[MD] The Hero's journey

[MarshaV]

On Nov 17, 2011, at 1:06 PM, david buchanan wrote:

> The MOQ has a dispute with the metaphysical assumptions of empirical science but it is based on experience and that's what makes it work. As a radical empiricist, one cannot reject the empirical data. In that sense, the MOQ retains an element of realism. We carve out everything, as James says. We sort experience into all kinds of concepts but experience itself does not bend to our will. Experience as it is immediately felt and lived in the concrete comes with real resistances against which we must struggle and we don't always win. Empirical reality pushes back such that concepts like sharpness, heaviness, and redness can be put to use in experience without any problems for a whole lifetime. That resistance is what gives rise to concepts about objects in the first place. I'm the kind of realist who sometimes burns his hands on the oven and I do not think it was an illusion when the broken drinking glass nearly sliced my pinky off. "Red" might be a deduced concepts that only has meaning in relation to human eyes, but the redness of the blood was real enough for me. Such concepts are pragmatically true rather than objectively true. Again, the pragmatic truth is one that agrees with empirical reality in the sense that it successfully operates within experience, not in the sense that it corresponds to an objective world of physical things in themselves or an ideal world of eternal Forms or anything like that. 


Marsha:
And for Adolph and company, the pragmatic truth of the holocaust was one that agreed with empirical reality in the sense that it successfully operated within their experience.

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RMP:
 "The idea that satisfaction alone is the test of anything is very dangerous, according to the Metaphysics of Quality. There are different kinds of satisfaction and some of them are moral nightmares. The Holocaust produced a satisfaction among Nazis. That was quality for them. They considered it to be practical. But it was a quality dictated by low-level static social and biological patterns whose overall purpose was to retard the evolution of truth and Dynamic Quality. James would probably have been horrified to find that Nazis could use his pragmatism just as freely as anyone else, but Phaedrus didn't see anything that would prevent it. But he thought that the Metaphysics of Quality's classification of static patterns of good prevents this kind of debasement." 
 

McWatt:
This criticism is supported by Popkin & Stroll (1956, p.271) who criticise the pragmatism of William James as it lacks an explicit moral framework to judge behaviour by:


Popkin & Stroll:
It is not possible to make an evaluation, to say something works or not, unless one has some criteria to appeal to. Such criteria the pragmatist denies us. What is meant by ‘what works’? Are we to be concerned for what works for us as individuals, for our society, for our humanity, or what? We need some moral framework, some idea of what is good and bad, desirable and undesirable, some notion of aims and objectives, in order to know what it might mean to say that something works or does not.

	      (McWatt, Anthony, 'A Critical Analysis of Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality'

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