[MD] FW: Quine and the Linguistic Turn

[david buchanan]

Gav said to Matt and dmb: ...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!
dmb says:Exactly. You've hit the proverbial nail on its head. Or, at the very least, you've nailed one of the key points of contention. Radical Empiricism puts the emphasis on pre-conceptual awareness and psychological nominalism says all awareness is linguistic. Far from being parallel, these positions are approximately opposite. Both see concepts and language as a web of meanings and beliefs but the latter says that its analogies all the way down and the former says that all analogies are formed in the wake of experience. The former says linguistic awareness is derived from something more basic and primary, from the primary empirical reality. In other words, as far as I know, Rorty's brand of pragmatism has nothing like DQ or pure experience. The implications and consequences of this difference can hardly be overstated. So when discussion turns to the connections between DQ and mysticism, a theme that runs through both of of Pirsig's books as well as his own biography, neo-pragmatism has very little, if anything at all, to say. As far as I know, that whole dimension is missing from the Rorty-like approaches and I suppose its no accident that Matt is not very interested in that dimension either. Because he finds so little importance in it, I suppose, Matt thinks its no big deal to interpret radical empiricism in a way that does not accommodate mysticism or non-linguistic experience. Or maybe he even prefers it that way. Maybe its not just indifference. Maybe he actively wants to get of that dimension. I don't know but, for whatever reason, its clear that Matt does not appreciate a difference that "seems quite simple" to you and me.One thing that has really struck me lately about myths, especially the hero's journey, is that the whole trick is to get beyond the clashing rocks, to pierce the valley. In symbolic language, the task of the hero is to transcend all the pairs of opposites, all dualisms, all forms of one-sidedness. The great final moment of victory for the hero's (or hera's) journey is called a conjunction of opposites, atonement with the father, the sacred marriage or "Enantiodromia", which means something like "into the other drama" or "the dance of opposties". The yin-yang symbol is a picture of this dance. And this transformational moment of consciousness can be described in terms of developmental psychology, as in Pirsig example of the undifferentiated consciousness of an infant. Here we have an analog of pure experience, pre-conceptual experience. The innocence of the infant can't be sustained if he or she is to survive and so of course the differentiations of our linguistic awareness quickly begin to set in. We need these static patterns of awareness to get along in the world, obviously, but the hero's task is to see through them, to see that conventional reality is a conceptual arrangement, that concepts bifurcate the world into pairs of opposites but that reality itself is fundamentally and profoundly unified, that the distinction between yourself and reality is conceptual and verbal rather than ultimately real. Thou art that. And this this kind of Jungian-Campbellian psychology, not behaviorism, that is most compatible with the MOQ.
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