[MD] Truth in the 21st century

[david buchanan]

In the "Dropped Threads" thread, Matt said to Adrie:
I agree with you that "Quality is timeless" in the sense you are using it, but would emphasize that along these lines, my point was that _articulations_ of Quality are not, and that Pirsig's particular articulations belonged to a different era (which I would probably place in the 19th C. these days were I to make such a pronouncement).

dmb says:
If memory serves, this is roughly the same thing you said about James. The notion that James has been eclipsed by 20th century developments in philosophy isn't a crazy idea. (He died in 1910.) But this is another assertion taken up and disputed in Laura Weed's paper and other scholars make the same basic case for James that she does. She names "behaviorism in psychology and logicism or deconstructionism in philosophy of language" as the 20th century developments that supposed eclipsed James's work. "All three movements claimed to be more 'scientific' that James was", she says, "but as the twenty-first century gets underway, science is moving in a direction that James and his view of truth would find more ambient that those twentieth century movements". (Weed, page 11)

She then introduces the findings of recent cognitive science and she shows how contemporary researchers like Fransico Varela, Bruce Mangan, Antonio Damasio, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson are corroborating what James was saying over a hundred years ago. What's more, these researchers are, in effect, studying the role of pre-intellectual and pre-conscious events in the overall cognitive process. Roughly speaking, they are studying the role of what we would call Quality or pure experience. And Weed is convinced that these findings give us a much richer picture, one that shows how impoverished those 20th century rivals really are by comparison. 

"Unlike reductivists, such as Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland", she says, "Varela and Mangan argue that time, as experienced by humans, is deeply, pragmatically rooted in the intentionality, the emotional tone, and the dynamics of a lived life. The very conception of an object is a result of the interaction of sensations, intentions and emotions within a flow of experiential time, primed by dispositions to action. ...in it's debt to James, the new phenomenological approach is a far cry from the reductivism of the recent past, especially as pursued by many analytical philosophers. ..for issues related to truth, the new approach indicates that nay propositional analysis, given in terms of linear mathematical or logical functions, such as Tarski's or Soames's, must be mistaken. ...It seems likely in light of contemporary studies of the brain that epistemological theories like Plato's, which claimed that reasoning improved when emotions were suppressed or transcended, were equally unrealistic. Damasio has shown that an emotionless person is one who can not think or plan at all, not one with clearer and more pure reasoning." (Weed, pp 11-12)

Remarkably, Weed even describes the findings of these cognitive scientists in terms of "static" and "dynamic". (Maybe that remark should have ended with an exclamation point.) 

"...Lakoff and Johnson argue that both the scientistic realism and the postmoderns anti-realism of 20th century philosophy have been empirically discredited. They present their view of embodied realism, which looks quite Jamesian,.. In the Lakoff and Johnson view of knowledge, as on James's view, conscious processes in an active, dynamic mind interact with a dynamic and changing environment, so there is nothing static on either end of the knower-known relationship that could be the terminal points for correspondence. " (Weed, page 13)