David Morey asked March 15th 2013: "Now we all know that positivist empiricists like to stick to perceptions and radical empiricists like to broaden out the sort of experiences that are happy to describe and include values, feelings and moods, etc."
"Agree/disagree?" Ant McWatt comments: David, I started trying to answer your various agree/disagree questions in this post but I am still looking at question one! The trouble with this "yes/no format" that you used here is that it essentially has an SOM heritage: "this is this and that is that and nothing is fuzzy and everything must be defined in a black or white way" so that either choice will distort. You only need to look up "logical empiricism" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to realise there are numerous shades of logical positivism rather one definitive philosophy which is why the Stanford article starts with the sentence: "Logical empiricism is a philosophic movement rather than a set of doctrines." ( plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism/ ) i.e. they were probably nearly as many philosophologists and philosophers that were in the various schools of thought (such as the Vienna Circle) as they were doctrines! So, in the first place, what I think your "questionnaire" post could possibly do with (question one at least), is being re-phrased using fuzzy logic a la Bart Kosko e.g. complete agreement could be represented by "1", a don't know by "0.5" and a complete disagreement by "zero". Check out Dr Greg Alvord's Commentary on the Pirsig PhD which has a nice section or two on relating statements about the MOQ with fuzzy logic: ( http://robertpirsig.org/PhD%20Addendum.htm ) The "fuzzy logic" answer to the question "Does Lila have Quality" (that you will find in Greg's commentary) is probably the most accurate one formulated so far. Best wishes, Ant ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- N.B the remainder of David's post follows: But how do radical empiricists feel about the imagination and fantasies? Are these just good old elements of experience like any other that we need to study and describe? Seems to me that what is important is what we share with other people and we don't seem to have discussed this enough with respect to the MOQ. Perceptions are simple we can all point at the same sources of our experiences and agree on at least their location, or we can move on to sharing quantities and measurements in a good old scientific way. Agree/disagree? Feelings and moods can at least sometimes be shared and rationally discussed. We can feel the same way about certain things, whether they make us feel happy, sad or whatever. Maybe we feel differently about eating fish and how it makes us feel, but at least we know we all have a reaction to eating or smelling fish that is something real even if it varies. Agree/disagree? But what about all that stuff we experience that we do not share with others, we can't point at it or measure it, we can't even agree what it is that we are referring to, because it is not shared, it is driven by imagined experiences? We can of course describe such experiences, they may even prove rather fruitful like Einstein's imagining what it is like to travel at the speed of light. What has the MOQ got to say about the imagination, does it recognise that all experiences are real? Is MOQ therefore not a realist metaphysics? I can't think why the MOQ would start to suggest that some experiences are less real than others or are illusions? I'd suggest the only real difference between these different sorts of experiences is really how easy or hard it is to share them. Would it not be fair to say that what we mean by perceptual experiences is that these are connected by having an easily shared source (SOM calls them objects). Moods are less easily shared (although our shared human nature helps) and may differ (SOM calls these subjective) and the imagination is a realm of freedom where we can travel to unfamiliar corners where we may often find ourselves alone and find it difficult to share our discoveries with others. I'd suggest all these experiences are quite real, unless you are a positivist, but how does the MOQ make sense of this difference in how we are able to share these experiences with different levels of difficulty? Great artists, of course, are those who enable us to share in their great imaginative discoveries and explorations. Agree/disagree? David M > > > 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
