DMB,
This is useful, thank you.
I'm reminded by a doctoral dissertation about the problem of induction
by Jüri Eintalu, which shows three centuries of philosophologist authors
trying to define Quality as some sort of a combination of "relevance"
and "original objective". Not much luck there. Rescher reveals the
underlying bias of many philosophologers: "rationality is equivalent to
virtuousness". So if something doesn't make sense, yet it is good, it
must be rational. Bye bye coherent notion of rationality.
-Tuukka
25.3.2012 7:37, david buchanan wrote:
This might be fun but it's also a kind of experiment. I was reading a paper and saw many
parallels to Pirsig, which wasn't very surprising because it's titled "Dewey's
Zen". But I wonder if others read it the same way I do. In certain passages it seems
like one could plug Pirsig's terms into the sentences and they'd still mean the same
thing - almost exactly. Telling you more than that - like which terms I had in mind - it
would ruin the experiment. How about if I just post a bit of it and let everyone take a
shot at it? Maybe it would be fun to put in Pirsig's terms wherever you think they would
fit. Take your pick or play with them all, but please be explicit enough to let me know
if you're seeing the same thing that I'm seeing.
...experiences come whole, pervaded by unifying qualities that demarcate them
within the flux of our lives. If we want to find meaning, or the basis for
meaning, we must therefore start with the qualitative unity that Dewey
describes. The demarcating pervasive quality is, at first, unanalyzed, but it
is the basis for subsequent analysis, thought, and development. Thought starts
from this experienced whole, and only then does it introduce distinctions that
carry it forward as inquiry.
It is not wrong to say that we experience objects, properties, and
relations, but it is wrong to say that these are primary in experience. What
are primary are pervasive qualities of situations, within which we subsequently
discriminate objects, properties, and relations.
Dewey took great pains to remind us that the primary locus of human experience is not
atomistic sense impressions, but rather what he called a "situation," by which
he meant, not just our physical setting, but the whole complex of physical, biological,
social, and cultural conditions that constitute any given experience—experience taken in
its fullest, deepest, richest, broadest sense.
Mind, on this view, is neither a willful creator of experience, nor is it a
mere window to objective mind-independent reality. Mind is a functional aspect
of experience that emerges when it becomes possible for us to share meanings,
to inquire into the meaning of a situation, and to initiate action that
transforms, or remakes, that situation.
The pervasive quality of a situation is not limited merely to sensible perception or
motor interactions. Thinking is action, and so "acts of thought" also
constitute situations that must have pervasive qualities. Even our best scientific
thinking stems from the grasp of qualities.
And perhaps my favorite....
The crux of Dewey's entire argument is that what we call thinking, or
reasoning, or logical inference could not even exist without the felt qualities of
situations: "The underlying unity of qualitativeness regulates pertinence or
relevancy and force of every distinction and relation; it guides selection and rejection
and the manner of utilization of all explicit terms."
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