[MD] Know-how - an aside

[MarshaV]

Hi Steve,

Since I still cannot find the words I'm looking for, I think I'll speak the words I have.  This is a beautiful post.  The quotes from ZMM are still as beautiful as I first remembered them. They are equal to my experience with the guitar and or listening to Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante.  When I was hopelessly lost somewhere between Philosophy East and Philosophy West, they were the ecstatic joy of finding a way home.  And reading these quotes this morning made my heart quicken.   

Thank you.  



Marsha
 
 
 




On May 13, 2010, at 6:52 PM, Steven Peterson wrote:

> 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
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