[MD] Know-how

[david buchanan]

dmb says:
Instead of concepts shaping what's "given" to the senses, concepts are "taken" from the stream of experience they way one would "take" a bucket of water from a river. The bucket of water does not get in the way of the river. It does not represent the river or correspond to the river. It's derived from the river. You captured something from the river and in some sense it's not something ontologically distinct from the river. But it sure ain't moving like a river and in some sense you can't even compare them. In this analogy, pure experience is the river and concepts are the buckets of water.

Steve replied:
I think this analogy punches up the notion that  concepts take one out of reality, while I can't see how that could be. I don't think this switch from give to take is what James was doing at all. For James experience is a give-and-take as well as a creative transcendence of what was previously given/taken in a bringing something new into experience, and it's futile and pointless to sort out where "given" begins and ends and where "created" begins and ends.



dmb says:

"The history of the theory of knowledge or epistemology would have been very different if instead of the word 'data' or 'givens', it had happened to start with calling the qualities in question 'takens'." (John Dewey, 1929;22-3)

Actually, the river-bucket analogy is James's and it does oppose the myth of the given in, as in the quote from Dewey, who was also a radical empiricist. And James certainly didn't think it was futile and pointless to sort out the difference between the stream and the buckets.

"The immediate experience of life solves the problems which so baffle our conceptual intelligence". (Pluralistic Universe, p.116)

"James does not denigrate, reject, or scorn what conceptual understanding can achieve. ..There would be no science and no philosophy. Concepts, then, play an essential practical and theoretical role in human life. But Bergson helped James to see more clearly that we are on the very brink of misunderstanding if we think that our only access to reality is through conceptual understanding. In addition to conceptual understanding there is also direct acquaintance and experience. ...Conceptual thought, despite its practical or theoretical efficacy, stays only on the surface of things. It is knowledge ABOUT things; it does not penetrate the inner life of things and reality's continuously changing character." (Editor's intro to PU, p.xxiii)
"...James wants to turn us upside down. He wants us to see that what is ontologically primary is a genuinely continuous, active reality [the stream]: 'the real units of our immediately-felt life are unlike the units that intellectualist logic holds to and makes its calculations with'. The depth of James's criticism of the intellectualist tendency in philosophy should not be underestimated. It is nothing less than critique of Western philosophic thought. 'I saw that philosophy had been on a false scent [this is James talking] ever since the days of Socrates and Plato, that an intellectual answer to the intellectualist's difficulties will never come, and that the real way out of them, far from consisting in the discovery of such an answer, consists in simply closing one's ears to the question'" (Intro to PU, xxiv)

I think it's pretty cool that James traces it back to Ancient Greece and for the same essential reason as Pirsig too. 

Also, Steve, this thing you think is futile to distinguish. We're talking about the first cut in the MOQ, static and dynamic. The river is flowing and dynamic, the bucket is discrete and static. I think you're missing something very big here, Mr. Peterson. 

   		 	   		  
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