[MD] Demanding Evidence From Theists

[david buchanan]

Back on Monday, 15 Feb 2010, Ron said to dmb:
I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that Dynamic Quality is non verbal, it's too broad a generalization that supports a correspondance viewpoint. Dynamic Quality as I understand the term, means the plural, the unrecognizable, the defiance of understanding, the unlimited, flux, ect... [And later] I think it's important to remember that the value Pirsig speaks of is pre-intellectual, That can be taken that to mean dominated by social patterns of value.

dmb says:
I've been meaning to comment on this for a while. Yes, the value (DQ) Pirsig talks about is pre-intellectual but this only means non-verbal or pre-verbal or pre-conceptual. In this case, the term "pre-intellectual" refers to the cutting edge of each moment in experience, not the historical era prior to the evolution of the intellectual level. See, the reason it defies understanding and can't be defined is that understandings and definitions are conceptual, verbal or intellectual while DQ refers to experience in the moment before it is chopped up, refers to an undifferentiated aesthetic awareness, a feel for the whole situation. This pre-intellectual awareness AND the static patterns we inhabit "are both implicated in the constitution of experience", as Hunter Brown put it. 


Ron said:
 I guess I have trouble agreeing with a universal foundation for truth that isn't colored by social level patterns of value. The way VALUE is used above, suggests a universal fundamental reality that we experience purely before social/ intellectual values are imposed. Value is at the front of the procession, but it is hardly a bottom for truth, it extends biologically and inorganically. Value as the test of the true speaks more about four levels of "true."


dmb says:
Well, the pragmatist doesn't offer a universal foundation nor does he deny the social context of our truth claims. The pragmatic theory of truth doesn't say in advance what is and is not true. It is just a method for testing our truth claims, our ideas. As you probably noticed when I was making the case to Steve, James held that truth is not an inherent property of an idea but rather that truth is something that happens to an idea in the course of experience. Testing a theory means putting it into practice, means actually trying it out. This basic formula can refer to what goes on in science labs or it can refer to motorcycle repair jobs. For a pragmatist, the "truth" can only ever refer to the quality of an idea and that quality is measured by actual experience. I think Pirsig is making a case that  the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality can be used to improve and enrich our conceptualizations, to expand our forms of rationality and even to guide the process of discovery and innovation in the sciences, but truth claims have to be made in conventional terms, with the static patterns at hand.  


dmb had said:
... the positivists represent the purest form of SOM and their project was predicated on the correspondence theory of truth. They were empiricists of a very different kind than is James, Dewey and Pirsig. The positivists thought subjects and objects were the starting points of experience and so radical empiricism is an explicit rejection of their basic metaphysical assumptions. The positivists were thoroughgoing realists who thought that objective reality was given to us through the five senses.


Ron replied:
Isn't that what's being suggest by "pure experience"? the interpretation of verbal truths correspodance with dynamic experience?


dmb says:

Nope. The correspondence theory of truth is rejected and replaced by the pragmatic theory of truth. The idea that there is an objective material reality that is what it is apart from what anyone thinks about it is rejected as primary and replaced by a picture an ever-changing experiential reality that's too rich, too thick, too overflowing and too dynamic to be conceptualized. In this view, our ideas are derived from experience and they can be used to guide future experience but they are talked about in terms of "takings" from reality rather than reflections or representations. And the idea here is that our takings can never exhaust the experiential reality from which they are taken. One classic example is the number of ways that a spot on a college campus can be taken. Say a bunch of different people are sitting in the central quadrant each taking it in their own ways. The security guard notices stuff that the history professor doesn't and vice versa. The student council president doesn't see what the captain of the football team sees. The cocky senior sees it differently than the intimidated freshman. The architect, the physicists and the geologist are all looking at it in material terms, basically, but they could each point out things the other two aren't seeing. They all have an equal shot at justifying their claims about that spot. They're all going to base those claims, at least partly we hope, on what's actually been experienced there at that spot. So which perspective is the right one? Can we even say there is only one correct perspective? Can we hope to somehow add up all these perspectives and try to know everything that's knowable about that courtyard? No, we can't pick just one view over the others. We can't privilege one kind of perspective over the others. We could never hope to add up all the points of view because the courtyard itself is constantly changing and new perspectives will come along that we haven't even imagined yet. The only thing we can do is test any given claim against experience itself. If it pans out there, that's all it means for an idea to be true. In this example, every one of the observers can be right or wrong within that perspective. The view of the physicist is best challenged by another physicist, not by the view of the football player. Not that these things are so discreet as to be untranslatable. We could blend perspectives to produce a hybrid perspective but this too would be subject to the test of experience and, like any of the other claims, could be shown to be true or false on that basis. This test asks if there is agreement between concept and reality, but differs quite dramatically from correspondence theory of truth wherein there can be only one correct concept that matches reality in a one-to-one sort of way, where I think the cat is on the mat and it's an objective scientific fact that the cat "really IS" on the mat. 


