[MD] Know-how

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB,



> 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.

Steve:
As is becoming typical, instead of responding to my objections to the
analogy, you post a bunch of quotes...


> 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)

Steve:
Whether you talk about givens or takens, you've still set up a
dichotomy between reality and concepts. Aren't concepts a part of
reality? When you "take" a bucket of reality, where are you taking to?
This is my objection to the analogy that you didn't bother to address.
If experience is the stream and if experience is reality, then the
buckets in this analogy must must be something not part of reality.


DMB:
> 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.

Steve:
James also said that the trail of the human serpent runs over
everything. As Sam Harris pointed out in his end notes to The End of
Faith, it is pretty easy to get James to argue with himself.


DMB:
> 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.

Steve:
Really? You can distinguish the static and dynamic aspects of reality
in practice? DQ/sq is the the first cut and a clean one as
metaphysics, but we've been talking about epistemology here. We are
talking about knowledge, and in doing so we are supposing a
distinction between a knower (the "taker" with the buckets) and what
is known (the stream).  People have different experiences because they
bring to experience different sets of static patterns. In our moment
to moment experience we cannot completely distinguish the static from
the dynamic. As soon as we start talking about a person _having_ an
experience whether in terms of giving or taking, the dynamic and
static aspects of that experiences are conflated to the point that it
is impossible to say where the dynamic part ends and the static part
begins.

Remember this bit on relativism from ZAMM?
"Why does everybody see Quality differently? This was the question he
had always had to answer speciously before. Now he said, ``Quality is
shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to
intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms.
The names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on
the Quality. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have
accumulated in our memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality
event, analogues to our previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be
unable to act. We build up our language in terms of these analogues.
We build up our whole culture in terms of these analogues.''

The reason people see Quality differently, he said, is because they
come to it with different sets of analogues. He gave linguistic
examples, showing that to us the Hindi letters da, da, and dha all
sound identical to us because we don't have analogues to them to
sensitize us to their differences. Similarly, most Hindi-speaking
people cannot distinguish between da and the because they are not so
sensitized. It is not uncommon, he said, for Indian villagers to see
ghosts. But they have a terrible time seeing the law of gravity.

This, he said, explains why a classful of freshman composition
students arrives at similar ratings of Quality in the compositions.
They all have relatively similar backgrounds and similar knowledge.
But if a group of foreign students were brought in, or, say, medieval
poems out of the range of class experience were brought in, then the
students' ability to rank Quality would probably not correlate as
well.

In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines
him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different,
but because people are different in terms of experience. He speculated
that if two people had identical a priori analogues they would see
Quality identically every time. There was no way to test this,
however, so it had to remain just speculation.

In answer to his colleagues at school he wrote:

``Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and
true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of
philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking
something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and
everybody else means) by the word quality cannot be broken down into
subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious
but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.

``The easiest intellectual analogue of pure Quality that people in our
environment can understand is that `Quality is the response of an
organism to its environment' ...

``In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to
our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We
invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts,
language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call
these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our
children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We
throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane
asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality.
Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us
to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.

``Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and
include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible.
That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are
defining something less than Quality itself.''


Steve:
In the above, the buckets are the analogues (later, the static
patterns). The stream is DQ, but it is not all of reality, it is only
the dynamic aspect of reality. It is constantly defined and never
exhausts definition, so it is undefinable. Reality is the collection
of all the analogues in addition to the buckets. The buckets aren't
something outside of reality that merely take from reality.

Best,
Steve