[MD] MOQ and Gödel's incompleteness theorems

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
... On that account, everyone is either a Platonist (rationalism) or an Aristotelain (empiricism), although Pirsig and James both think that Protagoras (Man is the measure) represents empiricism much better than Aristotle. 

Ron replied:

What are your thoughts concerning the proposal that this argument is the question of the "one and the many" and may best be examined in those terms? especially in terms of a logical coherent system, But the difficulty has always been, how is experience both one and many.

dmb says:
Right, Platonists are the lovers of the One while Aristotelians are the lovers of the many. Monism versus pluralism is idealism versus materialism is rationalism versus empiricism. These are different ways to say the same thing. Labels like idealism and materialism present the rivalry in terms of what there is while terms like rationalism and empiricism present the same rivalry in terms of what we can know. They are the ontological and epistemological dimensions of these two rival visions. James thought the question of the One and the many was the most interesting and difficult question of all time. 

It's kinda funny. At one point, in a chapter of Pragmatism titled "The One and the Many", James asks why the number one is so special and sacred to the Absolutist mind, why not 3 or 14 or 1,000,008?

As I understand it, Aristotle was the empiricist who rejected Plato's notion of the Forms (idealism) and adopted instead a "metaphysics of substance", as Pirsig calls it. As you may recall, Phaedrus wrote a wildly grandiose letter to the Aristotelian Chairman at the University of Chicago telling him that nobody was anybody in Chicago until he'd rubbed somebody out and it was time Aristotle got his. He tells the Chairman that he intends to overthrow the University's fundamental tenants in a dialectical reversal with his anti-Aristotelain thesis on Quality. And then there is his attack on the narrow empiricism of scientific positivism, wherein he says they aren't empirical enough and he points out that their anti-metaphysical stance is pure metaphysics. (SOM) Protagoras was not that kind of empiricist and neither are our two radical empiricists. I've been thinking that it's not easy to explain the difference. But I'll try.

First of all, the materialism is gone from their view. Or rather, the radical empiricist treats materialism as an hypothesis rather than a metaphysical assumption. It's treated as an idea only. Same with idealism. Instead of starting from either premise, the primary empirical reality is neither mental nor physical. It is undivided experience, an event and not a thing. Instead of talking about empirical reality in terms of atomistic bits of sense data and physical substance or things-in-themselves that are said to be the cause of sense data, experience is conceived as a continuous stream or an undifferentiated continuum. This is still empiricism. Experience is the concrete and factual and sensible in the sense that it is known and felt and experience is still the basis of all our subsequent knowledge but the causes or conditions that are said to make experience possible (subjects and objective reality) are stripped of their metaphysical rank and demoted to secondary concepts. 

Thinking about the ambiguity of the word "quality" is another way to think about the difference between traditional empiricism and our radical empiricists. It can mean two different things to say that something has certain qualities. If the term is being used to refer to the redness or hardness of something, then we're talking about properties that are detectable and knowable with scientific instruments. These instruments are mechanical extensions of our sense organs, in effect, and talking about properties in this way is going to make a lot of sense to a traditional empiricists, with the scientific positivists being the prime example. But that is NOT how do you "see" literary excellence. Elegance and beauty are not detectable the way physical properties are. On this traditional view, experience as it is lived and felt, suffered and enjoyed is just subjective, just what you like while the radical empiricist, by contrast, says that the quality of experience is a concrete fact, the most real reality we ever get. The affective domain of man's consciousness is not dismissed or treated as an impediment to the empirical facts. These feelings are not only taken as empirical facts, they're taken as being among the most important of facts. Why should redness or coldness be more real than awe or curiosity or bewilderment?