On Sep 29, 2011, at 2:43 PM, david buchanan wrote:
>
> Steve said:
> ...If we subtract the metaphysical baggage from BOTH free will AND
> determinism, then how could the idea of determinism render your actions inert
> and your life meaningless? If we are are considering determinism
> pragmatically rather than married to SOM, then we aren't considering it as a
> candidate for what is REALLY going on in spite of all appearances to the
> contrary.
>
>
>
> dmb says:
>
> Like I've been saying for months, the only metaphysical baggage is the load
> you keep adding. Ideas have consequences and that fact does not depend on SOM
> or the appearance-reality distinction. You can drop both of those
> metaphysical posits and still assert that ideas have consequences. You can
> subscribe to the pragmatic theory of truth and still assert that some ideas
> are not true because of those consequences.
>
> That's what Seigfried explains in those quotes you keep ignoring. For the
> millionth time, Pirsig and James are both saying that the issue is empirical
> and practical, not metaphysical. Why do you keep talking as if I haven't
> already said this 50 times? Read what she said, Steve. By refusing, you have
> wasted 100 days already. Or would you rather waste another 100 days? Why do
> you persist in raising objections to claims that nobody is making and that
> have already addressed many times? Your repeated requests to drop the
> metaphysical versions are aimed at nobody. The scholarly evidence is already
> on the table and ignoring it does not change that fact. Ignoring it only
> proves that you're not being honest, that you are being a Lucy.
>
> For anyone who's genuinely interested in a Jamesian analysis of free will...
Marsha:
Oh this is just lovely... How does it relate to the Metaphysics of Quality?
> "...The pragmatic method includes directives for validating a belief, whereas
> the principle of pure experience includes directives for formulating the
> belief in experiential terms...
> He [James] calls on the principle of pure experience, for instance, to
> demonstrate that if activity is to have any meaning at all, it must be
> derived from 'some concrete kind of experience that can be definitely pointed
> out' (James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 81).
> The first step in the investigation must be to seek 'the original type and
> model of what it means' in the stream of experience." (Charlene Seigfried in
> "William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy", page 318)
> "James then develops his concrete description of human activity; 'But in this
> actual world or ours, as it is given, a part at least of activity comes with
> definite direction; it comes with desire and sense of goal; it comes
> complicated with resistances which it overcomes or succumbs to, and with the
> efforts which the feeling of resistance so often provokes; and it is in
> complex experiences like these that the notions of distinct agents, and of
> passivity as opposed to activity arise.
> Here also the notion of causal activity comes to birth. (ERE, 81-2)
> James culls from experience original models for understanding not only
> action, but causality and freedom. ...
> "The experience of activity is then described as it is 'lived through or
> authentically known' (ERE, 84-5).
> What activity is 'known-as' is taken from this 'complete activity in its
> original and first intention.'
> H goes into detail about the 'ultimate Qualiia' of 'these experiences of
> process, obstruction,, striving, strain, or release' and concludes that we
> cannot conceive of it as lived through except 'in the dramatic shape of
> something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles, and overcoming or
> being overcome'." (Charlene Seigfried in "William James's Radical
> Reconstruction of Philosophy", page 319.)
> "...We want to know whether we are responsible for our activities or are
> determined by events outside of our knowledge and control.
> The phenomenal level cannot be superseded if we are even to ask the right
> questions or frame the experiments correctly.
> The issue is precisely whether events which we experience as ours are in fact
> so, or whether they should be reductively attributed to brain cells.
> In returning to the metaphysical question James defends the position that the
> nature, meaning and location of causality can be determined only at the
> phenomenal level of concrete experience (Essays in Radical Empiricism, 91).
> It it thus not a metaphysical question at all, but a concrete one, or one
> answerable within the parameters of radical empiricism.
> Not only does he show that the metaphysical question must be dropped as
> unanswerable on its own terms, but taking activity at its face-value, or as
> we experience it, we also discover 'the very power that makes facts come and
> be'.
> In arguing that facts are interactively constituted by us, he has finally
> explicitly drawn the consequences of his break with the empiricist assumption
> that our percepts passively mirror reality as it is in itself." (Charlene
> Seigfried in "William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy", page
> 322.)
> "To the objection that our felt activity is only an impression and the facts
> are to be found elsewhere he responds with the principle of the radically
> empiricist philosophy according to which anything, to be considered real,
> must be located within experience. If creative activities are to be found
> anywhere, 'they must be immediately lived' (ERE, 92). ...
> What we mean by causing, even if we mislocate it, are activities of
> 'sustaining, persevering, striving, paying with effort as we go, hanging on,
> and finally achieving our intentions'. For anything to be called a cause, it
> must be of the sort of activity that resembles this 'creation in its first
> intention,' this 'causality at work.'
> To call this phenomenal experience of activity a mere illusion is to prefer a
> hidden ontological principle, that can never experienced and thus never
> verified, to an experientially verifiable level of investigation. James,
> therefore, concludes that 'real effectual causation as an ultimate nature, as
> a 'category', if you like, of reality is JUST WHAT WE FEEL IT TO BE, just
> that kind of conjunction which our own activity-series reveal."
> "...Therefore, the nature of causality is not to be found in searching for
> such a transcendental cause of causes, if this means a non-experiential
> source of what is experienced or some 'more' real, 'unimaginable ontological
> principle' mysteriously hidden from our investigations.
> Furthermore, the worth or interest of our investigations of activity does not
> even consist in discerning the elements of conjunctions of things empirically
> but 'in the dramatic outcome of the whole process' (ERE, 94).
> The only reason for investigating activity and causality is to help us
> understand the course and meaning of life.
> The pragmatic stance is that we seek to know, not for its own sake, but to
> enable us to live better." (Seigfried in "James's Rad Recon", page 323.
> Emphasis is James's in the original.)
> "It has been the traditional interpretive distinction between a world of
> subjective experience and the world of objective reality that has generated
> contemporary attacks on objectivity and verifiability.
> Such REIFIED distinctions can be dissolved by drawing out the implications of
> the perspective that 'The world is surely the TOTAL world, including our
> mental reaction." (Seigfried, 356.)
> "James appeals to pure experience to keep us from REIFYING these categories:
> 'We may, indeed, speculatively imagine a state of pure experience before the
> hypothesis of permanent objects behind its flux has been framed; and we can
> play with the idea that some primeval genius might have struck into a
> different hypothesis' (James, Meaning of Truth, 43).
> Imagining a state of pure experience reminds us that the way the world
> appears to us, the self-evidenct objectivity of objects, is actually the
> result of inventive categories by our ancestors that have been found to be
> useful and therefore preserved and passed on to us through our culture and
> language.
> However, we cannot remake the world at our will. As a result of past choices,
> some possibilities cannot be realized anymore..." (Seigfried, 358.)
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