dmb had said:
Rorty says, "my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics". As Ramberg puts it, "Epistemology, in Rorty's account, is wedded to a picture of mind's structure working on empirical content to produce in itself items—thoughts, representations—which, when things go well, correctly mirror reality." In other words, for Rorty, epistemology is WEDDED to the correspondence theory of truth so that when you get rid of SOM you automatically get rid of epistemology and simply abandon all truth theories. This is what I like to call all-or-nothing-ism. By contrast, radical empiricism is a reconstructed epistemology and pragmatism is a theory of truth, both of which are predicated on the rejection or traditional empiricism and a rejection of the correspondence theory of truth. Or, to put it very simply, the classical pragmatists reform epistemology whereas Rorty simply abandons epistemology. This is why the Rorty fans are so confused about radical empiricism and the pragmatic theory of truth.  

Ron replied:
I understand now. Because ultimately, Pragmatism is nothing if it isn't epistemological. Therefore Rorty is an influentual character in the understanding of the reformation of epistomology, "pure experience" then, is an epistemological point of beginning. An epistemological first principle. In fact it takes redefining the term "empirical" from an ontological point of view to an epistomological one...

dmb says:

Well, yes. Pragmatism is a theory of truth and radical empiricism is an epistemological position. Epistemology is the investigation of what counts as knowledge and truth. Ontology is about the nature of being, about the nature of what exists. Within SOM, for example, reality is dualistic so that mind and matter are two separate ontological categories. The correspondence theory of truth goes with this dualism and holds that truth is a matter of matching mind to matter, of correspondence between subjective beliefs and objective states of affairs. By contrast, radical empiricism says this so-called objective ontological is actual just a secondary concept derived from the recalcitrances felt in experience. I mean, the whole idea of an objective material reality is based on the way experience pushes back. It really does hurt to stub your toe or to fall off a horse. If you think you can fly and jump off a building to test that theory, the existence of a pre-existing material reality is going to seem quite real just as hit the pavement and your belief in human flight is disproved. I mean, there is a reason why this view is so widespread. Most of the time, it works. The pragmatist says it works because most of the time it agrees with experience but he also says it is just a useful idea, not an ontological reality. That's what it means to say that subjects and objects are secondary, to say they are the products of thought and experience rather than the conditions that makes experience and thought possible.  


As I understand it, the term "empirical" was always an epistemological term but the radical empiricist is so radically empirical that ontology evaporates almost entirely. It is a position that says experience IS reality. We don't come to know reality through experience so much as reality just IS that experience. The distinction between DQ and sq might suggest an ontological dualism if you simply put them in the place where subjects and objects used to go but that would be a misconception, I think. The idea here is that they are both forms of Quality but they are not two different ontological categories so much as phases in experience. Likewise, truth and knowledge are obtained by passing through the various phases of experience. This is a constant ongoing process but it all happens within stream of experience so that thoughts and things are already connected to each other by the transitional experiences that bring you from one to the other. 


He said, two weeks later. Better late than never, I guess.

dmb










 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469230/direct/01/