[MD] FW: Quine and the Linguistic Turn

[Matt Kundert]

> Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 14:58:22 -0700
> From: gav_gc at yahoo.com.au
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Subject: Re: [MD] FW:  Quine and the Linguistic Turn
> 
> 
> you guys are funny.
> straight guy and funny guy eh..?
> how about less of the melodrama and get to the point...us amateurs need some clarity
> so is psychological nominalism saying that all awareness is linguistic?
> if so then this is not radically empirical or moqish to my mind...seems quite simple. how can you guys spend so many electrons not understanding this?
> i think a lot of awareness is linguistically filtered, most of it even, but what of novelty then? what of aesthetic arrest? what of meditative states, epiphanies, beauty! what about music!
> how can people get paid to write such fucking rubbish.......

Well, in deference to DMB, you're speaking his language.  That's been his point.



My point has been that, though psychological nominalism's slogan is
"all awareness is a linguistic affair," it doesn't quite mean the
counter-intuitive things it suggests.  It has to be understood in the
context of various kinds of atomism, particularly the kinds that
surfaced in early analytic philosophy.



My suggestion about the parallel qualities of radical empiricism and
psychological nominalism is that both are kinds of holism, and that the
only difference between the two is a difference in jargon, in the state
of the philosophical dialogue that each arose out of and responded to. 
But to move this beyond a suggestion is not a small task, requiring an
exposition of both contexts (particularly the stranger and more arid
context of analytic philosophy which us amateurs have a more difficult
time making sense out of), exposition of both positions, and
explication of just what atomism and holism are (such that they
function as larger paradigms that the others sit in).  This extended
task I'm not yet prepared to do (though I've been working on it for
some time).  I don't have all my ducks in a row.  I think all of your prima facie counter-examples, Gav, fit in fine with a proper understanding of psychological nominalism, it's just beyond my present capacities to explain how. 



One indicator of symmetry: James was at pains to point out that _relations_, which in those days was to say "ideas," were as real and experienced as _things_.  His enemy was an atomism that thought that the universe came pre-packaged in little atoms called "things," and that what people did was add on relationships between them.  And, on the other hand, in Rorty's most accessible introduction to his philosophical viewpoint (in Philosophy and Social Hope), he describes it as a kind of panrelationalism, that there is no "thing" outside of its relationships to other things.  I take the latter, in particular, to be strikingly similar to Pirsig's notion of static patterns of Quality.

I, personally, don't see the melodrama (outside whatever exists between DMB and me personally) because I don't think it's important for amateur philosophers like ourselves to have to be into everything other amateur philosophers are into.  I'm into the history of philosophy and Richard Rorty (among other things).  I relate Pirsig to that.  But I don't think a "proper" understanding of Pirsig requires anything of the kind--"properness" isn't really a proper category for amateur philosophy.

Matt

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