Hello everyone
On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 3:25 PM, Matt Kundert
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hey Dan,
>
> Matt said:
> Say Don's in the living room fretting about his dog not getting enough
> food because he isn't hovering around the food dish in the kitchen.
> Without that direct experience of the food dish, Don worries the dish
> won't be there for Fido. Don's buddy Chris gets tired of the moaning
> over Fido's fate and goes into the kitchen. Chris then yells out from
> the kitchen, "Fido's dish is still here!" Should Don be less fretful?
> Why? He, after all, is _not_ directly experiencing the food dish: Chris
> is. Don is only directly experiencing the noise coming out of the
> kitchen that comes in the form of a sentence expressing information.
>
> If we use the sense of "know" you are using, Dan, then Don will still
> be in the same position, fretting over Fido's survival because he is
> not directly experiencing the food dish. However, wouldn't we want
> to say that his imaginary sense of the existence of Fido's food dish
> is _enhanced_ in some way by his direct experience of Chris's
> words?
>
> I think we do. This enhancement can be articulated in many different
> ways at this point, but to deny an effect on what you called the
> imagination in this context is to deny common sense assumptions.
> And for what use? (I'll get back to that in a moment.)
>
> I think the best way to stage the enhancement is to first deny that the
> primary context of "to know" is the solitary first-person-subject. I
> think that is the Cartesian context. To suggest "knowing" something
> is to be in an _inter_personal context, to be in a web of other
> people's imaginings, if you will. This allows the following response to
> your penultimate statement: "Whether or not Don's dog dish exists
> apart from the empirical evidence of its existence is a question
> rooted in the conviction that there is a real world out there."
> 1)
> "Empirical evidence" should be construed interpersonally, so that
> nobody would suggest that a dog dish does exist apart from the
> empirical evidence of its existence, though of course some evidence
> is indirect reporting from other first-person-subjects.
> 2) The
> "conviction" is one found in every community that has dealt with dog
> dishes in other rooms. This conviction is _not_, though, the Cartesian
> sense of a "real world out there."
>
> Dan said:
> If I understand what you're saying correctly, I agree and I think it fits
> into the framework of the MOQ in a proper sense. Replacing the
> notion of a reality where a subject exists independently from the
> objects that the subject experiences with the notion of a reality
> composed of values enhances and expands our point of view.
> Intellectual and social patterns are just as "real" as biological and
> inorganic patterns, but they are real in a different way.
>
> Matt:
> I repeated the long extract from my post above, without your
> interstitial responses, because how you end right above encapsulates
> the thrust of my dialectical de-construction of the vocabulary you
> were using to articulate yourself (as potentially hiding Cartesianism)
> and re-construction to show how it would avoid ("to be in a web of
> other people's imaginings"). Because you end above by saying that
> intellectual patterns are "real in a different way"--doesn't using the
> rhetoric of imaginary get in the way of this point?
Dan:
I think there are high quality intellectual patterns that do not rely
on a hypothesis contrary to fact like imagination sometimes can.
>Matt:
> My new Don scenario was meant to call attention to the problem of
> knowledge by testimony in a vocabulary that takes seriously the idea
> that what is real is what is directly experienced. What I want to say
> is that talking about everything but that which is in your immediate,
> direct experience as imaginary seems natural, but weird and
> distended when we want to talk about common sense stuff like our
> dogs.
Dan:
The idea that the city of New York exists is a high quality idea. I
have no reason to suspect that New York City doesn't exist even though
I've never personally been there to experience it directly. But I do
have reason to suspect Don's dog dish doesn't exist, just as I suspect
the tree falling in the forest doesn't exist. They're imaginary. Now,
I might imagine what New York City is like, but until I visit I'll
never know. But imagining something that I know exists and imagining
that which doesn't exist are on different ends of the spectrum of
intellectual quality patterns. Is that really so weird?
>Matt:
> I can fully countenance the idea that you don't want to agree with
> any of the potential Cartesian implications, and that you nor Pirsig
> have to, but it isn't clear to me what the force of questions like "How
> does Don know if his dog's food dish exists when he's apart from
> experiencing it?" is except for posing the Cartesian problematic.
> They seem ill-posed for someone whose goal isn't that problematic,
> but rather one that is beyond it. My sense is that Pirsig _wouldn't_
> pose those koan-esque questions as you say he would ("what
> dish?"), _unless_ he were first confronted by a Cartesian. But I
> thought we'd just reached the position in our conversation where
> you weren't going to ask questions assuming that, so when I see
> one, I take us down the dialectic again.
Dan:
Thank you for your patience... I'm sure you're much more adept than I
at seeing the philosophical implications of what we're discussing.
Like you, I'm unsure the question "what dish?" would even be asked
unless confronted by a Cartesian yet I'm also at a loss as to a proper
answer otherwise. Do we just turn and walk away? Isn't the argument
against the philosophic idealism contained in the MOQ one that a
Cartesian would pose? I thought your query me as to how a person would
answer that charge was what started this line of thought.
If I am talking in circles, I apologize. It's just that I fail to see
a resolution as yet even though I sense we are basically in agreement
on this.
Thank you,
Dan
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