[MD] Radical Empiricism and Psychological Nominalism

[118]

Hi Matt,
Thank you for the post, and the attempt at reconciliation of the
mind/body dichotomy.  There is certainly a tendency to place words at
a much higher place in reality than they truly are.  Words are
strictly for communication, and thus create the web between
individuals.  As such, the intellect is driven to spend a lot of time
on words, for social purposes.  If we define ourselves by how we fit
in, then words become all.

The social aspect of existence, as created by words, is created by the
biological.  If we assume an evolution paradigm, we can say it is for
survival.  There are of course other paradigms, but all are conceptual
tools for creating cohesion between.  This final thought pattern which
occurs for the explicit reason of communication, is the product of a
much more complex interaction.  However do to societal constraints,
this form of wordy thoughts is often confused with who we are.  By
such reasoning, we could say that we are effectively dead when we are
asleep.

Placing most of our eggs into this basket of communicative thought
denies the majority of what we are.  The sense is that, if we cannot
think of it, it doesn't exist.  This is where Western thought has
taken us with the profound indoctrination that we receive through the
educational system.  Western Thought has meandered up a path which
denies most of experience.  This is where the social dominates the
individual.  Our sense of purpose is seen with reference to others.

The critical point as I see it, is that we have chosen to define the
internal with the external.  The more holistic approach would be to
define the external with the internal.  While there have been attempts
at this in Western Thought, such as the brain in the vat concept, even
this is an externally derived description.  This is, however, what I
would consider to be at the basis of Eastern Thought, starting with
Vedic philosophy and culminating in the highly rational Buddhist
philosophies, of which Zen is of course one.

I would seem to me, that your essay below is trying to bridge two
forms of Western Thought, and not dealing with the true fork in the
path.  Experience as subjective creates the objective.  Not the other
way around.  This may seem to coincide nicely with Essentialism, which
we have become privy to thanks to Ham.  However, it is possible to
extrapolate the created objective into a perceived objective which is
done through Quality.  Our connection with Quality is through Intent
(or will).  Such a connection results in perceived choices.  Those
choices guide or pattern Intent with what we perceive as reality.
Such an analogy creates a concept which can then be discussed.

To get back to the mind/body paradigm, which is after all at the crux
of this form of metaphysics or religion, we need to objectively define
it for the purposes of communication.  The subjective is trying to
make the objective (other) understand.  The temporary bridge of
communication which facilitates this, does not need to linger as it
does.  When it does linger it creates a false subjective.  This has
its purposes, for example in a store, we can imagine what is in a
package by reading the words.  The point is not to get stuck there.
If we subscribe the subjective to the workings of the brain, this is
also objectification of it.

The easiest way for me to explain the subjective is with an avatar
analogy.  Our bodies are such an incarnation.  What perceives the body
(the subjective) is like looking through a window.  When the body
looks back to see who is looking through, acknowledges such a thing,
and shakes hands, that is enlightenment.

