[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[david buchanan]

Matt said:
...I have offered descriptions of why there is no soft spot underneath his positive program by offering descriptions of the parallel between the radical-empiricism-positive-program and the "linguistic"-positive-program (what's offered, e.g., at the end of "Quine, Sellars, etc.").   ... What I said was to justify my angle of conversation, which is to first offer an understanding of how the non-Platonic radical empiricism parallels the non-Platonic psychological nominalism.  And what I don't understand is how "pure," "direct," and "pre-intellectual" cut into the soft underbelly of psychological nominalism while _remaining_ non-Platonic.  ...I think all I'm asking for is the understanding of how the "pure," "direct," and "pre-intellectual" of radical empiricism attacks psychological nominalism, something to parallel the understanding of how they don't that I offered in "Quine, Sellars, etc."  Can you state what you are asking of me?



dmb says:
As I understand it, psychological nominalism has nothing to do with radical empiricism and I really don't see how it's at all plausible to assert that they are somehow parallel. In fact, Sellars is denying "pre-intellectual" experience but that term is being used against traditional sensory empiricism wherein this "pre-conceptual" experience is a raw sensation, like a patch of red, to use the classic example. The radical empiricist uses those terms very differently. Sellars is denying" immediate experience" in a Cartesian framework, wherein the world gives itself to us through the senses. Radical empiricism is not making any claims that would be at odds with what Sellars is doing. But I think psychological nominalism has a parallel in the MOQ. It is essentially the assertion that thought and language, concepts and words, are not two different things and that language is a shared, public or collective affair. We find this in Lila when Pirsig quotes the slogan "we are suspended in language" and the way he paints the mythos and logos as evolved and inherited. And I don't have any problem with the assertion that "red" and "patch" are already conceptual categories. 

Radical Empiricism rejects Cartesian dualism, positivism and sensory empiricism but it also says that concepts are secondary. Its claims about pre-conceptual or pre-intellectual experience are not claims about raw sense data. It's just not that kind of theory. As you probably recall, the actual claim is that this experience is prior to any distinctions and that would include distinctions such as "red" or "patch". By the time you noticed and named that, it is no longer pre-conceptual or preverbal. It's static by the time it's "red" or "hot" or any other name. 

More broadly speaking, Sellars is basically a scientific materialist, a verbal behaviorist and roughly equates thinking with brain activity. Generally speaking, he has an entirely different tone and temperament. The agreement between his view of language and the MOQ is very widely shared in contemporary philosophy. I mean, destruction of the myth of the given poses no problem for the radical empiricists. I'm just saying it bears no relation to radical empiricism, expect to confuse the meaning of the central terms.

Just so you don't think I'm flinging charges of SOMism arbitrarily, I quote the following:


"Sellars' most famous work is the lengthy and difficult paper, " [http://ditext.com/sellars/epm.html Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind] ," a sustained discussion of what he called "The Myth of the Given," which consists of the claim, central to both phenomenology and sense-data theories of knowledge, that we can know things about our perceptual experiences independently of and in some important sense prior to the conceptual apparatus which we use to perceive objects. Sellars targets several theories at once, especially C.I. Lewis' Kantian pragmatism and Rudolf Carnap's positivism."
.........


"Following Descartes, philosophers often speak of the “structure of knowledge”: highly theoretical knowledge is seen as resting on the (justified) foundation of more basic knowledge, and that on even more basic knowledge, and so on. But empirical knowledge is possible only if there is ultimately a stratum of most basic knowledge, which in some way involves our making cognitive contact with the world. It is natural to think that this most basic contact with the world involves our having sensory experiences. We can know the world, ultimately, because in some manner the world reveals itself to us through sensation. Or better yet, the world gives itself to us, in a form we can understand. If it didn’t, it would be hard to understand how we ever know anything. For Descartes, and for centuries of philosophers since, the basic knowledge which forms the foundation of knowledge is just the knowledge of our own inner states, our own thoughts, feelings, and sensations that we have from being in sensory contact with the world.


As for these inner states themselves, we both have them and also know them just by being in sensory contact with the world. In short, sensing the world was held, from Descartes on, to be sufficient for the production of inner states which we in turn know about just because of that sensory contact. For instance, simply sensing a red patch would be sufficient for knowing that we are sensing a red patch. We may doubt whether there really is a red patch there (maybe it is blue and the lighting misleads us), but our knowledge of the sensation of a red patch itself is immediate, direct, and a result simply of that sensing. The knowledge that we gain is, again, knowledge of our own sensations or thoughts.


As plausible as this picture seems, Sellars takes issue with it, referring to it as the Myth of the Given: that there are such sensory episodes that by their mere occurrence give us knowledge of themselves, is a myth to be dispelled, one to be replaced by a better account of the nature of sensing, thinking, and knowing. Of course, our aim here isn’t to explore Sellars’ reasons for thinking such episodes are mythological, nor to pursue his views on the nature of knowledge. Instead, we’ll address only what Sellars thinks is missing in this traditional account of knowledge of our inner, private episodes. Doing so will help explain why, according to Sellars, knowledge of even our own private episodes is itself much more complicated than the tradition held. Paradoxically, however, though knowledge of our own inner states is more complicated, explaining how it is possible will make our knowledge of other peoples’ inner episodes less complicated, less vulnerable to skepticism than traditionally thought.


What then is required for knowledge of our own inner, private episodes, say knowledge that I’m having a sensation of a red triangle, if it isn’t just that I am sensing a red triangle? What else is required besides the actual sensation? In short, knowledge requires concepts, and since concepts are linguistic entities, we can say that knowledge requires a language. To know something as simple as that the patch is red requires an ability to classify that patch, and Sellars thinks the only resource for such rich categorization as adult humans are capable of comes from a public language. Knowledge, and in fact all awareness, according to Sellars, is a linguistic affair. There is no such thing, accordingly, as preconceptual awareness or prelinguistic awareness or knowledge. Sellars calls this the thesis of “Psychological Nominalism,” and it is at the heart of his epistemology and theory of mind. We don’t know the world just by sensing it. We don’t even know our own sensations just by having them. We need a language for any awareness, including of our own sensations."