[MD] The Hero's journey

[david buchanan]

Dan said to Matt:
Right... for Don to "know" the dog dish exists apart from his experience of it is a high quality idea. It allows Don to go about his day without worrying whether Fido is starving to death at home. So we seem to agree it is a high quality idea that reality exists apart from experience but it is only an idea.  ...How does Don know if his dog's food dish exists when he's apart from experiencing it?



dmb says:
When James talked about truth in terms of "cash value", his critics mistook him to be saying that truth is whatever has practical pay off, that truth is whatever gets us the results we want. But I discovered that he was up to something else. Basically, he was talking about the empirical issue you guys have been debating in this thread. His point was that the vast majority of our empirically verifiable truths are purchased on credit, as opposed to cash. In this analogy, personally witnessing the dog dish with your own eyes is cashing out the belief in that dog dish. Your friend telling you that he has a dog dish would be a truth purchased on credit. If you can't, at least in theory, go over to his house and confirm the validity of his claim, then his credit is no good. If memory serves, James used the city of Tokyo as an example of a belief he held on credit. He'd never been there himself, he said, but he'd known people who had been there. He'd seen it on maps and in photos and otherwise had many reasons to believe that the claim could be cashed out, that all these second-hand reports could be verified in his own experience if he were willing to take a long journey. And James said that the vast majority of our beliefs are held on credit. It would simply be impractical to limit your scientific beliefs to the data that comes only from experiments that you personally witnessed. 

But, he insisted, actual experience by actual people is the cold hard cash. That's what supports the whole credit system, he insisted. 

I'm not saying the existence of the dog dish becomes second-hand knowledge as soon as you leave the room, however. That would simply be a matter of not forgetting that you just cashed out that belief by filling the dish with food. There's no empirical reason to believe that the dish disappears when you leave the room. And if it seems to be where we left it every time we care to check, then I think we have to move to a very unreasonable level of skepticism to have any serious doubts about it's existence. It simply isn't a problem. The dog gets fed because there is a regularity and stability in experience such that we can fruitfully employ concepts like object permanence. This stability and regularity is what gives rise to the concept and it's what makes the credit system work. That's how there can be far more knowledge in the world than any one person could possible have, even by second-hand, even on credit. 

Object permanence is a practical belief, one invented by "some remote ancestor" and learned by every infant. As a practical belief, it's been true for a very long time but it's much less ambitious than subject-object metaphysics, philosophical physicalism, the scientific belief in an objective reality or the metaphysical belief in, say, Kant's things-in-themselves. You're going jump off the hot stove regardless of your metaphysics. Whatever particular concepts are used to explain the event afterward, they have to agree with the experience or otherwise answer to that (ouch) empirical reality. That's why we can give up on objective reality and the Cartesian self but still think it's a good idea to avoid cuts, burns, dog bites and atom bombs. It's a kind of mysticism that is decidedly NOT otherworldly, that brings philosophy down to the earth of things. The mystics will get off the stove first, he says, because Quality, the mystic reality, is not a metaphysical idea but the primary empirical reality and that's what the mystic pays attention to rather than his ideas about empirical reality.