In the "Dropped Threads" thread, Matt said to Adrie:
I agree with you that "Quality is timeless" in the sense you are using it, but
would emphasize that along these lines, my point was that _articulations_ of
Quality are not, and that Pirsig's particular articulations belonged to a
different era (which I would probably place in the 19th C. these days were I to
make such a pronouncement).
dmb says:
If memory serves, this is roughly the same thing you said about James. The
notion that James has been eclipsed by 20th century developments in philosophy
isn't a crazy idea. (He died in 1910.) But this is another assertion taken up
and disputed in Laura Weed's paper and other scholars make the same basic case
for James that she does. She names "behaviorism in psychology and logicism or
deconstructionism in philosophy of language" as the 20th century developments
that supposed eclipsed James's work. "All three movements claimed to be more
'scientific' that James was", she says, "but as the twenty-first century gets
underway, science is moving in a direction that James and his view of truth
would find more ambient that those twentieth century movements". (Weed, page 11)
She then introduces the findings of recent cognitive science and she shows how
contemporary researchers like Fransico Varela, Bruce Mangan, Antonio Damasio,
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson are corroborating what James was saying over a
hundred years ago. What's more, these researchers are, in effect, studying the
role of pre-intellectual and pre-conscious events in the overall cognitive
process. Roughly speaking, they are studying the role of what we would call
Quality or pure experience. And Weed is convinced that these findings give us a
much richer picture, one that shows how impoverished those 20th century rivals
really are by comparison.
"Unlike reductivists, such as Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland", she says,
"Varela and Mangan argue that time, as experienced by humans, is deeply,
pragmatically rooted in the intentionality, the emotional tone, and the
dynamics of a lived life. The very conception of an object is a result of the
interaction of sensations, intentions and emotions within a flow of
experiential time, primed by dispositions to action. ...in it's debt to James,
the new phenomenological approach is a far cry from the reductivism of the
recent past, especially as pursued by many analytical philosophers. ..for
issues related to truth, the new approach indicates that nay propositional
analysis, given in terms of linear mathematical or logical functions, such as
Tarski's or Soames's, must be mistaken. ...It seems likely in light of
contemporary studies of the brain that epistemological theories like Plato's,
which claimed that reasoning improved when emotions were suppressed or
transcended, were equ
ally unrealistic. Damasio has shown that an emotionless person is one who can
not think or plan at all, not one with clearer and more pure reasoning." (Weed,
pp 11-12)
Remarkably, Weed even describes the findings of these cognitive scientists in
terms of "static" and "dynamic". (Maybe that remark should have ended with an
exclamation point.)
"...Lakoff and Johnson argue that both the scientistic realism and the
postmoderns anti-realism of 20th century philosophy have been empirically
discredited. They present their view of embodied realism, which looks quite
Jamesian,.. In the Lakoff and Johnson view of knowledge, as on James's view,
conscious processes in an active, dynamic mind interact with a dynamic and
changing environment, so there is nothing static on either end of the
knower-known relationship that could be the terminal points for correspondence.
" (Weed, page 13)
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