[MD] Noncognitive babble

[Ian Glendinning]

Hi Steve, Marsha, I keep hearing clips and trailers to Hawking hawking
his new book around, but haven't managed to catch one yet. That
"philosophy is dead" attention grabber is surely just that, one in a
long line starting with Nietzsche and taking in Pirsig's
philosophologists. Arrogant enough to get a reaction.

Back to Steve's point.

Those 5 Putnam statements are definitive statements from the point of
view of someone who believes the definition of a fact matters. The
number of "real life" cases where that holds is vanishingly small -
those repeatable laboratory cases where scientific method applies. The
value of philosophy is surely to integrate the fact / value views, not
help reinforce the divide.

The problem with the Hawking / Dawkins "arrogant science" view is that
they believe that view IS "real life" and everything else has "lesser"
value.

I do still believe we need to be tilting against the windmill Steve.
Public media still has a thing about "what science says ..." being
distinct from "what a politician says ..." Yes, young (inexperienced)
people (unless they are scientists or analytic philosophers -
inexperienced ones) will still form a mix of those that do or don't
see or even care about the divide. In my experience they range from
the whatever to the vehement, just like we grey beards do, only we
should know better.

Ian

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 8:53 PM, MarshaV <valkyr at att.net> wrote:
>
> Btw, I was listening to an interview with Garry Parsons who
> was a coauthor with Stephen Hawking on the new book 'The Grand
> Design.'  The interview was on a pbs program.  One of the last statements
> Parsons made was "Philosophy is dead!"  He then went on to say that
> philosophy cannot tell us anything about the world we live in.
>
> Pretty arrogant, yes?
>
>
>
> Marsha
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sep 10, 2010, at 3:43 PM, MarshaV wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Hi Steve,
>>
>> Interesting, and reminded me of asking how many angels can
>> dance on the head of a pin.  But fun!  And I image it has created  a
>> quattuordecillion opportunities for papers to be published. And one
>> can only wonder about those 'ideal conditions'?  Interesting...
>>
>> I have often wondered about the difference between a static
>> pattern of value representing a conventional truth (Tim is a
>> human.)  and a static pattern of value representing a
>> conventional judgement (Tim is an hypocrite), or something
>> like that.
>>
>>
>> Marsha
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sep 10, 2010, at 12:27 PM, Steven Peterson wrote:
>>
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> 20 years after Lila, I wonder how it would be read by someone new to
>>> Pirsig. Would the ideas seem relevent? As we get more and more
>>> distance from the positivists, I wonder how young people today would
>>> read Pirsig's attacks on the fact-value dichotomy. Would they wonder
>>> just who it is Pirsig thinks he is arguing against?
>>> Maybe this aspect of SOM that attracted most of us to the MOQ is a
>>> straw man. If Pirsig and the other antiSomers are successful, at least
>>> at some point it will be a straw man, right?  Someday young people
>>> just won't even know what Pirsig was going on about. At the time I got
>>> into Pirsig, I really felt like the notion of objectivity was being
>>> used to push values into some realm of noncognitive babble. Is that
>>> still happening today?
>>>
>>> Here are some examples of the views that Pirsig attacks with regard to
>>> the dichotomy between facts and values taken from an article on Hilary
>>> Putnam who also made such critiques on SOM:
>>>
>>> http://www.philosophy.su.se/texter/putnam.htm
>>>
>>> (1) No statement is both evaluative and factual.
>>>
>>> (2) There is no logical connection between evaluative and factual statements.
>>>
>>> (3) Factual statements are true or false independently of any value judgments.
>>>
>>> (4) Facts can, and values cannot, be established beyond controversy.
>>>
>>> (5) Evaluative statements are neither true nor false.
>>>
>>>
>>> Are these dogmas ones that people still adhere to? Or have Pirsig,
>>> Putnam, and the other critics of the fact-value dichotomy been
>>> successful?
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> Steve
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>>
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