Steve said to dmb:
As is becoming typical, instead of responding to my objections to the analogy,
you post a bunch of quotes... dmb Quoted Dewey:
"The history of the theory of knowledge or epistemology would have been very
different if instead of the word 'data' or 'givens', it had happened to start
with calling the qualities in question 'takens'." (John Dewey, 1929;22-3)
dmb says:
Your objection the to the analogy is bogus and the Dewey quote is evidence of
that. Was I wrong to assume that you can draw inferences and conclusions from
the evidence? Apparently so.
In ZAMM, Pirsig says, "Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective
idealist would say. Nor is he THE PASSIVE OBSERVER of all things, as the
OBJECTIVE idealists and MATERIALISTS would say. ...He is a participant in the
creation of all things."
The "passive observer of all things" being denied here refers to SOM's "myth of
the given". Notice also that Pirsig is NOT saying we are the source of all
things either. He's somewhere between those two positions. We do not simply
create our reality nor is it simply given to us. We are participants. Yes, the
human serpent coils over everything, but "everything" is part of the story too.
Steve:
Whether you talk about givens or takens, you've still set up a dichotomy
between reality and concepts. Aren't concepts a part of reality? When you
"take" a bucket of reality, where are you taking to? This is my objection to
the analogy that you didn't bother to address. If experience is the stream and
if experience is reality, then the buckets in this analogy must must be
something not part of reality.
dmb says:
The bucket holds water. Water flows in the river. Water is reality either way,
but one is still derived from the other. We can make distinctions between them
even though they are not different "substances" or whatever. Since these
buckets of water are concepts, then what does your question mean? Where do we
"take" the concepts? "Taken" is just another word for "derived". The "taking"
is what makes them concepts in the first place. After that, we use them and
test them in the stream. They have to work together. Without DQ nothing can
grow and without sq nothing can last.
DMB said:
Also, Steve, this thing you think is futile to distinguish. We're talking about
the first cut in the MOQ, static and dynamic. The river is flowing and dynamic,
the bucket is discrete and static. I think you're missing something very big
here, Mr. Peterson.
Steve replied:
Really? You can distinguish the static and dynamic aspects of reality in
practice? DQ/sq is the the first cut and a clean one as metaphysics, but we've
been talking about epistemology here. We are talking about knowledge, and in
doing so we are supposing a distinction between a knower (the "taker" with the
buckets) and what is known (the stream).
dmb says:
What? We are supposing a distinction between knower and known?!? That is SOM
and I'm not supposing any such thing. The knower and known are derived from
pure experience and so they are in the conceptual buckets, not the
pre-conceptual stream. Again, this is an attack on the myth of the given. It
replaces SOM. I thought you understood that. You have read Lila, right?
Steve said:In our moment to moment experience we cannot completely distinguish
the static from the dynamic. As soon as we start talking about a person
_having_ an experience whether in terms of giving or taking, the dynamic and
static aspects of that experiences are conflated to the point that it is
impossible to say where the dynamic part ends and the static part begins.
dmb says:
A day or two ago I offered up the James Quote where he says just that, that
pure experience is never literally pure. (Except for babies, drug users and
meditators, etc..) But objecting on the grounds that we can't "completely
distinguish" and "it is impossible to say" shows that you're missing the point
in a pretty big way. These guys are saying that the fundamental nature of
reality is outside of language, that you can't capture the stream in a bucket,
that our buckets can only "take" some small portion from an inexhaustible,
ever-changing, dynamic flux of reality. This is not supposed to suggest that
the buckets are unreal, but it characterizes the scope and scale of their
relationship to the stream. They are static, secondary, and derived whereas the
stream is dynamic, primary and inexhaustible, that last feature meaning that
buckets can be derived from it endlessly. In fact, that secondary status of the
buckets in relation to the stream is expressed in the Pirsig quote yo
u posted...
"Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it
within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality
cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than
Quality itself.''
Steve said:
In the above, the buckets are the analogues (later, the static patterns). The
stream is DQ, but it is not all of reality, it is only the dynamic aspect of
reality. It is constantly defined and never exhausts definition, so it is
undefinable. Reality is the collection of all the analogues in addition to the
buckets. The buckets aren't something outside of reality that merely take from
reality.
dmb says:
I agree.
Now think about Rorty's position. If conversation within an ethnocentric
context is the only constraint, then all we have are buckets. The simply is no
stream in this view. If you whisper "primary empirical reality" or
"unconceptualized reality" in the ear of a Rortyist, he thinks you're talking
about reviving the myth of the given or otherwise making a claim about the
subject having direct access to the objective world of things. He'll take it as
a bad faith effort to reinstate the correspondence theory because, for Rorty,
that's all epistemology ever did and all it can ever be.
If you don't ditch SOM then everything said about pure experience (DQ) will be
sorely misunderstood. This is the misunderstanding as you put it, Steve: "We
are talking about knowledge, and in doing so we are supposing a distinction
between a knower (the "taker" with the buckets) and what is known (the stream)."
Again, subjects and objects are BOTH derived from the stream. The both have
secondary status and are both part of a larger hypothesis called SOM. As you've
construed it, the analogy represents SOM, the very thing it is supposed to
replace. See?
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