dmb said:
On top of the several named by Pirsig, I have posted quotes from a number of
philosophers wherein they specifically reject SOM.
Bo replied:
...Those rejections of SOM that you mention were failed attempts to escape SOM.
Failed because it requires a metaphysics that has SOM as a sub-system and
Phaedrus' breakthrough in ZAMM was that of seeing SOM as a fall-out of Quality
..... and the S/O distinction called "intellect" FYI.
dmb says:
This is exactly why people get frustrated with you Bo. I have explained this to
you already many times. For example, the following was addressed to you two and
a half years ago. Not that it'll do any good, but here it is again. Please
notice that I am quoting philosophers to make this point. What reason do you
have for thinking you understand this stuff better than they do? You're smarter
and better read than those hacks over at Stanford University, better than the
scholars who've devoted their lives to studying this stuff? That is absurdly
arrogant.
Maybe you'd like to hear from some other pragmatists on the topic of SOM. John
Stuhr is the Editor of "Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential
Readings and Interpretive Essays. (Oxford University Press, 2000.) He says, “In
beginning to understand his view, it cannot be overemphasized that Dewey is not
using the word ‘experience’ in its conventional sense. For Dewey, experience is
not to be understood in terms of the experiencing subject, or as the
interaction of a subject and object that exist separate from their interaction.
Instead, Dewey’s view is radically empirical” and “experience is an activity in
which subject and object are unified and constituted as partial features and
relations within this ingoing, unanalyzed unity” (PCAP 437). Or, as Dewey
himself explains SOM in “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”, “the
characteristic feature of this prior notion is the assumption that experience
centres in, or gathers about, or proceeds from a centre or subject which is
outside the course of natural existence, and set over against it” (PCAP 449).
This “prior notion” is what radical empiricism is rejecting. It is seen as a
mistake and as the source of many fake problems in philosophy. As Stuhr puts
it, “the error of materialists and idealists alike” is “the error of conferring
existential status upon the products of reflection” (PCAP 437). This is a
matter of treating our “products of reflection” as if they were ontological
realities instead of parts of a conceptual scheme. In this case, subjects and
objects are our primary example. When these abstractions are taken from the
realm of practical doings and then asked to do work metaphysics or
epistemology, it creates many problems and questions. Most of these have to do
with how subjects and objects relate, how the former can know what the latter
"really" is, for example. “The problem of knowledge as conceived in the
industry of epistemology is the problem of knowledge in general – of the
possibility, extent, and validity of knowledge in general” but, Dewey says in
“The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”, this problem only “exists because it
is assumed that there is a knower in general, who is outside of the world to be
known, and who is defined in terms antithetical to the traits of the world”
(PCAP 449). Or, as William James puts it in “A World of Pure Experience”, “the
first great pitfall from which a radical standing by experience will save us is
an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known. Throughout
the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as
absolutely discontinuous entities” and their relations have “assumed a
paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to
overcome” (PCAP 184). I think all this fits quite neatly with Pirsig's attack
on SOM. Not only does he explicitly align the MOQ with James's radical
empiricism, he attacks SOM for the same reasons. He calls it a "metaphysical
assumption" or "concepts derived from experience" instead of the "products of
reflection" but the complaint is about mistaking intellectual abstractions for
existential realities. And I suppose one of the reasons the abstraction seems
so hard to shake is that we can't shake the practical doings of life from which
they are drawn. The experience from which they are abstracted remains even when
the abstractions are seen as such.
“The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims
that all legitimate knowledge arises from the sense or by thinking about what
the sense provided. Most empiricists deny that validity of any knowledge gained
through imagination, authority tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They
regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable.
The Metaphysics of Quality varies from this by saying that the values of art
and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past
they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. They
have been excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that all the universe
is composed of subjects and objects and anything that can’t be classified as a
subject or an object isn’t real. There is no empirical evidence for this
assumption at all. Its just an assumption” (LILA 99).
“The second of James’ two main systems of philosophy …was his radical
empiricism. By this he meant that subject 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, such 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 of psychical: it
logically precedes this distinction” (LILA 365).
If you can see your way through these ideas, Bo, then I just can't help you.
That goes double for the English speaking defenders of Bo's equation. You guys
are at odds with everyone who knows what they're talking about. You do not
understand the meaning of the central terms in Bo's equation. Nobody has to
take my word for it. Look it up. Go find out for yourself. The Stanford
encyclopedia is free for everyone. That'd be a good place to start.
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