I think John's rejoinder is effective. When, in experience,
you wonder about meaning, what do you do?
You ask somebody.
If you don't understand what the meaning of a sentence
was, you often ask the producer, "What did you mean?" If
agreement is never obtained over "what was meant," there
will remain obscurity over "the meaning."
Another way of putting it is to say that I don't know what
the slogan "empiricism over rhetoric" is supposed to mean,
because I identify "rhetoric" with "meaning in experience."
But this notion of "preconceptual predication" might be a
useful way to state what I take us to have learned from
post-positivism (i.e. from the attempts by professional
philosophers to get rid of positivism, e.g. Quine, Sellars,
Davidson, Rorty)--which is: a non-linguistic item cannot
itself serve as predication because predication itself is a
linguistic item.
Another way of putting it: if you are caused to think "I see
water" by water, the water _itself_ is not the justification
for thinking you see water, but rather the sitting of the
thought "I think I see water because I see water" within a
network of other thought-items (almost always _implicit_
items, and not self-consciously explicit). These implicit
relations cannot be rubbed off: as James said, the "trail of
the human serpent is over all." These relations include, for
instance, other things like "I am not high" and "My senses
are not hooked up to a computer" and "I am not in a desert
and have not not had anything to drink in two days."
This is a complicated nettle of issues (including the thought
that "thought-items" is more misleading than not, and that
we should think of the mind as a muscle), ones that I do not
do so well in articulating these days, but they are what halt
me from seeing the general utility of the distinction between
"predicated on immediate experience or the experience of
social persuasion." The reason why is because, though I
understand the difference between seeing water and
somebody persuading me that I'm just high, I also consider
the human ego--the first-person "I"--to be the
internalization of "social persuasion," of socialness. Without
a society, there is no "person." Because of the freight of
Cartesian epistemology (in which a concerted philosophical
effort was enjoined to erase the socialness of knowing), I
think we must be very careful in deploying the distinctions
we do to create a general model of knowledge-formation.
So--okay, there are different "types of meaning" which we
can pratically distinguish (by their relations to other
"meanings"). The above is intended to show why I am not
persuaded that I need to use the vocabulary of "immediate"
and "preconceptual"--I think I can unpack types of meaning
perfectly well without them.
Is it because I fear Plato, Descartes, and Kant? Sure. We
just have different judgements about whether or not this
fear is unreasonable. I'm not suggesting that
retro-pragmatists stop their systematization of insights
latent in James and Dewey that were left dormant with the
shift from an experience-vocabulary to a
language-vocabulary, and them doing so in an
experience-vocabulary. I just don't see the theoretical
conflict between their project and stating these insights in
a language-vocabulary. I see the "meaning" of James not
to be in his use of "immediate experience" but in the
relationship of that term to the other things going on.
Matt
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail is redefining busy with tools for the New Busy. Get more from your
inbox.
http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID27925::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:032010_2
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/md/archives.html
