[MD] Schroedinger's paradox

[david buchanan]

dmb said to John McConnell:
The problem is predicated on the assumptions of subject-object metaphysics and the correspondence theory of truth that goes so neatly with those assumptions. The MOQ rejects those assumptions and it rejects the correspondence theory of truth. In fact, anyone who subscribes to pragmatism, which is a theory of truth, is by definition rejecting the correspondence theory of truth and the metaphysical assumptions that go with it.


Krimel jumped in:
James does not reject the assumption that concepts must conform to perception. He states quite clearly that concepts arise from and are subject to percepts. ... James doesn't reject the assumptions of correspondence theory. He  adds to them that ideas must hang together. They must cohere. Truth is a network of ideas resonating in harmony. Truth must ring true. ...We might disagree about what gives rise to our sense data, but to the extent that two or more find mutual harmony in their shared accounts, objectivity emerges.




dmb says:
I'm pretty sure that you're mixing up some things here, Krimel. The idea that "concepts must conform to perception" is NOT the correspondence theory and it's not exactly James's view either. 

On the pragmatist's account, ideas are true to the extent that they agree with experience. He wants to put it that way because "conformity to perception" wouldn't be wrong, exactly, but it would be too narrow. Unlike traditional forms of empiricism, the pragmatist's conception of empirical experience includes perceptions but is not limited to them. Any kind of experience counts as empirical reality. And so it is with Pirsig too. As you may recall, Pirsig's complaint about the positivists (old-school empiricism) was the they we not empirical enough, that they excluded all kinds of experience and they did so for metaphysical reasons.

In the philosophological business, there is a relatively subtle but important difference between phenomenalism and phenomenology. In both cases, they stick to the "subjective" side. They suspend or bracket out the objective and focus on the phenomenal realities but the phenomenalist retains the narrower conception of experience, i.e. sensory experience, whereas the phenomenologist has a broader conception of experience and so includes experiences beyond the five senses. Feelings, moods, attitudes, and all that fuzzy stuff that old school empiricism would dismiss as unimportant or irrelevant. They say that if phenomenology had taken off in America, James would be considered the father of American phenomenology. His Varieties of Religious Experience, for example, is phenomenological. Religious experience, mystical experience, epiphanies and the like, for example, do not come through the senses and yet they can be profoundly life-altering. That's how the phenomenology is broader than phenomenalism. The phenomenalist is unlikely to say much about objective reality but he does retain the narrow conception of experience  and that's what distinguishes him from the phenomenologist. These days, "phenomenology" has come to mean any carefully constructed first-person account so that you'll see stuff like "the phenomenology of going to the movies", the "phenomenology of sailing", and this can certainly include what's seen and heard but such accounts will always go beyond the senses and they try to capture "what it's like" to have this or that experience. They try to capture the experiential qualities of a given experience. 

But the difference between the pragmatic theory of truth and the correspondence theory of truth is not so subtle. That's where subject-object metaphysics (and the pragmatist's rejection of it) comes in. That's the basic assumption underlying the correspondence theory of truth, wherein the subject has the true idea if that idea corresponds with objective reality. This is a metaphysics of substance, wherein subjects and objects are conceived as distinct entities or as distinct ontological categories, as two distinctly different kinds of stuff, and the trick is for the former to gain knowledge about the latter. This the basic assumption that not only underwrites the positivist's (the most extreme example), but the major stars of philosophy too; Descartes, Hume, Kant, and just about any kind of scientific materialism. In fact, this is one of the main reasons that James moved from psychology to philosophy. As a psychologist he was more or less forced to operate with those assumptions and he grew increasingly skeptical about that conception of the self and about the conception of objective reality too. We can see this even more clearly by the time we get to his radical empiricism. In "Does Consciousness Exist?", he rejects the idea of the subjective self as a distinct entity and in "A World of Pure Experience" he rejects the conception of objective reality in favor of empirical reality. 

"The first great pitfall from which [radical empiricism] will save us is an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known. Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension' by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome. Representative theories put a mental 'representation,' 'image,' or 'content' into the gap, as a sort of intermediary. Common-sense theories left the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a self-transcending leap. Transcendentalist theories left it impossible to traverse by finite knowers, and brought an Absolute in to perform the saltatory act. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full."

And we see this in the secondary literature too, not least of all in Pirsig's second book.


"The second of James' two main systems of philosophy, which he said was independent of pragmatism, was his radical empiricism. By this he meant that subjects and objects were not the starting point of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories'. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be either physical or psychical: It logically precedes this distinction." (Pirsig 1991, 364-5)


You're not going to see this very well in James's "Principles of Psychology". His work as a psychologist raised a lot of questions about the Cartesian self and subject-object metaphysics and the answers don't get developed and articulated until he leaves that science behind and moves on to philosophy. I suspect your impression of James comes from that earlier phase of his life.