Just to help this old thread die in terms of where everybody was
before we left it behind...
DMB said:
I would beg every MOQer to think in paragraphs - or at least
recognize it when the other guy is talking like that. How far can we
go by simply trading slogans and quips, after all?
Dan said:
I don't think Matt is talking about thinking in paragraphs (and feel
free to correct me if that's untrue) but rather he wishes I would
respond to the gist of his entire post rather than breaking it down
into bit-size bits. Unfortunately, that's my "style."
Matt:
I wasn't thinking about what Dave said, but it is a good heuristic.
However, I wasn't also exactly thinking about what you said either,
Dan. The holism I was commending was digesting the whole of a
post/essay/whatever before picking out the bits that one responds to
in bits. The purely stylistic part is choosing between "write a single
block" vs. "write bits corresponding to bits." I'm not terribly
concerned about that. What I'm concerned about is the expression
of a single point of view that can be grasped by a reader as a
coherent point of view with a center of gravity within the confines of
a single post/whatever. It doesn't matter, for this, whether there's a
single block or five bits. What matters for the reader looking for this
in order to grasp what all five bits mean together is that the writer
was occupying a single point of view when he wrote them.
The relationship between this articulation of "composition principles,"
if you will, and you Dan, is only that I've been having terrible difficulty
in finding the center of gravity, and so had begun to experiment with
the possibility that there wasn't one.
Dan said:
Furthermore, I think it is way too easy for some contributors (not
naming names, Dave) to cover up their uncertainties with a load of
bullshit by going on and on rather than taking the time to offer up a
succinct response. There is no reason to expect someone to read a
ten thousand word essay replete with dozens of cut-and-pastes
when a hundred well-chosen words will suffice.
Matt:
Despite the fact that I will name Dave as thinking that I do this
(loaded down with jargon as I am), I think Dave and I do, on the
other hand, agree that figuring out how to tell the difference between
"when a hundred well-chosen words will suffice" and the time when
more are needed is harder then you seem to let on here. I have
students that think that they've said all that needs to be said about
human rights in 500 words. I think it's wise that I've been put into a
position with authority to tell them, "uh...no."
DMB said:
...Otherwise, the use of jargon is not only unhelpful, it almost seems
like a deliberate effort to exclude people from the conversation. A
good writer understands who he is talking to and acts accordingly,
no?
Matt:
Let me interject before your response to this, Dan, to confirm that
Dave was, as he said, just talking about me here. (And that's
actually all I have to say about Dave's lecture about jargon.)
Dan said:
Well, when I offered up a few of the definitions concerning
"imagination" Matt seemed perturbed that I didn't isolate upon one.
The English language is ambiguous in that many words have
multiple meanings. When you throw about terms like "standard
english" and all we have to do is stick to it, well... it makes me
wonder just how familiar you are with the language and its
intricacies.
Matt:
I found this odd, Dan. I absolutely agree with you that "the English
language is ambiguous in that many words have multiple meanings,"
but given that premise of understanding, why do you seem to find
my perturbation about you not choosing one odd? I wanted you to
choose one definition/understanding so that we could help _avoid_
ambiguity in our conversation, because I'm pretty sure that us
missing how the other was using a particular word at a particular
point, and this happening over and over again at different stages
with different words, is how we moved in circles. (For example, I
think I found a mistake, in reviewing the beginning of our
conversation for the new thread, I had made in syntax. It was when
you said "imaginary trees and dog dishes": in reviewing the context
and the future of the conversation, I think I took you to have meant
"imaginary" to cover both objects, when I think now that you meant
only the trees to be covered by the adjective "imaginary.")
Dan said:
Again, I am not saying to doubt everything that isn't sensed. I think
you're misunderstanding the question being considered, as I've
already said a couple times. Of course an "object" is imaginary when
it isn't sensed. It exists as a concept. How else can it exist? It isn't
that the object "becomes" imaginary though, nor does it magically
blink out of existence. There is nothing we can say of it other than
what we imagine. That is the only sense of it that we have.
