[MD] Realism and anti-realism

[david buchanan]

dmb to Dan:
...I'm talking about concrete particulars AS OPPOSED to abstract hypotheticals. The difference is that one is connected to empirical reality and the other one is not. Since the MOQ is a vert strong form of empiricism and its central term refers to the primary empirical reality, I think this is one of the more important points to make in a discussion about the status of objects.


Andre replied:
Yes dmb and perhaps the notion of 'object permanence' is an unfortunate term given the reactions and implications given to it in this discussion. Dan asked (and rightly so):"What is the difference..." (between the hypothetical forest and the tree falling when no one is around and Don's dog dish).  ..I'll first backtrack a bit: is there agreement that there is no division between the knower and the known in the MOQ? In other words that in pure, direct experience the object seen is not separate from the subject perceiving it? As William James expressed it:" The paper [dog dish] seen and the seeing of it are only two names for one indivisible fact...The paper [dog dish] is in the mind and the mind is around the paper [dog dish] because paper and mind are only two names that are given later to the one experience, when, taken in a larger world of which it form a part, its connections are traced in different directions ( The Writings of William James, McDermott p 156/7)
But does that mean that the dog dish vanishes off the face of the earth when I am not around to perceive it or indeed that James' paper vanishes off the face of the earth when he closes his eyes for a moment? Can one imagine the horror of existence if that indeed be so?

I would suggest that the dog dish or, for that matter James' piece of paper continue to exist but not as an object "out there". It has become part of our continuing/remembered experience and Don's dog dish is noted as a subjective intellectual pattern of value which we can expect to encounter again when we visit Don. Unless Don's dog has died and the dish has been thrown away which will adjust our experience accordingly. In the very same way that I expect the trains to run tomorrow to take me to work (should I be so lucky). If the trains do not run the experience gets adjusted accordingly.



dmb says:
I think that's right. The "full fact" of experience includes all the elements that we subsequently identify as knower and known, as well as the feeling tone and any number of other things. "Subjects and objects are secondary," Pirsig says, explaining James's radical empiricism, "They are concepts derived from something more fundamental". We can see this in the hot stove example. The negative value prompts the act of jumping off but the ideas about stoves, heat, jumping and hurting asses are abstracted and identified after the full fact of experience. The full fact of experience is what "furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories", as Pirsig quotes James. 
"in this basic flux of experience," Pirsig goes on to say, "the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms WHICH WE MAKE THEM. [my emphasis] Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical; it logically precedes this distinction."

P.S. Thanks for your transcription work, Andre. Opening up access to that material is no small thing.