Ron: Bob and Willy are talkin bout the value of the distinction while Freds talkin reification. I think when we begin to compare them it is important to note the tradition of the philosophic questions that they are responding to. As Willy pointed out in "Pragmatism" the question of the one and the many figures promently in most philosophic attitudes. Fred seems to be attacking the decided Monists and while Bob points it out as a trap, I get the impression from Fred that he would like to demonize it. Fred often gets read as a bit of a Nihlist because of it, if not for the reason that he tends to lump intelligibility in with reification and paints it with the same brush. There are contributors here who also make that same implication.
>>"There must always be a discrepancy between concepts [static quality] and >>reality [Dynamic Quality] -- Robert Pirsig >> >>"Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not >>supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual >>original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a >>concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less >>similar cases—which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and >>thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal >>things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as >>another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily >>discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing >>aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists >>in nature the "leaf": the original model according to which all the leaves >>were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted—but by >>incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a >> correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model." >> — Friedrich Nietzsche Ron: Freds pointing to Platonism obviously and the conflicts in experience when one is predicting and expecting a mean generalization and are unsatisfied with the results when they are plural and many. The temperment of the decided monist. Aristotle made the same criticism of Pato and the theory of forms or the "doctrine of ideas" but being of the empricist, pluralist and pragmatist temperment he asserts that intelligiblity is an art: " From memory man gains experience; often remembering he aquires the power of unified experience." "Art is born when out of the many bits of information derived from experience there emerges a grasp of those similarities in view of which they are a unified whole." "Experience, like action or production, deals with things severally as concrete individuals whereas art deals with them generally." "someone lacking experience, but knowing the gerneral principles of the art, will often miss the mark by overlooking the individual within the whole" "Never the less, we believe that knowing and understanding characterize art rather than experience." -Aristotle book Alpha Metaphysics In this light Fred differs from Bob and Willy in much the same way as Aristotle and Socrates differed from the Sophists. ..Or so it would seem. .. .. 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
