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.
---
RMP:
"The idea that satisfaction alone is the test of anything is very dangerous,
according to the Metaphysics of Quality. There are different kinds of
satisfaction and some of them are moral nightmares. The Holocaust produced a
satisfaction among Nazis. That was quality for them. They considered it to be
practical. But it was a quality dictated by low-level static social and
biological patterns whose overall purpose was to retard the evolution of truth
and Dynamic Quality. James would probably have been horrified to find that
Nazis could use his pragmatism just as freely as anyone else, but Phaedrus
didn't see anything that would prevent it. But he thought that the Metaphysics
of Quality's classification of static patterns of good prevents this kind of
debasement."
McWatt:
This criticism is supported by Popkin & Stroll (1956, p.271) who criticise the
pragmatism of William James as it lacks an explicit moral framework to judge
behaviour by:
Popkin & Stroll:
It is not possible to make an evaluation, to say something works or not, unless
one has some criteria to appeal to. Such criteria the pragmatist denies us.
What is meant by ‘what works’? Are we to be concerned for what works for us as
individuals, for our society, for our humanity, or what? We need some moral
framework, some idea of what is good and bad, desirable and undesirable, some
notion of aims and objectives, in order to know what it might mean to say that
something works or does not.
(McWatt, Anthony, 'A Critical Analysis of Robert Pirsig’s
Metaphysics of Quality'
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