[MD] MD Quality, DQ and SQ

[Scott Roberts]

Ian,

Ian said:
Scott, You said
"The undivided and the divided ARE contradictory identity."

Scott, You also said [paraphrasing]
"Even REALITY, or the one true metaphysics, is doomed to stumble
through [a nest of dichotomies, dualities and recursions] and irony
[or accepting contracdictions] is an essential part of making sense of
it."

I say somehow Scott we are violently agreeing (something I've always 
suspected).
I say you should just give in ...
... and accept you are a pragmatist (like the best of us) :-)
ie you are saying pragmatism IS fundamental.

Scott:
Well, your paraphrase needs comment, which I'll get to in a moment. On 
whether I am a pragmatist, I could say I am, because I hold pragmatist 
critiques to be fundamental, but pragmatists don't like anything to be 
fundamental -- which is to say they critique foundationalism. My claim 
against that is that this provides a new foundation, which goes by the names 
of 'language games', 'eternal critique', 'creation be setting criteria', and 
so forth. Here's another: as soon as one acknowledges multi-culturalism, one 
has made a step that transcends cultural relativism.

On your paraphrase. First of all, the phrase "nest of dualisms" is Dewey's, 
but he and I take very different tacks on it. Dewey wants to just get rid of 
them in philosophy. I want to rethink them (some of them anyway, like 
'many/one') as contradictory identity, and make that fundamental. And that 
is the next point. I am not about "accepting contradictions". For example, I 
reject materialism because it contains contradictions (mainly, the 
Munchhausen fallacy), which is what my posts to Case in the "Looking for the 
Primary Difference" thread are about. A contradictory identity is a 
different matter. On the one hand, it forces acceptance (because any attempt 
to deny one or the other pole results in nonsense: for example, the 
emergence theory of consciousness cannot deal with consciousness' continuity 
pole), but also prevents acceptance. By the latter, I mean that it cannot be 
"thought through" -- it always escapes being understood. But this is also 
different from the "DQ is ineffable" claim, in that though CI cannot be 
thought through, it can be thought, and therefore is a vital clue to the 
nature of thought (and consciousness and quality).

- Scott