[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[Matt Kundert]

SA, DMB,

Since SA spun off DMB's take on the pragmatist metaphor of "language as a 
tool" I was using, I thought I'd just answer that seperately.

DMB said:
See, the MOQ would not say that language is a tool we use to cope with the 
world, instead it says something more like language IS the (static) world.

Matt:
I think your cutting me at cross-purposes here.  You may not remember, but 
one of the slogans that neopragmatism attaches itself to is Sellars' 
"psychological nominalism": "all awareness is a linguistic affair".  (And in 
this case, we should take to be "static awareness".)

We can still say this along with thinking of language as a tool.  The reason 
this suggestion comes forward is because we are trying to replace the 
suggestion that language is a mediator between us and reality.  As above, 
there is an important sense in which "language IS the (static) world."  (I 
would still want to warn away from a full-fledged idealism, but that's 
ancillary to this point.)  The point of shifting from mediation to tool is 
to get rid of representationalism, the idea that language represents 
reality, that language can get us closer or leave us far away from reality.  
This can be seen as part of the mystics' point, that language has nothing to 
do with getting us closer or further away from reality.  Language is just 
one of the ways in which make our way about the world, like a limb or a 
screwdriver.  And like biologically evolved limbs and constructed 
screwdrivers, there's no point in asking if the that tool gets us _closer_ 
to reality, but there is a point in asking how _helpful_ the tool is being.

The point of evolution is betterness, as Pirsig says.  If you are using a 
screwdriver to pound in a nail, it may work, but a hammer would work better. 
  Thinking of value as something coming out of Subjects and Objects may work 
(after all, we'd been doin' it for many years), but thinking of subjects and 
objects coming out of value would work better.  Language, a metaphysics (the 
two being moreorless coextensive after Pirsig moreorless defines metaphysics 
as the act of definition), is a tool, like a map is a tool.  Pirsig gives us 
the suggestion for thinking of language as a tool himself.  The map isn't 
essentially _between_ us and reality, its just a tool we use to make our way 
about it.  (The map-tool suggestion is mitigated to a certain extent when 
Pirsig later uses the glasses analogy, which re-suggests that we should 
think of language as between us and reality.  I've been suggesting for a 
while that we kinda' ignore that analogy as being at best misguided.  
Glasses can be seen as tools, its just we should be staying as far away from 
the visual metaphors of the Plato-Descartes tradition as we can.)

So its not as if the language-as-tool analogy comes out of nowhere.  It is 
deployed specifically to counteract another analogy, language-as-mirror.  
Without that deployment in mind, the analogy (like any other analogy 
deployed without its context) will take on weird shapes.

Matt

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