On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 4:35 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Here is part of the rapprochement I offered between radical
> empiricism and psychological nominalism in "Quine, Sellars,
> Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn":
>
> I think it an open question as to whether retro-pragmatists like David
> Hildebrand are right about there being an important line to be drawn
> between classical pragmatists like James and Dewey and
> neopragmatists like Rorty and Putnam, one roughly centering around
> the "radical empiricism" of the former set, and supposed lack there-of
> in the latter. I still tend to think that there's simply an unimportant line
> between the classical tendency to talk about experience and the neo
> tendency to talk about language, with no further major philosophical
> implications.
>
> The main thesis for this line of thought is that the role radical
> empiricism plays for James (with Dewey having an analogous section
> of his philosophy that could be so-named) is the same role
> "psychological nominalism" plays for Sellars (with a likewise
> analogous section in Rorty). We might call the slogan of radical
> empiricism "everything is experience," and the intuitive appeal of this
> slogan makes it easy to see why James and Dewey might wield it
> opposition to those who take, for instance, meanings to be analytic,
> and therefore non-experiential (for if they were, they'd be synthetic
> in the requisite sense). Psychological nominalism's slogan, however,
> is "all awareness is a linguistic affair," which on the surface seems
> counter-intuitive--am I really aware of that sunset I'm appreciating
> silently linguistically? I don't think psychological nominalism, however,
> quite means this kind of thing. 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. We might encapsulate the differences by saying that
> modern philosophy was birthed out of Greek when talk moved from
> being about "reality" to being about "experience." Rorty, Whitehead,
> and Dewey all advanced historical arguments about the lack of an
> internal "place" called the mind where reality played itself out for us
> (Whitehead called it the birth of the "subjectivist principle"). This
> created a divorce between reality and our experience-of-reality such
> that now we had to deal with problems about just when we were in
> touch with reality.
>
> The atomistic response are various correspondentisms, philosophical
> theories about how this bit of experience rubs up against this bit
> reality, which it does in a one-to-one relation. Dewey and James
> advanced their ideas about experience in this milieu of experience-talk,
> and their basic suggestion was to _collapse_ experience back into
> reality--experience _is_ reality (witness James' "a world of pure
> experience" and Dewey's appreciation of Aristotle's pre-modern,
> anti-Platonism). Their's was a kind of holism, for it consisted in the
> idea that our experiences all relate to each other in a hanging web,
> and trying to pinpoint connections between this web and something
> else is pure folly. For the web, our experience of life, _works_ in
> getting us through life, and it is only a kind of retrograde metaphysical
> dogmatism that keeps us trying for something more--we need to stop
> thinking there is something more.
>
> Psychological nominalism, on the other hand, consists in the same
> move, except now the linguistic turn has made philosophers think
> that there is a divorce between language and experience. Early
> atomists like Russell and Carnap spent their time trying to elaborate
> theories that specified when this linguistic-bit here connected to that
> experience-chunk over there. Sellars attack on the Myth of the Given
> was on the idea that our linguistic concepts overlaid bald experiences.
> "All awareness is a linguistic affair" is simply the analogous collapse
> of language into experience that James and Dewey did for experience
> into reality.
>
> What we basically have is a line that looks like this:
> language-about-experience-of-reality. The Greeks, having just
> become leisured, reflective individuals, talked about "reality," though
> they occasionally would stumble down a path where it sounds as if
> they recognize the modern fact that we each experience reality
> differently. They _did_ understand this _commonsensically_, but they
> didn't charge it with any special philosophical significance. It was only
> after the march of thousands of more philosophers, trampling down
> the philosophical terrain, trying to get various theories to work, that
> Descartes, Locke, and the rest suddenly get the idea that, maybe we
> should charge the fact that different eyeballs see different ways with
> philosophically-charged metaphorical significance. And so they began
> promoting an expansion of what knowing is of from the object
> "reality" to tacking on "_experience-of_-reality."
>
> This new philosophical situation took hold in part because of an
> equivocation in terminology--Descartes and Locke used the word
> "idea" to denote both (what we might now distinguish as)
> _per_ceptions and _con_ceptions. As modern philosophy moved
> passed Kant, who isolated explicitly the two (in intuitions and concepts
> respectively), and thousands of more philosophers (aided by
> expansions in population, education, and professionalization) trampled
> down this new terrain, philosophers began sniffing more and more
> around the idea that, hey, what really is the difference between a
> concept and word? Isn't it just a silly Platonism, with a universal Realm
> of Forms, that would make us think otherwise? (This is what makes
> sense out of the "nominalism" bit in Sellars' platform name--nominalism
> was the medieval counter to Plato's Realm of Forms idea.)
>
> The linguistic turn was roughly the realization that when we talk about
> reality, we are _talking_ about experience or reality, we are using
> words, language, and that when this or that philosopher, be they
> Platonist, Thomist, Cartesian, Kantian or Russellian, suggests taking up
> this or that philosophical position, they aren't changing the world like a
> bridge-builder does, they are suggesting a change in thought, which is
> to say, in our conceptions, which is to say, _in the words we use to
> describe the world_. And so analytic philosophers began promoting a
> further expansion of what knowing is of from the object
> "_experience-of_-reality" to tacking on
> "_*language-about*-experience-of_-reality."
>
> One way to conceive of what the holists are up to is to see them as
> trying to get us back to a kind of pre-Platonic common sense position,
> before the whole obsession over knowing what knowing was even
> started. The only point in collapsing language-into-experience or
> experience-into-reality is if you'd also be just as willing to finish the
> collapse into the remainder, unconsidered term.
>
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