[MD] Putting SOM back into the MOQ by excluding SQ, let's not do that say some of us

[X]

Thanks for that Dave,
 Since Dave Morey seems to be taking a different tack in regard to this philosophical
question, I however would like to explore the tradional arguement it raises.
Polish the rhetorical explanation if you will.

Since I am not as versed in the tradition of Pragmatism in the formal sense as you,
I am hoping to find alittle guidance.

The philosophical question I need help on (in the rhetorical counter arguement)
is "How does Pragmatism explain how truths are verifyable in experience?
How does it explain how one truth (concept) is better than another?

The feed back that is being forwarded basicaly amounts to the explanation of
"it just is." and leave it at that. Pragmatists dont ask those questions.

At this point in the rhetorical art of persuasion, it can be said that it lacks explanitory
power. You begin to lose the target audience.

Any help is appreciated.

Dan, 
You are gonna have to insult yourself today. 
Not much time, not worth a post.

tootles

-Ron

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david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:

>"Dynamic Quality is defined constantly by everyone. Consciousness can be described is a process of defining Dynamic Quality. But once the definitions emerge, they are static patterns and no longer apply to Dynamic Quality. So one can say correctly that Dynamic Quality is both infinitely definable and undefinable because definition never exhausts it." -- Robert Pirsig
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>Dan said:
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>This is what the discussion between David H./David M. and myself has centered upon. Both Davids insist that we experience pre-existing pattens of value. This is the common way of using the term 'experience' as Robert Pirsig states: a subject/object relationship. It would appear to me that the correspondence theory of truth uses this same definition of experience.   In the MOQ, however, experience becomes synonymous with Dynamic Quality. There are no pre-existing patterns of value, or a pre-existing subject/object relationship.
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>Ron said:
>I think what Dave M is asking, and deducing, is that there must be a sort of relatedness our concepts MUST share with DQ in order for Pragmatic truths to exist.  ...Or else what the heck are we really saying about precision and clarity.
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>dmb says:
>Yes, basically David M wants to find a determinate reality behind our concepts. He doesn't see how concepts can make sense of an empirical flux, he then considers this to be a problem that he's going to solve for us, and his solution is to construe static patterns as pre-existing things that we experience and then conceptualize.
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>"Now you can do all this reasoning," Morey says, "only if you can experience pre-conceptual patterns and through culture and concepts make sense of these. If as Dan claims there are no patterns to make conceptual sense of, there is nothing but flux to make sense of, nothing to hook us out of change to see there are patterns and persistence."
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>David Morey is not only asking an ancient question, he is also giving us an ancient answer. We can't make sense of an unpatterned flux, he figures, so we MUST experience pre-conceptual patterns. How could the flux of experience be ordered and defined if there aren't "pre-conceptual patterns", if there aren't patterns already existing before we conceptualize them, he wonders? Kant's "things–in–themselves", which are the objects of reality as they exist apart from being images in the subject mind of a perceiver or an observer, are posited as an answer to that question. 
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>"...though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves," Kant says, "we must yet be in a position at least to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears." There must be something that structures our experience, some noumenal reality that limits and determines our experience, something that causes phenomenal reality to be conceivable and definable. 
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>"Platonic Ideas and Forms are noumena, and phenomena are things displaying themselves to the senses [...] that noumena and the noumenal world are objects of the highest knowledge, truths, and values is Plato's principal legacy to philosophy." —The Oxford Companion to Philosophy
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>For Aristotle, as Pirsig tells us, the real reality behind phenomenal appearances, was "substance". The observable, sensible properties were conceived as inhering in "sub-stance", that which stands below the appearances. 
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>Bringing it a closer to home (to an 18th century English-speaker), John Locke defines "substance" very much like Kant's idea of the thing-in-itself:
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>"The idea then we have, to which we give the general name substance, being nothing but the supposed, but unknown, support of those qualities we find existing, which we imagine cannot subsist sine re substante, without something to support them, we call that support substantia; which, according to the true import of the word, is, in plain English, standing under or upholding."  —John Locke
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>Descartes famously held that two distinctly different kinds of substances exist; mental and physical. The common conception of science held today says that physical reality is what's really real and minds are a special property of matter. What used to be called materialism is now called physicalism because time, space, gravity, energy, etc. are physical but have no mass or substance in the usual, material sense. 
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>All of these theories, following Plato, assume a distinction between appearance and reality. They all presume that experience is caused by an objective, pre-existing reality and that's what makes our ideas true or not. That's what the correspondence theory of truth says. There are differences between Plato's Forms, Aristotle's substance, Descartes substances, Locke's substance, Kant's things-in-themselves, and the physical objects of science, of course, but we can discern a pattern here. In each case, our concepts are supposed to represent realities as they really are. Truth is a correspondence between our mental images and the real structure of reality. This is the basic answer that was always given in Western philosophy - but then came Nietzsche and the pragmatist. This is what our radical empiricists are rejecting, shooting down and replacing with something else. Their answer is quite different. We might even say that they don't answer the question so much as they reject the assumptions behind the question. 
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>Please notice another pattern here. Plato says noumena "are the objects of the highest knowledge" and can be known only by the most accomplished philosophers. Kant says, "we cannot know these things in themselves," but we must, "be in a position at least to think them as things in themselves". Locke says substance is just a general name, "being nothing but the supposed, but unknown support of those qualities we find existing". In each case, the so-called reality behind appearances is revealed to be a supposition, a concept posited as an explanation, a hypothesis offered as the answer to a question. Without positing some external, pre-existing, reality-in-itself, this theory goes, "we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears".
