Hi DMB Well, good, a reasonable response, please see my comments.
dmb: I've encountered this kind of objection many times. This objection entails an assumption that scientific truths correspond to an objective reality and so it tells me that DM is still haunted by the ghost of objectivity. It's difficult to overcome realism because almost all non-philosophers and non-scientist accepted it as common sense. Most scientists are realists and the vast majority of analytic philosophers are realists too. DM: No, I wish to avoid objectivism and scientism as much as anyone, but I think it needs separating off from realism, I think there is a core element of good sense about realism that should not be as strongly rejected as objectivism, sure care is needed, qualification about realism is needed, but full blown rejection can look daft, contrary to good and non-scientistic science. Yes experience is the heart of reality, MOQ really needs to show this, but we all experience how things persist when we are not present and know our parents and others can report on an experienced existence prior to our birth. This is a reasonable way to understand realism without pushing into an objectivism that ends up eliminating the existence let alone the centrality of experience. My position says yes we need to embrace experientialism, but we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater and fail to see what our experience of SQ can tell us about a wider context, but one always grounded in experience. DMB: But it's very important to realize that the MOQ is opposed to this view, not least of all because realism entails SOM. DM: Well whilst SOM is realist, I am suggesting realism can be put together, in a more limited way, realism-2 if you like, without SOM, all the essentialism, reductionism, determinism, scientism, can be excluded from realism-2. This is my suggestion, you might think it is a bad idea or can't be done, but it is quite clear what I am suggesting. DMB: Pragmatism is an alternative to SOM's correspondence theory of truth DM: Well I like pragmatism too, I think our knowledge is highly grounded in what works and what is useful. I feel very reluctant to ever use the word 'truth', our theories are always human constructions, always provisional, etc. But I see no readon why such well made points cannot find a place for realism-2. Now some people might say what I suggest is not realism at all, but what I'd like to see MOQ do, is reject everything about full blown realism that is poorly grounded, yet not fully reject realism, as we experience absence, and we need to think about times and places not experienced by humans, so there is a well reasoned place for realist thinking and we need to not exclude it ehere it is appropriate. "The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized." DM: Well fair enough, no doubt our access to the wider world requires reason and imagination: yes the world has existence, yes because we have imagination and reason to realise this, despite the finite limits of our experience. "...the laws of physics and logic ..the number system ...These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real." "The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton." DM: Yes these regularities are always understood via human intellectual constructs, gravity is a human construct, we construct mathematics, we introduce quantity to experience. Sure you can't kick these things, so OK I see the ghost point, but is this going too far. Does not a trully radical empiricism recognise that exploring our experience of numbers and ideas of causality through imagination is as real as any other experience, intellectual SQ is no more qhostly than biological SQ it is all experienced SQ. Everything should be real for MOQ, it just sits somewhere in the levels, unicorns are real myths on the intellectual level. Yes Newton gives us gravity, but can we tske a realist view about orbits and galaxy formation before Newton was born, of course we can and scientists legitimately do so, but only after Newton has produced the ideas. Much later in ZAMM (page 262), when Pirsig is talking about Poincare and alternative geometries he says it doesn't really make any sense to... "...ask whether the metric system is true and the avoirdupois system is false; whether Cartesian coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false. One geometry can not be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous." DM: no problem with that, I just add that working with a geometry, applying it over space and time makes obvious realist assumptions, general relativity does this, it can't work without a realist assumption. Is it true? Who can say, but we can say it works, and if it works we can use it to reason about times and processes that have nothing to do with humans, to suggest we avoid doing any such reasoning and imagining would makes us some kind of luddite fundamentalists. DMB: If we want the MOQ to be taken seriously, I think it's important to talk about it in terms that are going to be intelligible to people who think about philosophy. That's why I think we should be talking about it in basic philosophical terms. For those who might like to get a grasp of the MOQ it's important to reach out, meet them halfway, and otherwise explain it in terms that are commonly understood - as opposed to dishing it up in Pirsigese or any other exclusive jargon. DM: exactly why I think my suggestion is a bloody good one. DMB:Let's say we want to address the concerns of an uncomprehending realist, for example. David Morey tells us that he's concerned that without realism, "we lose the best aspects of science" and end up promoting "solipsism". To explain why this is not the case we could cite the Stanford Encyclopedia (or any one of a zillion Journal articles) on a anti-realist stance known as "Constructive Empiricism" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/constructive-empiricism/) or the article titled "Challenges to Metaphysical Realism" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism-sem-challenge/). The following introductory lines are enough to explain why we don't lose any aspect of science with Constructive Empiricism. "Constructive empiricism is a view which stands in contrast to the type of scientific realism that claims the following: Science aims to give us, in its theories, a literally true story of what the world is like; and acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it is true. In contrast, the constructive empiricist holds that science aims at truth about observable aspects of the world, but that science does not aim at truth about unobservable aspects. Acceptance of a theory, according to constructive empiricism, correspondingly differs from acceptance of a theory on the scientific realist view: the constructive empiricist holds that as far as belief is concerned, acceptance of a scientific theory involves only the belief that the theory is empirically adequate." DM: Fair enough, could try that approach, not very mainstream currently, but I think the MOQ could and should co-opt realism in an MOQ re-interpretation, turn it into realism-2, and get the majority of scientists and philosophers on its side. DQ is a hard sell, so I suggest making SQ understood in terms as conducive to progressive science as possible. And equally it accords with experience, we experience presence and absence, experience is always changing, stuff comes and goes, and communication with others leads us to realism about what they report to us of different times and diffdifferent places that we have never experienced. I've never met DMB or been to the US but quite sensibly I reason that they exist, I need some level of realism to do that, I do not need SOM or objectivism. 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