[MD] Empiricism for dummies

[Matt Kundert]

It's funny that Douglas Adams should come up in this connection.

I wrote this in my old "Confessions" paper at moq.org:

"Following Rorty, meditating 
        on the number 42 will not reveal an essence.45 
        The only thing it could reveal is its relations to other numbers. To describe 
        42 is to say things like: 20 plus 22, 84 divided by 2, 21 times 2, greater 
        than 40 but less than 42.6, etc.46"

The philosophical rejection of "essence" is what leads to panrelationalism--look at numbers, all they do is relate to each other in an infinite number of ways.  And footnote 46 says this (warning, Marsha, spoiler ahead!!!):

"You could also relate it to things other than numbers such as saying, 
          “the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.” This relates 
          it to Douglas Adams, and I take Adams’ answer to what the ultimate essence 
          is as a reductio ad absurdum for the question of essences (including 
          what the Ultimate Question actually is: “What do you get if you multiply 
          six by nine?”). I also take this to be the point of his description 
          of the Universe, the Babel fish proof for the non-existence of God, 
          and the fact that there are five books in the Hitchhiker trilogy. 
          In fact, read the Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide from start to finish, 
          from the introduction (“A Guide to the Guide,” a very funny piece on 
          how the various writings all contradict each other) to Mostly Harmless, 
          and you basically get the most entertaining way I’ve ever read to suggest 
          that we should stop looking for essences i.e. to stop doing metaphysics. 
          The world truly lost its funniest pragmatist when Adams died prematurely 
          at the age of 49 in 2001."

Adams was brilliant, though I guess more for guys (what-ever...).  He was quite sophisticated in his humor, philosophically speaking that is.  One of his closest friends was Richard Dawkins (in fact, Adams introduced Dawkins to his wife).

That being said, I think Ian's example of the Whale punches up exactly the _opposite_ point than Ian wishes (an example of pre-conceptual experience), and underscores my Davidsonian point.

Ian said:
When thinking of pre-conceptual experience, I don't think it's possible to beat the example of what enters the mind of Douglas Adams' Whale when it "pops into existence" for a few brief experience-filled moments.

Matt:
Ian is right, this is exactly the kind of thing empiricists have in mind--we're suddenly inundated with a shitload of content, and you start reasoning about it, even living the Adamic dream of _naming_: "I think I'll call this quickly approaching thing beneath me 'ground'--[SPLAT!!!]" (that's not a direct quote from the book).

But think about what Whalie's sudden ability to conceptualize (not existing until that very moment) pre-supposes--ability to use every single word he uses, and correctly no less.

This is why Davidson says that the notion of a "language" doesn't exist (with the important caveat, "at least as philosophers and linguists have often supposed") and that the radical holism he espouses (with its notion of triangulation between person-community-world) erases the distinction between knowing your way around a language and knowing your way around the world generally.

Words are not frames that can be filled in with different kinds of content--the only way we know whether a single word is used ("filled in") correctly or incorrectly is because all the other words are being used normally, which means incorrectness presupposes the general ability to use a whole host of words correctly.

But what does "pre-conceptual" mean, then, if Whalie, as soon as he is made to exist and forced (by our humorous writer) to tell us what he is experiencing, is _fully_ conceptual--he _appears_ to be learning concepts (like "ground"), but the only way to learn a single concept at a time is to be already able to use a whole gigantic slew of previous concepts.  Davidson argues that one doesn't learn a language atomistically, one word, one concept at a time.  One just gets the swing of things.

Language is a skill, like riding a bicycle.  And I mean this literally, not metaphorically.  It is only be treating language as something other than a practical, learned skill that we use or not use depending on the call of the situation that we start in on problems--for instance, treating language as a pair of colored glasses.  That is a metaphor that we can't make heads or tails out of literally, but that is just what philosophers have been trying to do to that metaphor--trying to kill that metaphor off so it makes literal, clear sense that we can use without getting tied up into problems.  

Matt

p.s.  As kitschy as the old Simon Jones version of the Hitchhiker movie is, the recent version is vastly superior--or perhaps I'm blinded by my love for Tim (from the english Office), Mos Def, Zooey "coweyes" Deschanel, and the greatest "I'm totally crazy, but totally cooler than cool ("Icecold!")" performance since Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys--the inimitable Sam Rockwell.

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