Hi Paul,
Paul said:
It wasn't so much praise as an acknowledgement that the distinction has
served the evolution of static patterns well, particularly in the physical
sciences, and that babies wouldn't find "a complex pattern of values
called an object to work well" if the distinction wasn't valuable. I think all
of the distinctions above probably have value in some circumstances but
that value doesn't extend to them having any ontological or
epistemological significance.
Matt:
That's interesting. This might be a genuine disagreement, then,
because I'm not sure I would say that the subject/object distinction
served at all in the history of the physical sciences, for example. It's
beyond my ken to substantiate the claim one way or the other, but to
answer it would mean to isolate an operative sense of the distinction
that isn't replaceable with, say, one of the one's I offered, or others
(observer/observed is another one I thought of just now). I'm not sure
there is a differentiable sense. (One person I know who does make a
big deal of the distinction is Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been
Modern, but I think he's wrong when he suggests that the overlapping
conceptual senses of subject and object that Boyle and Hobbes
unconsciously exploited in unconscious collaboration to separate politics
from science was necessary to unlock the power of something he calls
"modernity." However, I do think he is right that there was some
conceptual promiscuity going on.)
So, because I suspect there isn't any sense to the distinction that can't
be had by another one, I'm reticent to grant any historical power to it.
However, I'm also not sure what import to attach to the question of
whether or not, e.g., the mind/matter or first-person/third-person
have "any ontological or epistemological significance." My inclination
is to say, "Seriously?" Such historically significant concepts like "mind"
and "autonomy" make me wonder what importance you attach to
that claim. My second inclination is to say that such significance is
conferred by the contextual role played by the terms in the
philosopher's vocabulary. For example, Robert Brandom thinks the
user-of-sentence/what-the-sentence-is-about distinction has significant
epistemological and metaphysical implications (this worked out in
detail in his Making It Explicit). So the question would be why the
subject/object distinction has ontological and epistemological
significance, but not these others. Granted you might view the term
"mind" like I do "subject"--as being insignificant philosophically or
historically because replaceable (I should add that I view "mind" like
this)--but it's the criteria you're using for conferring significance that
would need elaboration.
Paul said:
I agree with your last point [about Pirsig's map-coordinates analogy
being about pragmatic intellectual distinction-making]. I did make a
point of separating the subject-object distinction from the
subject-object metaphysics. You seem to suggest that one inevitably
leads to the other, or at least has done so historically. This is where
context (1) comes in for me and the Buddhist precept of non-attachment
may also assist. Certainly I think it is better to talk about patterns of
value than subjects and objects but I sometimes detect the
understanding of some people to be that what *appears* to be subjects
and objects are *really* patterns of value and that's what was on my
mind. This appearance-reality distinction is the one to be avoided.
Matt:
Well, I guess I wouldn't say that the subject/object distinction leads
inevitably to SOM. I've learned my lesson about thinking any
distinction or metaphor is inherently bad. (It took me a long time, but
eventually I figured out that a consequence of the panrelationalism
pragmatists tend to subscribe to is the impropriety of the
intrinsic/extrinsic distinction at the level of metaphysics, which means
that every distinction or metaphor just needs to be means-tested for
seeing whether or not its being used in an undesirable way.) My real
point is that I can't think of a use for it that can't be performed by a
different distinction, and these other distinctions might lack the
multipurpose ability of the subject/object distinction and so be much less
likely to create the blur that I think produces much of the congestion in
metaphysical inquiry.
As an example of the kind of lesson I've learned about metaphysics over
the past ten years, above you say that "the appearance-reality
distinction is the one to be avoided" in the context of the locution "what
appears to be subjects and objects are really patterns of value."
Divorced of any other collateral premises (e.g., about having a method
for determining when one has detected reality qua reality), I'm now no
longer inclined to think there's anything suspicious about saying that
subjects and objects are really patterns of value. This is because
conceptual redescription is the genre to which pernicious metaphysical
reductionism (e.g., Platonism) is simply one species. "Really," above, is
simply a commendation about what will work better. There are
probably many contexts in which substituting "patterns of value"
-doesn't- help, but also doesn't harm (think of Pirsig on causation). This
makes the conceptual redescription aesthetic on that particular score.
(Divorced of any examples, of course, also makes "what appears to be
subjects and objects are really patterns of value" appear pretty vacuous,
except as an indication that the person wielding the locution is a
Pirsigian, since the only way to judge the commendatory "really" is to
specify the context in which "patterns of value" works better than
"subjects and objects.")
Of course, I as much as you want to avoid the appearance/reality
distinction and most of the locutions that call it into being when we are
doing metaphysics. But neither it nor the subject/object distinction
leads inevitably to SOM. Perhaps I'd be willing to say that -no-
distinctions, by themselves, lead to SOM. What we need is a picture of
the premises that work together to create it. On the other hand, at the
level of avoidance-strategy, we might ask, "Which is more important to
avoid? The subject/object distinction or the appearance/reality
distinction?" And there I would agree with you--the appearance/reality
distinction is more conceptually pernicious than the other. There'd be
nothing wrong with talk about "objectivity" if it could be detached from
the premise that "only objective things are real."
Matt
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