Adrie, Marsha and all interested MOQers:
Adrie said:
I did some further investigaton on the squirrel issue, and apparantly i'm not
the only one to see the pattern, it is really there and other scolars , sources
and readers recognised it to. i found a paper on an American uncc.edu
webserver, i will mail the link towards you, to review it.
dmb says:
I read the paper and there is an interesting harmony between the philosophy and
the physics, but I'm not convinced the two are really connected. I mean, the
author wants to push the idea from epistemology into ontology. He thinks it's
not just about what we know and how we know, but also about what there is. If I
understand James rightly, all ontological categories should be taken AS IF.
They are abstract ideas that we use to unify similar kinds of experience and
they serve that purpose well but James's empiricism is so radical that
experience itself is reality and anything we posit as a ground of experience is
going to be a concept, an abstraction drawn from experience. And so it seems to
me that the various frames of reference talked about in physics are posited as
a physical fact, a physical structure. (In this case, of course, time-space and
all the forces are counted as physical.) From the point of view of pragmatism,
physics itself would be counted as a frame of referen
ce, as a point of view, and even as a "world" or sub-universe within our
world. He was pushing against Absolutism on the one hand but he was also
pushing back against the scientific materialism of his positivistic age.
Having said that, however, it is interesting that Einstein was developing
relativity in Zurich and Picasso was developing cubism in Paris at about the
same time James was talking about a pluralistic universe in philosophy. In
three separate domains, great geniuses were thinking about perspectives and
points of view all at the same time, around 1910. Somehow, I think the
discovery of the unconscious mind figures in here too. It's almost like there
was something going below the surface that's even more mind-blowing and
revolutionary than all of these mind-blowing revolutions put together. Taken
all together, the over-riding lesson seems to be that reality is far more
plastic than we imagined.
Now having said that, the pragmatist does NOT say reality is whatever we think
it is. It isn't JUST a matter of perspective because experience puts
constraints on what we can believe. The scientific method works because it
systematically tests ideas in experience. As a radical empiricists, he is going
to insist that we respect scientific data because the data it produces are the
products of experience. In the same way that experiments can falsify an
hypothesis, our personal beliefs can also fail the test of experience. In that
sense, pragmatism is a kind of realism. It says the concrete experiences we
have ARE the facts. We come up with some pretty fancy ideas to explain those
concrete, lived realities and some of them work better than others but for
James it all begins and ends with experience. There is no ontological reality
beyond or underlying experience, except as an hypothesis, except as a
conceptual tool. And the value of these ideas is measured in terms of their
abili
ty to successfully guide future experience. "It is," James said," AS IF
reality were made of ether, atoms or electrons, but we mustn't think so
literally. The term 'energy' doesn't even pretend to stand for anything
'objective.' It is only a way of measuring the surface of phenomena so as to
string their changes on a simple formula." (508, emphasis is James's in the
original)
Adrie said:
I think the issue needs further investigation, because the value of it , and
Pirsig's adding, "we are in the position of that squirrel" proving he
recognised the importance of it.
dmb says:
You were right about that. I mean, I checked and Pirsig does in fact mention
Einstein's theory in connection with the squirrel story. But I think there is
that other side to the story. In some sense he's saying that ideas are true
because they work or they work because they're true. He thinks it means the
same thing either way, but this is not as lax as it may seem. Later on in the
same book, James goes into some detail about what it actually means to say that
an idea works. And since true ideas are the ones that work, he's being very
explicit about what counts as truth according to pragmatism. In the chapter
called "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth" we find that truth is constrained in
all kinds of ways. Check out these passages, for example:
"All human thinking gets discursified; we exchange ideas; we lend and borrow
verifications, get them from one another by means of social intercourse. All
truth thus gets verbally built out, stored up, and made available for everyone.
Hence, we must TALK consistently just as we must THINK consistently: for both
in talk and thought we deal with kinds. Names are arbitrary, but once
understood they must be kept to. We mustn't now call Abel 'Cain' or Cain
'Abel.' If we do, we ungear ourselves from the whole book of Genesis, and from
all its connexions with the universe of speech and fact down to the present
time. We throw ourselves out of whatever truth that entire system of speech and
fact may embody." (579)
dmb comments:
A lot of people don't know this about James, but there is a certain kind of
conservatism of truth in this conception. Notice how "human thinking" gets
"built out, stored up, and made available to everyone"? This reminds me of
Pirsig's description of the mythos being built of one analogy on top of another
until we have a world of understanding shared by all of communicating mankind.
Unless we want to ungear ourselves from that mythos, we talk to our fellow man
as if black were black and white were white, and as if Cain was different from
Abel. He's not being an essentialist or reifying these concepts, but the
agreement, the harmony produced by their common use is real. "Names are
arbitrary", he says, "but once understood they must be kept to". It's all a
human invention but this world of common understandings is a product of a kind
of natural selection and so we inherit the conceptual "inventions" that have
worked.
"True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as
directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and
flowing human intercourse. They lead away from excentricity and isolation, from
foiled and barren thinking. The untrammeled flowing of the leading-process, its
general freedom from clash and contradiction, passes for its indirect
verification; but all roads lead to Rome, and in the end and eventually, all
true processes must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences
SOMEWHERE, which somebody's ideas have copied." (580)
dmb comments:
True ideas lead us away from excentricity and isolation. Yep, that's what
Matthew Crawford was saying about the idiot mechanics as they were depicted in
ZAMM. He says the idiot is, at bottom, a solipsist. Sadly, James has been
misinterpreted as a relativist, as saying truth is whatever works FOR ME. Not
so.
"Yet in the choice of these man-made formulas we cannot be capricious with
impunity any more than we can be capricious on the common-sense practical
level. We must find a theory that will WORK; and that means something extremely
difficult; for our theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain
new experiences. It must derange common sense and previous belief as little as
possible, and it must lead to some sensible terminus or other that can be
verified exactly. To 'work' means both these things; and the squeeze is so
tight that there is little loose play for any hypothesis. Our theories are
wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic
formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose
between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we
are already partial; we follow 'elegance' or 'economy.' Clerk Maxwell somewhere
says it would be "poor scientific taste" to choose the more com
plicated of two equally well-evidenced conceptions; and you will all agree
with him. Truth in science is what gives us the maximum possible sum of
satisfactions, taste included, but consistency both with previous truth and
with novel fact is always the most imperious claimant".
dmb says:
Yep, Pirsig talks about Quality in terms of the force that opposes
capriciousness. And he echoes James's idea that new understandings always exist
by analogy with previous understandings. "It can't be anything else", he says.
Can we rightly call it relativism when the view says "our theories are wedged
and controlled as nothing else is"? No, the guy who says "sometimes alternative
theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know" is not a
relativist. He's a pluralist. Big difference.
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