Marsha, I have no idea what you are presenting. What is your point? Is this a cut-and-past forum, or a discussion forum? Cheers, Marki
On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 11:33 AM, MarshaV <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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' > > ___ > > > 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 > 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
