Hi Dave,
> Steve: > > The MOQ has some transcultural, ahistorical skyhook for getting us in > > a position to do more than make good arguments for what is good? > > Dave: > Yep. The MoQ's transcultural, ahistorical skyhook is mystic experience. > Opps, maybe not quite. This skyhook gets one in a position to "really know" > both what is really real and ultimately good, but good arguments rely on > words that are always inadequate. But given human nature, many mystics, > historically, have given it a good go anyway. Oooo...mmmmm. > Steve: You make be right that dmb intended this sort of move--to call on radical empiricism and mystical experience as some sort of ahistorical and transcultural philosophical Foundation for knowledge, but I can't see how we get something practice-transcending for justifying our truth claims by referring to a mystical reality. I think you touch on one big problem, perhaps THEE big problem with the notion, in that when referring to a prelinguistic reality as justification we wind up using language to do so. We are suspended in language, and radical empiricism doesn't change that fact. It can't give us practice-transcending standards since standards are linguistic. I see radical empiricism as a good critique against sense-data empiricism, but that's as far as it goes for doing any work in epistemology. Our truth claims are subject to the objections that we and other humans make about them, and as Rorty says there are no constraints on such claims that are not included in the set of such potential objections. Consulting mystical reality to tell us what is true and false is a possible demand that I suppose someone could make of us (and a very silly demand that would be (pray on it!)), but mystical reality itself makes no such demand. Best, Steve 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