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>This is the pivot point of the problem. This is the problem that gives rise to the answers supplied by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Locke, and scientific objectivity. These are all variations on the answer given by subject-object metaphysics. But Pirsig, James and others say that this is just a long history of bad solutions to a fake problem, that they're all bad answers to a bogus question. 
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>"The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing by experience will save us is an artificial [fake!] 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 [traditional empiricists like Hume]. Common-sense theories left the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a self-transcending leap [naive realism]. Transcendentalist theories left it impossible to traverse by finite knowers, and brought an Absolute in to perform the saltatory act [Kant and Hegel]. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full."
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>By contrast, radical empiricism says, "that subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he [William James] 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, as 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 [DQ] cannot be called either physical or psychical; it logically precedes this distinction."
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>The status of subjects and objects is hereby reduced from the starting points of experience to concepts derived from experience. Radical empiricists maintain that all concepts and all abstractions are derived from experience and are true and good only to the extent that they function within the ongoing process of living. But this rejection of SOM is also about solving philosophical problems.
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>Radical empiricism saves us from having to invent a fancy metaphysical theory as to the relations between subjects and objects - this is the same as the relation between phenomenal reality and the noumenal realm of things in themselves. By treating subjects and objects as "absolutely discontinuous entities", these theories are concerned with overcoming fictional gap between experience and reality. Ironically, the real "reality" in each case is actually a concept invented and posited to explain experience. "Of course it's just an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don't know that." But for Pirsig there is no gap between experience and reality. Experience IS reality, the primary empirical. Likewise James says, "experience and reality amount to the same thing". Everything you need to make the relations between knower and known intelligible is already right there in experience. That's where these concepts came from in the first place. It's a bit paradoxical, I know, but the idea that there is a reality prior to experience and which makes experience possible is just an idea. When this idea is mistaken for more than that, it become a primary reality in itself, an actual ontological starting point of reality. That is what it means to reify an idea. That is what it means to be under the spell of SOM. The following three quotes might help to break the spell. It may or may not help to click the heels of your ruby slippers three times as you read them.
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>"Phædrus felt that at the moment of pure Quality perception, or not even perception, at the moment of pure Quality, there is no subject and there is no object. There is only a sense of Quality that produces a later awareness of subjects and objects. At the moment of pure quality, subject and object are identical. This is the tat tvam asi truth of the Upanishads, but it's also reflected in modern street argot. ``Getting with it,'' ``digging it,'' ``grooving on it'' are all slang reflections of this identity. It is this identity that is the basis of craftsmanship in all the technical arts. And it is this identity that modern, dualistically conceived technology lacks." (Robert Pirsig, ZAMM pp. 290-91)
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>"‘Pure experience’ is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only newborn babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don’t appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction or of identity can be caught. Pure experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation. But the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies." (William James, "THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS", p. 40)
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>"Value, the leading edge of reality, is no longer an irrelevant offshoot of structure. Value is the predecessor of structure. It's the preintellectual awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is preselected on the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value source from which it's derived. …Reality isn't static anymore. It's not a set of ideas you have to either fight or resign yourself to. It's made up, in part, of ideas that are expected to grow as you grow, and as we all grow, century after century. With Quality as a central undefined term, reality is, in its essential nature, not static but dynamic. " (Robert Pirsig, ZAMM p. 284)
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>In the first one Pirsig says there is no subject and object in the moment of pure Quality, but that "sense of Quality" is what "produces a later awareness of subjects and objects". Similarly, in the second quote James says pure experience "is not yet any definite what" but it's "ready to be all sorts of whats". There are no such distinctions or identities in the flux of pure experience itself but It is what "furnishes the material" for our conceptual categories. It is the DQ that becomes static quality as soon as you define it, as soon as the salient parts of experience "become identified and fixed and abstracted". But the primary empirical reality we're talking about here is referred to as a "flux," as "dynamic," as "the leading edge of reality" because it is not structured. It is "the predecessor of structure". Our "structured reality" is conceptual and static and you want that to be ordered and structured but, unlike SOMers down through the ages, they do not suppose that the structure of our thought mirrors the structure of reality or corresponds to a pre-existing structure. We add this structure. These are man-made structures and they serve human purposes. DQ is the primary empirical reality and the source of all these conceptual structures but DQ is negatively defined by exactly that. It is neither conceptual nor structured. It is unpatterned and undifferentiated Quality. There are no subject and objects, no Forms, no  substances, no things-in-themselves. All of that comes later because those are ideas, products of reflections, concepts derived from experience for philosophical purposes and not primary realities of their own. 
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>"Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phædrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects." (Robert Pirsig, ZAMM p. 247)
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>"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 called either physical or psychical: it logically precedes this distinction." (Robert Pirsig, LILA ch. 29)
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