[MD] Radical Empiricism and Psychological Nominalism

[John Carl]

Ok Matt, there's a bit of a story that goes with this reply, for it is long
delayed and as to "why" is a story.

And I know you like stories, so here it is in full.

The house on the ridge has been shut down, where we lived for 18 years.  I'm
bouncing around a bit, but there is no reason to keep the broadband on, in a
mostly deserted dwelling.  But I do need to get up there, and get the place
ready for the new tenants who will be renting, and also as a sort of
"writer's cabin" but not connected to the internet.  So... to transfer my
thoughts, I got one of those cheapo flash drives and stick it in my pocket
but last time I went down to the bosom of civilization (Grass Valley) I
forget my flash drive and it's only now that I'm getting it and on top of
that, I have no idea at all if I'll forget it again, but here's hoping and
you're presumably reading, so...

Matt prev:

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.

John:

Well, open questions are obviously more interesting than closed ones!  So
I'd say that's why we're here.  Let's address it.  I'm pretty obviously on
the line with Rorty and Putnam, by your characterizations because radical
empiricism, as I've stated before, just doesn't make sense to me.
Especially, it doesn't make sense pragmatically.

Well... I take that back.  It doesn't make it sense to me, pragmatically, to
somebody with an agenda.  That agenda being either an axe to grind, or an
axe to avoid, but nevertheless an agenda pre-formed.

Matt:

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).

John:

Ok, we have a whole sequence of thought here, that I've posted, when I
assumed your Sellars was the same one I was reading about when I was up here
last, and had no access to google.  Since then, a little checking (very
little) reveals another Sellars out there in the philosophical, a "Wilfred",
but at this point the whole issue is cloudy to me, so I'm just gonna trot
out my understanding by MY Sellars, which also sounds close enough to
"psychological nominalism" and if nothing else, I'll explain how I
understand that term and you can correct me if necesary or applaud me if
desired.  :)

The heart of Psych. Nom. is that meaning arises out of pure perception -
that what we sense is what is, and thus our mind construct's meaning
(conceptualizes) and there is nothing, absolutely nothing "out there".
There are no a priori, there is no absolute, there are no universals.

That's how I understand, "psychological nominalism" and I'd welcome any
criticism on my understanding.

Matt:

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?

----------------
John Now:

Now this part, is from before, and I'm leaving it as is, because it's
relevant and I'm still thinking this way:
____________

John Before:

 This is the direction I've been heading lately, equating consciousness with
language and all.

 Experience requires a matrix of understanding, a  pre-defined propensity to
differentiate in culturally-defined ways, that which is before our sensory
apparatus.  If there is no fit into our understanding, then there is no real
existence of phenomena.  Sometimes we feel things for which we have no real
words, and those things can't be said to have real existence.  They have
quasi-existence.  They sort of exist.  Maybe. We haven't decided yet.

We continue...

----------

Matt:

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.

----------------

John Before:

Well, like I said, I'm unsure if you're talking about the same guy I'm
reading right now, but here's what I'm reading - scan it for me and show me
wherein your "atomism".

In what follows I quote from Sellars's 1932 book, The Philosophy of Physical
Realism.  Chapter 8 he characterizes his own position as "logical
conceptualism and ontological nominalism" and writes "I believe in concepts
but I do not believe in universals as a peculiar kind of entity in external
things which may be in many things at once and gives then an identity of
nature.  Thus I desire to do justice to concepts, or meanings, as
instruments of thought and knowing, while keeping to similarity as a fact
about things which are built up in corresponding ways out of chemical
elements".

(Scott Ryan)

Sellars argues that our concepts and meanings are intrinsic to operations,
and because used by the mind to build up a picture of reality, are easily
(and often) mistaken for the reality we seek to know.  "The very mode of
working or our minds though concepts as instruments leads us to project the
recurrence of the same meaning in our minds into the things we are thinking
of.  Logical identity is transformed into real universals." (Mind, 1927 p.
158, emphasis his)

John Before:
There's a lot there I agree with, but at the same time, I'd say there are at
least real universals in the mind-brain events that he takes to constitute
thought, but that's my abs. ideal peeking through the curtains and we'll
leave it there for now.

Atomism?  "keeping to similarity as a fact about things which are built up
in corresponding ways out of chemical elements". sounds like "atomism" to
me.  Or chemicalism.  Whatever.

Matt:

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.

John Now:

I agree with the congruence - that they are alike and "the only difference
between the two is a difference in jargon"  but I'm not sure what you mean
by "holism" and what that fits.  Is a complete solipsism a "holism"?  In
that regard, I'd agree!

Matt:

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.

John:

You know, I've been on a kick about the social aspects of this process, and
it's an interesting thought - how divorced from reality could one's thinking
and ideas become, as long as it was strongly enough socially reinforced?
It's obvious that we can divorce quite a bit from reality, but it's also
equally obvious that we cannot go all the way!   Now there's a spot to stick
one's scalpel, then you'd be able to figure out which ones were the
messiahs, and which the degenerates, just by what side of the line they were
on.

Matt:

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.

John:

Right, I'm following you.

Matt:

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.

John:

See, that doesn't make sense to me.  Isn't further meaning, deeper
understanding, "something more"?  Isn't that man's ongoing story so far?  An
ever growing search for meaning, understanding reality and our relationship
to it.  Every life recapitulates this urge, from  infancy to the grave, and
it seems to me that if we stop thinking there is something more, we are as
good as dead - meaningless, stagnant and lost.  I really don't get the
charge of "pure folly", except perhaps as a rhetorical ploy when you're fed
up with certain kinds of other thinkers.  Like I said, Pragmatism seems to
depend an awful lot upon who is wielding it, for the proper ends of men vary
greatly.

Matt:

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.

John:

Where I'm at as of now, is the idea that ideas are intellectualized
concepts, (thinking about our realization) and that all perception is
conception, whereas not all conceptions are percepts.  So from lowest to
highest, we start with animal perception, which is of the senses, these are
concepts which then give rise to non-perceptual concepts which lead to
ideas.    That's John's epistemological ladder of the moment.

Matt:

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.)

John:

My answer to the concept/word question, as a newbie surveying this "trampled
path" you lay out before us, is that it is possible to conceptualize bits of
reality for which we have no words.   Pavlov's dogs had a concept of feeding
time, even divorced from immediate real experience, but they had no words
for "the bell rings".

Matt:


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.

John:

I'll be pondering this some more, and the insights from that Rorty Intro to
"Consequences of Pragmatism" - which, you were right, I did enjoy.  Even
though when I saved it to my usb drive, I lost all formatting and that made
for some very slow, awkward reading, but I appreciate the time you've taken
and hopefully this response will make it back to broadband country and pass
through the net, so that you can see your efforts to continue this grand
game, have not been in vain,

Yours,

John