Matt:
Your "of course" seems to denote a kind of obviousness about the
conceptual relationships you are describing (say, between sensation,
imagination, and memory). I took one point of philosophical
discourse about these things to be that we withhold the sense of the
obvious in order to tease apart what the relationships are that make
for the obviousness. (You used this kind of line of thought earlier to
wonder why I kept wanting to talk about common sense, but I don't
think there is anything common about wanting to explain just how
the "common" works in holding together our "sense" of things.) For
example, did you mean to suggest that dog dishes have the same
status of existence as unicorns when the dog dishes are unobserved?
I'm not sure why you'd want to say that. However, be that as it may,
what I do want in the other thread is an explication of these
relationships, and not just taking them as "obvious."
Dan said:
You can cling to the notion of object permanence and claim it is
common sense that objects exist apart from the experience of those
objects but on the other hand there is no way for you to prove their
existence when I ask: what objects?
Matt:
Here's another part I never understood. Why isn't the answer, to
your rhetorical question, "the objects in our imagination" open? It
seems like the Pirsigian answer, in fact, that follows out from what
you've called Pirsig's idealism. You keep reading Dave and I as
"clinging" to object permanence, when we've just been trying to
explain how it works.
DMB said:
If the infant doesn't sort these things out and learn concepts like
object permanence, life is gonna be rough. That's why we should let
our babies play with knives and fire.
Dan said:
Exactly... so to try and explain to Don that he shouldn't worry himself
about his dog dish disappearing when he leaves the room on account
of the concept of object permanence is a fool's choice. He should
know that already. As you say... every infant needs to know it in
order to properly function in the world and if they don't, us explaining
it to them isn't going to help much.
Matt:
This line of thought about Don is what I meant about not
understanding how to approach the thought-experiment in a way that
was useful and rather short-circuiting it. Don _should_ understand
common sense already. But we are supposing he doesn't so that we,
the philosophers using the thought-experiment, can explain how
common sense works. It's like pretending that Don had a brain-fart,
and suddenly and inexplicably _forgot_ how to function
commonsensically, and we had to just remind him. ("Easy Don,
easy...remember: dog dishes don't disappear when we stop looking
at them...remember that?")
And, actually, that does work sometimes for crazy people (so says
my wife). Come to think of it, a better example is people with
various kinds of autism. One way of understanding a few of its forms
is to say that they have an immunity to internalizing social patterns,
but that they can cue them as intellectual patterns. (If I remember
right, I think the movie about Temple Grandin illustrates this.)
Dan said:
You and Matt seem blocked to me and I am sure I appear the same
way to you. Yet it is clear by your continued responses that you are
not understanding the holistic (thank you, Matt) meanings behind my
postings. On the other hand, I understand what you're saying even
though I don't (entirely) agree with it.
Matt:
It is this thought most of all that I wish I could block. (For Dave, too,
actually, but about other issues, like Rorty.) When I remarked once
that you had not "successfully recapitulated" the line of thought I had
expressed, what I was expressing there was that you had not
demonstrated to my reckoning that you had understood what I had
said. I thought, for a while, that I was understanding you, and you
me, and that we were together moving toward a successful
conclusion of the conversation, which among autonomous
philosophers is usually the ability to agree on where one agrees and
disagrees. When, rather than continuing toward this goal, you
continued to confuse me, I _gave up_ my conviction that I
understood you _as a precondition to trying to understand you_. And
it was partly your attempts to summarize explicitly what you thought
I (and/or Dave) was saying that confused me, which is what leads
me to think that it isn't just me that doesn't understand, but you also.
I appreciate your conviction that you've understood us all along. You
don't have to give up your conviction; you only have _to fake like it_,
which means moving slowly and taking fewer things for granted (i.e.,
not treating things as obvious).
Dan said:
You keep saying: Oh! I have it now! But you don't have it. What you
have is your idea of what I am saying and that is stopping you,
blocking you if you will, from grasping the notion that I am
attempting to convey...
Matt:
It can't be the idea that we grasp what you are saying itself because
every person has to have an idea of what is being said in order to be
able to say, "I understand what you said." You have those ideas as
much as we or anyone else does. It can only be an inability to
relinquish a false grasp on what is being said that can block a
conversation. And the "Oh!"s are evidence enough that we are
attempting to evolve our understanding of what is going on. At least
mine are.
Matt
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
