[MD] Static patterns are ever-changing?!? i

[David Morey]

Hi DMB

DMB: It's been a while, but I have addressed this question (about pre-conceptual experience) many, many times. No matter how hard I try, the answers never satisfy and the question comes back around again. 

DM: Well perhaps the reasonable explanation for this lack of progress is that you are either wrong or not very good at explaining yourself. I have no problem with the primacy of the flux and change,  this is the sea,  the dominant quality of experience,  I only think we need to be able to explain how it is possible for concepts to find some stability or regularity in experience,  small islands though these may be,  I call these experiences pre-conceptual patterns but the name is not important. I read James' Radical Empiricism a couple of years ago,  I would say he uses the word percept instead,  but he also talks a lot about things,  objects and sensations and how he perceives his pen,  and how his hat is a real idea when it is an absent hat,  if I talked like that round here the SOM flag waving brigade would have a frenzy, James takes s pretty good look in that book at realism and what sense it had without essentialism or Kantianism,  he seems closer to me than you,  go and read the next paragraph after the one you quote below,  in fact read the whole book again,  what does James mean by percept exactly? Problem I have is percept is neither found in SQ or DQ according to you,  is James in error?


Note James says shot through AS IF below,  so percepts are not shot through with concepts that is only an analogy,  what they are shot through with is pre-conceptual patterns,  or proto-patterns,  or some quality that allows particulars to stand out from the flux,  so that some bubble,  some wave,  some shadow or shape emerges and can be valued can be good or bad,  something to desire or flee. I cannot see what case there is for pretending that experience is restricted to flux or concept,  radical empiricism is meant to be open to all of experience not reducing it to two categories,  odd kind of pluralism that,  sort of dogmatism MOQ was designed to combat not encourage. Man up and admit that you need to think again.






"Only new-born 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 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 ofidentity, 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 - Essays in Radical Empiricism.