----- Original Message -----
From: "Steven Peterson" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, December 08, 2011 3:06 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] Realism and anti-realism
Steve:
Our descriptions of reality are always descriptions made for a
purpose. When the realist or anti-realist asks, do you affirm or deny
the existence of objective reality?, what is desired is not a
description made in relation to particular purposes but a
practice-transcending description. We have no practice-transcending
descriptions to offer. We aren't denying that reality is objectively
real. We just can't make any sense of the notion of descriptions of
reality that are objective in the sense of being true without regard
to human practice when we take the meaning for words like "true" and
all others words as having meaning only in relation to practice.
Carl:
To disagree, I think we DO have practice-transcending descriptions. What we
don't have is an adequate way of expressing them that is meaningful to
someone who has never had the experience that resulted in the transcendental
experience. To fall back on an old analogy, we just don't have the ability
to adequately tell someone what a banana tastes like so that they fully
understand the taste of the banana. They have to experience it themselves
before they completely understand. Does this make sense?
Then it gets murkier. Even with a shared experience it's different. It
would be like you trying to explain to me what it feels like to put on a
sock that had just been taken from a warm dryer and putting it on when your
feet are cold. I know what it would feel like to me, but I can't
extrapolate that it would feel the same to you. i.e. for me, your
explanation wouldn't necessarily be "true" in that it wouldn't mean the same
thing to me that it meant to you. We could be sitting side-by-side and
putting on socks at the same time, and you could be revelling in the warmth
while I'm preoccupied wondering why the brakes stopped working on my truck.
We would have a shared experience, but that experience would be different
for each of us. I think that's the problem we encounter when talking about
SQ and DQ. Like Pirsig said in ZAMM, such things as beauty and truth are
events, not concrete ideas.
What do you think?
Carl
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