Dan said to Matt:
Right... for Don to "know" the dog dish exists apart from his experience of it
is a high quality idea. It allows Don to go about his day without worrying
whether Fido is starving to death at home. So we seem to agree it is a high
quality idea that reality exists apart from experience but it is only an idea.
...How does Don know if his dog's food dish exists when he's apart from
experiencing it?
dmb says:
When James talked about truth in terms of "cash value", his critics mistook him
to be saying that truth is whatever has practical pay off, that truth is
whatever gets us the results we want. But I discovered that he was up to
something else. Basically, he was talking about the empirical issue you guys
have been debating in this thread. His point was that the vast majority of our
empirically verifiable truths are purchased on credit, as opposed to cash. In
this analogy, personally witnessing the dog dish with your own eyes is cashing
out the belief in that dog dish. Your friend telling you that he has a dog dish
would be a truth purchased on credit. If you can't, at least in theory, go over
to his house and confirm the validity of his claim, then his credit is no good.
If memory serves, James used the city of Tokyo as an example of a belief he
held on credit. He'd never been there himself, he said, but he'd known people
who had been there. He'd seen it on maps and in photos an
d otherwise had many reasons to believe that the claim could be cashed out,
that all these second-hand reports could be verified in his own experience if
he were willing to take a long journey. And James said that the vast majority
of our beliefs are held on credit. It would simply be impractical to limit your
scientific beliefs to the data that comes only from experiments that you
personally witnessed.
But, he insisted, actual experience by actual people is the cold hard cash.
That's what supports the whole credit system, he insisted.
I'm not saying the existence of the dog dish becomes second-hand knowledge as
soon as you leave the room, however. That would simply be a matter of not
forgetting that you just cashed out that belief by filling the dish with food.
There's no empirical reason to believe that the dish disappears when you leave
the room. And if it seems to be where we left it every time we care to check,
then I think we have to move to a very unreasonable level of skepticism to have
any serious doubts about it's existence. It simply isn't a problem. The dog
gets fed because there is a regularity and stability in experience such that we
can fruitfully employ concepts like object permanence. This stability and
regularity is what gives rise to the concept and it's what makes the credit
system work. That's how there can be far more knowledge in the world than any
one person could possible have, even by second-hand, even on credit.
Object permanence is a practical belief, one invented by "some remote ancestor"
and learned by every infant. As a practical belief, it's been true for a very
long time but it's much less ambitious than subject-object metaphysics,
philosophical physicalism, the scientific belief in an objective reality or the
metaphysical belief in, say, Kant's things-in-themselves. You're going jump off
the hot stove regardless of your metaphysics. Whatever particular concepts are
used to explain the event afterward, they have to agree with the experience or
otherwise answer to that (ouch) empirical reality. That's why we can give up on
objective reality and the Cartesian self but still think it's a good idea to
avoid cuts, burns, dog bites and atom bombs. It's a kind of mysticism that is
decidedly NOT otherworldly, that brings philosophy down to the earth of things.
The mystics will get off the stove first, he says, because Quality, the mystic
reality, is not a metaphysical idea but the prim
ary empirical reality and that's what the mystic pays attention to rather than
his ideas about empirical reality.
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