[MD] continental and analytic philosophy

[david buchanan]

Matt said:

When, in experience, you wonder about meaning, what do you do? You ask somebody. If you don't understand what the meaning of a sentence was, you often ask the producer, "What did you mean?" Another way of putting it is to say that I don't know what the slogan "empiricism over rhetoric" is supposed to mean, because I identify "rhetoric" with "meaning in experience." 

dmb says:

I'm not sure where the slogan comes from but I get the general idea of it and I think I see what's going on here.

The problem here is that the issue has become one of meaningful conversation. That's certainly an important issue but it's not quite relevant because verbal meaning is always going to be conceptual and this conceptual half of the conceptual/nonconceptual distinction is not in dispute. This distinction does not deny that verbal meaning is part of experience. It says that there is ALSO nonverbal experience. The distinction and the term itself is conceptual of course, but they both point to something that is felt and known in experience despite the fact that it can't be nailed down in terms of verbal meanings. In that sense, yes, I think empiricism trumps rhetoric. As Pirsig puts it, Quality is more empirical than subjects and objects, and elsewhere, concepts are secondary and derived from something more fundamental.  



Matt said:

...what I take us to have learned from post-positivism (i.e. from the attempts by professional philosophers to get rid of positivism, e.g. Quine, Sellars, Davidson, Rorty)--which is: a non-linguistic item cannot itself serve as predication because predication itself is a linguistic item. ...Another way of putting it: if you are caused to think "I see water" by water, the water _itself_ is not the justification for thinking you see water, but rather the sitting of the thought "I think I see water because I see water" within a network of other thought-items (almost always _implicit_ items, and not self-consciously explicit).  These implicit relations cannot be rubbed off: as James said, the "trail of the human serpent is over all."  These relations include, for instance, other things like "I am not high" and "My senses are not hooked up to a computer" and "I am not in a desert and have not not had anything to drink in two days."


dmb says:

I agree that the non-linguisitc cannot serve as a predication of any conceptual meaning, but the post-positivists were aiming that at the positivist's claims, not the claims of radical empiricism, which claims so such thing about predication. The same thing goes for the other way of putting it. The radical empiricists claims relating to non-linguistic experience do not entail a claim about "water itself" justifying anything. Again, this objection makes sense in terms of denying the hopes of positivism but it simply doesn't apply here. The primary empirical reality or preintellectual experience is not a perfectly transparent view of an objective world full of things like water or cats on mats. It is an undifferentiated aesthetic continuum. By the time water, cats and mats come into the picture, the nonconceputal is already gone. The undifferentiated has been differentiated, in this case into water and cats and mats. That's when the implicit relations have taken over and the sand sorting is already underway. Anyway, the point is that both of your reasons are valid within the terms of post-positivism but it's a mistake to apply those lessons to James or Pirsig, who are obviously not positivists. 


Matt also said:

This is a complicated nettle of issues but they are what halt me from seeing the general utility of the distinction between "predicated on immediate experience or the experience of social persuasion."  ... The above is intended to show why I am not persuaded that I need to use the vocabulary of "immediate" and "preconceptual"--I think I can unpack types of meaning perfectly well without them. I'm not suggesting that retro-pragmatists stop their systematization of insights latent in James and Dewey that were left dormant with the shift from an experience-vocabulary to a language-vocabulary, and them doing so in an experience-vocabulary.  I just don't see the theoretical conflict between their project and stating these insights in a language-vocabulary.  I see the "meaning" of James not to be in his use of "immediate experience" but in the relationship of that term to the other things going on.


dmb says:

If the distinction is aimed at asserting the reality and importance of the non-linguistic, then how could it NOT be a theoretical conflict to state these aims in a language vocabulary? That vocabulary and the limits it imposes both push back in the opposite direction of their aims. 

The shift from experience vocabulary to a language vocabulary, as you put it, is basically the linguistic turn. And what it turned on was positivism. Again, you're using the post-positivist critique of traditional empiricism against radical empiricists. Reviving James and Dewey is not a revival of positivism. They had different metaphysical assumptions. They had a different theory of truth that reflected that shift in basic assumptions. And they insisted that all experience be accounted for in our philosophies, regardless of whether they could be nailed down conceptually or not. Radical Empiricism is just a completely different animal. Radical empiricism is itself an opponent of traditional empiricism and positivism.

Apparently it is also an opponent of post-positivism, analytic philosophy and neopragmatism. Those things are being mistakenly used against it here, at least. I suspect there's actually lots of overlap and common enemies, but the emphasis on language and these vocabulary-vocabularies are definitely and obviously rubbing against the whole grain of Pirsig's assertion that the fundamental nature of reality (Quality) is outside language. I think this clash is quite obvious AND hugely important.

You think I'm accusing you of a freshman blunder. My harping on the meaning of "Quality" must look like I'm trying to instruct you in the basics and so you feel it as condescension. But this is how I tried to explain my thesis to my classmates and my professor. "The basic goal of this thesis is to develop the meaning of  “pure experience”, a key term in William James’s “radical empiricism”. According to Eugene Taylor and Robert Wozniak in their 1996 piece titled Pure Experience, the Responses to William James: An Introduction, the responses of James’s critics in 1904 and 1905 constitute, “a case study in misinterpretation and distortion” (page 2). Hunter Brown, in the conclusion to his 2000 book titled William James on Radical Empiricism and Religion, says that this feature of James’s work is central to his philosophy of religion and suggests that “future analyses of his thought on religion should be directed more extensively toward that aspect of his work” because it is still misunderstood (page 143). Brown quotes Gerald Meyers on this point, saying that the notion of immediate experience still “remains a puzzle” (page 75).                 John McDowell, looking at the notion of non-conceptual experience from the perspective of the analytic school of philosophy in his 1994 book Mind and World, says that non-conceptual experience is a philosophically useless idea and in fact there is no such thing. With respect to this notion, referred to variously here as “pure experience” or “immediate experience” or “non-conceptual experience”, it seems that the one of the most central terms in James’s radical empiricism has been widely misunderstood for more than a hundred years. The aim, then, is to join the scholars who are working to improve that situation.












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