Steve said:
I'm pretty sure that RMP would see a difference between asserting "X is true"
and "One ought to do X." There is a difference between saying "DMB thinks this
distinction is meaningless" and "DMB should see this distinction as
meaningless."
dmb says:
"This problem of trying to describe value in terms of substance has been the
problem of a smaller container trying to contain a larger one. Value is not a
subspecies of substance. [You can't get oughts from ises.] Substance is a
subspecies of value. When you reverse the container process and define
substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a 'stable
patterns of inorganic values.' The problem then disappears. The world of
objects and the world of values is unified."(Lila p101)
"The physical order of the universe is also the moral order of the universe.
RTA is both. This was exactly what the MOQ was claiming. It was not a new idea.
It was the oldest idea known to man." (Lila p382)
Steve:
I'm asking for more specifics here. Though our truth claims await future
justification or falsification, reality doesn't just hand us the standards for
deciding what sorts of expriences ought to be considered support for our claims
and what sorts of experiences should count as evidence against our claims.
dmb says:
Radical empiricism says ALL experiences can be counted as evidence for or
against our claims. It insists that all kinds of experience be accounted for in
our philosophies and says that anything beyond experience should not be
included in those accounts. This empiricism is so radical that experience and
reality amount to the same thing.
Steve said;
... I don't know how else such claims could be tested if not in the course of
human inquiry. But you recite the refrain "tested by experience" as though
reality sets up parameters and does the testing for us and then communicates to
us the outcome of the test.
dmb says:
That interpretation is quite bizarre. Do you imagine this is about something
other that human experience and human claims? Obviously, it was William James
who set up the parameters of radical empiricism people do the testing and
telling.
Steve:
This question of second order justification is also quite relevant. Until you
can make sense of this question, you shouldn't get on Rorty's case for saying
"no nonconversational constraints on knowledge" because second-order
justification (how we can be justified in our standards for justification) is
what Rorty is talking about in that quote. He doesn't think that there is
anything nonhuman we can appeal to in a conversation to say what ought to count
as a good justification. I'm pretty sure that you agree with Rorty on this
point. Don't you?
dmb says:
Ah, but see the meaning of that quote is at the heart of our dispute. I don't
know if you realize it or not, but this all about the difference between
language and experience. It is Rorty's belief that appeals to experience would
count as one of those non-human justifications. But of course this is an
objection to the claims of traditional empiricism, particularly positivism. In
that case, the nonhuman standard would be an objective physical reality. This
concern does not apply to radical empiricism simply because it does not make
any such claims. But - and this is a very big but - experience does push back,
it offers resistances, displays a certain recalcitrance and is also filled with
regularities. This is human experience, of course, but there is still a kind of
realism involved when experience is the test of truth. And so, unlike Rortyism,
radical empiricism says there most certainly ARE non-conversational constraints
on what we can claim. In fact, the radical empiricist
can be totally convinced by experience even if no one else believes it or even
knows about it.
It seems you don't realize how very different these two views are. You keep
asking me to defend claims I never made and misunderstand the claims I do make.
Like I tried to explain by way of Fish and Standford, Rockwell, Weed,
Hildebrand, Hickman, Putnam and others, Rorty dismisses epistemology because he
defines the question in terms of the failed answer. Matt finally saw what I
meant. Ask him. Read one of the papers I suggested. Like I said, I honestly
don't know what else I can do to help you see it.
_________________________________________________________________
The New Busy is not the too busy. Combine all your e-mail accounts with Hotmail.
http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?tile=multiaccount&ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_4
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
