[MD] Apologies for Dropped Threads

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Ian,

Matt said:
I applaud [Steve's] good answer to the "mere conversation" slogan 
this is: "Of course conversation is not excluded from experience, but 
what you fail to get is that nothing is excluded from conversation." 
What's great about this is that it catches exactly how the two, 
conversation and experience, are inverses of each other.  Just as 
part of our experience is conversation, so can conversation be 
_about_ anything.

Ian said:
JUST as conversation is "part of" our experience, 
SO experience is NOT "part of" conversation, 
This is NOT a simple inverse relation.

[Direct] experience IS excluded from conversation; it can be no more 
than the subject the conversation is ABOUT. Clearly a conversation 
can be ABOUT ANY experience, but that conversation is not that 
experience.

Matt:
I guess I don't see what the hubbub is.  If you look closely, I went 
from "part of" to "be about" when moving from experience to 
conversation, so I'm not sure what you're taking issue with.  Steve's 
formula was very nice because it made a pun.  When I articulated 
what Steve meant, you'll notice I disambiguated the sense.

It seems like the sense of "exclusion" you are using when you say 
"direct experience is excluded from conversation" is the same sense 
we would find in "apples are excluded from conversation."  The 
apple isn't "in" the conversation in the same way: I can talk _about_ 
the apple, but the apple isn't in it.

It seems to me that, as far as master concepts go, experience and 
conversation have a peculiar relationship to each other.  Experience 
includes everything, is everything: every particular experience--like 
the experience of conversation--we might delineate afterward is a 
subclass of the ultimate, all-inclusive class.  Right?  Well, check out 
that word "about": you can have an experience _of_ the apple, but 
you can't have an experience _about_ the apple.  Experience is the 
includer: whatever "thing" you are aware _of_ (you are not, so it 
seems, "aware about"), it is within the enveloping embrace of the 
ultimate class "experience."  (That's something like the rejection of 
SOM: we don't have an experience of an object, the object is 
disclosed in experience.  Conceptually speaking, if not grammatically, 
according to SOM's order of cognition, we are "aware about" 
objects out there.)  Conversation, however, as is continually pointed 
out by the mystic tradition, is the great excluder: it divides, analyzes, 
breaks into pieces.  Conversation stands to the side of what it is 
_about_.  But, and here's the bit, it can stand to the side of 
everything.

One might think: "yes, but like you just said to Ian, isn't the sense of 
'stand to the side' that conversation can do the same sense in which 
apples 'stand to the side' of oranges?"

If you want to think it's the same sense, ask yourself why you would 
resist saying, "apples are about oranges."  (If you are agile enough 
to think the sentence "The apples are all about the oranges" makes 
perfect sense, then consider whether that is the same sense of 
"about" as the sense in this sentence: "The previous sentence in this 
parenthetical is about apples surrounding a pile of oranges."  If you 
are a radical empiricist and you do think sentences surround their 
subjects, you might wonder why you aren't also a psychological 
nominalist.)

Matt