On Sep 28, 2010, at 6:11 PM, david buchanan wrote:
>
> 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
> refer
en
> 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
> abi
li
> 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 c
om
> 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.
>
>
>
>
>
> 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
___
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
