[MD] Dog Dishes and Direct Experience

[david buchanan]

Matt said to dmb:
I'm not sure how I've confused the issue...  I'm not really sure what you have in mind as me "re-confusing" or what you might find disagreeable. I'm not using "object permanence" in any usual way. I apologize if you think that is unnecessarily confusing and detrimental to understanding.  However, I'm after more fish than just babies with toys or dogs with food.  It is difficult to get at these issues, and perhaps I am making it unnecessarily difficult by moving too quickly into them.


dmb says:
You're using "object permanence" to mean things that it doesn't mean. Period. 

I explained what it means by referencing a basic encyclopedia.

I explained what it means in the MOQ by quoting from Lila.

How could you be unsure about what I had in mind? C'mon, really. How is that possible? 

Are we NOT talking about the status of "objects" within in the MOQ, as opposed to their status within SOM? Gents, this is where the MOQ's central distinction (between DQ and sq) and the MOQ's empiricism both work together quite neatly. This is where concepts (sq) and empirical reality (DQ) work together in the most basic, practical unphilosophical way. Like the negative value in the hot stove example, the infant can act upon the sensations and feelings even before he is able to conceptualize an object as the cause of those experiences. If the rabbit goes in one side of the bush, even a dog will not be surprised to when that rabbit comes out on the other side. 

By contrast with notion of "object permanence" as a cognitive ability so very very basic that even birds can do it, you sort of mixed this in with "the concept of 'stuff in nature being around before and after we personally are', which you said you had, "implicitly defined as "object permanence" in the first post in this thread". You also said, "the easiest thing to refer to is a rock. But this definition also works just as well for New York City" and ascribed this ambiguity to the "concept of object permanence" itself. I'm saying that the concept is much more limited than you claim AND that your claim as it's ambiguity and flexibility is undermining my effort to get down to the most basic and empirically grounded concepts about "objects". That's why I brought up the concept of object permanence in the first place. Your comments on the topic are making a big hairy mess right where I was trying to be clean and simple.

"Taking physical-object permanence to be a social pattern I think is right," you said to Dan, "as is treating New York City and dog dishes as being partly composed of social and/or intellectual patterns". 

No. New York City is way too complex to rightly be discussed as an "object". It doesn't take a scientific worldview or a metaphysics of substance to believe in that city on the Hudson but it's still way beyond what we mean by "objects" as they're understood by infants, dogs, cats, etc. Why is it so hard to impress upon you how simple and basic and old this idea is? 

My point is to CONTRAST this simple, practical idea with the far more abstract and complex notion of objectivity as a metaphysical belief or as a scientific worldview. Basically, if a chimp can't grasp the notion, then you are NOT talking about "objects" in this very basic sense. This little test is going to exclude, for example, the idea of "stuff in nature being around before and after we personally are". (Which you said was your implicit definition of "object permanence".) The idea of object permanence is not supposed to be a claim about the persistence of things in historical time. Instead, objects are "permanent" in the much simpler sense that they continue to exist when they are out of view. 

Soooooooooooo, this notion of object permanence is totally relevant to the question about the status of Don's dog dish WHEN DON LEAVES THE ROOM, right? 

Oh, man.

You guys are killing me.