[MD] Positivist empiricism, radical empiricism and imaginative exploration

[Ant McWatt]

David Morey asked March 15th 2013:

"Now we all know that positivist empiricists like to stick to perceptions
and radical empiricists like to broaden out the sort of experiences that
are happy to describe and include values, feelings and moods, etc."

"Agree/disagree?"


Ant McWatt comments:

David,

I started trying to answer your various agree/disagree questions in this post but I am still looking at question one!

The
 trouble with this "yes/no format" that you used here is that it essentially has an SOM 
heritage: "this is this and that is that and nothing is fuzzy and 
everything must be defined in a black or white way" so that either 
choice will distort.  You only need to look up "logical empiricism" in 
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to realise there are numerous 
shades of logical positivism rather one definitive philosophy which is 
why the Stanford article starts with the sentence:

"Logical empiricism is a philosophic movement rather than a set of
doctrines."

( plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism/ )

i.e. they were probably nearly as many 
philosophologists and philosophers that were in the various schools of 
thought (such as the Vienna Circle) as they were doctrines!


So,
 in the first place, what I think your "questionnaire" post could possibly do 
with (question one at least), is being re-phrased using fuzzy logic a la Bart Kosko e.g. 
complete agreement could be represented by "1", a don't know by "0.5" 
and a complete disagreement by "zero".  Check out Dr Greg Alvord's 
Commentary on the Pirsig PhD which has a nice section or two on relating
 statements about the MOQ with fuzzy logic:

( http://robertpirsig.org/PhD%20Addendum.htm )


The "fuzzy logic" answer to the question "Does Lila have Quality" (that you will find in Greg's commentary) is probably the most accurate one formulated so far.

Best wishes,

Ant

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N.B the remainder of David's post follows:


But how do radical empiricists feel about the imagination and fantasies?
Are these just good old elements of experience like any other that we
need to study and describe?
 
Seems to me that what is important is what we share with other people
and we don't seem to have discussed this enough with respect to the MOQ.
 
Perceptions are simple we can all point at the same sources of our
experiences and agree on at least their location, or we can move on
to sharing quantities and measurements in a good old scientific way.

Agree/disagree?

 
Feelings and moods can at least sometimes be shared and rationally
discussed. We can feel the same way about certain things, whether
they make us feel happy, sad or whatever. Maybe we feel differently
about eating fish and how it makes us feel, but at least we know we
all have a reaction to eating or smelling fish that is something real
even if it varies.

Agree/disagree?

 
But what about all that stuff we experience that we do not share with 
others, we can't point at it or measure it, we can't even agree what it is that we
are referring to, because it is not shared, it is driven by imagined 
experiences?

We can of course describe such experiences, they may even prove rather
fruitful like Einstein's imagining what it is like to travel at the speed of 
light.

What has the MOQ got to say about the imagination, does it recognise
that all experiences are real? Is MOQ therefore not a realist metaphysics?
I can't think why the MOQ would start to suggest that some experiences are
less real than others or are illusions? I'd suggest the only real difference 
between these different sorts of experiences is really how easy or hard it is to 
share them.

Would it not be fair to say that what we mean by perceptual experiences is 
that these are connected by having an easily shared source (SOM calls them 
objects).

Moods are less easily shared (although our shared human nature helps) and may differ 
(SOM calls these subjective) and the imagination is a realm of freedom where we can 
travel to unfamiliar corners where we may often find ourselves alone and find it 
difficult to share our discoveries with others. I'd suggest all these experiences 
are quite real, unless you are a positivist, but how does the MOQ make sense of this 
difference in how we are able to share these experiences with different levels of 
difficulty? Great artists, of course, are those who enable us to share in their 
great imaginative discoveries and explorations.

Agree/disagree?

 
David M
 
 
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