On Nov 17, 2011, at 1:06 PM, david buchanan wrote: > The MOQ has a dispute with the metaphysical assumptions of empirical science > but it is based on experience and that's what makes it work. As a radical > empiricist, one cannot reject the empirical data. In that sense, the MOQ > retains an element of realism. We carve out everything, as James says. We > sort experience into all kinds of concepts but experience itself does not > bend to our will. Experience as it is immediately felt and lived in the > concrete comes with real resistances against which we must struggle and we > don't always win. Empirical reality pushes back such that concepts like > sharpness, heaviness, and redness can be put to use in experience without any > problems for a whole lifetime. That resistance is what gives rise to concepts > about objects in the first place. I'm the kind of realist who sometimes burns > his hands on the oven and I do not think it was an illusion when the broken > drinking glass nearly sliced my pinky off. "Red" might be a deduced concepts > that only has meaning in relation to human eyes, but the redness of the blood was real enough for me. Such concepts are pragmatically true rather than objectively true. Again, the pragmatic truth is one that agrees with empirical reality in the sense that it successfully operates within experience, not in the sense that it corresponds to an objective world of physical things in themselves or an ideal world of eternal Forms or anything like that.
Marsha: And for Adolph and company, the pragmatic truth of the holocaust was one that agreed with empirical reality in the sense that it successfully operated within their experience. ___ 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
