[MD] Quine on Experience

[118]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the quote below.  I agree with it.  Another way to put it
would be, that as humans we radiate intelligence in the same way that
the sun radiates light.  It comes from within, not from without.
Understanding is created, not found.  Instead of seeking we are
creating.  Physics is indeed fun to draw (create) analogies from, we
are creating a force field.  Perhaps we can keep the Klingons out.

Cheers,
Mark

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 9:46 AM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> "The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most
> casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of
> atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made
> fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.  Or, to
> change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary
> conditions are experience.  A conflict with experience at the periphery
> occasions readjustments in the interior of the field.  Truth values have
> to be redistributed over some of our statements.  Reevaluation of some
> statements entails reevaluation of others, because of their logical
> interconnections--the logical laws being in turn simply certain further
> statements of the system, certain further elements of the field.  Having
> reevaluated one statement we must reevaluate some others, which
> may be statements logically connected with the first or may be the
> statements of logical connections themselves.  But the total field is so
> underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is
> much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light
> of any single contrary experience.  No particular experiences are linked
> with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except
> indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a
> whole."
>
> --WvO Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" in From a Logical Point of View, 42-3
>
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