as regards the notion that perception is wholly determined by physiological
issues, as in "you can't help seeing 'red' or green:
one in five women have an extra red receptor that men never have.
most emphatically, perception is not to be confused with sensation - that
way lies behaviorism, and a mechanistic view of human life, which is
definitely insufficient (i.e. -overly simplistic) in explaining how we know
the world about us. The point is that empiricism is, in some ways remarkably
related to behaviorism. I believe that empiricism is a way of trying to
limit the complexity of the argument, by resorting to "Ockhams razor"
(entities may not be multiplied or proposed unnecessarily), and appealing to
the notion of 'fundamental' things we can say about the world' - and
treating them as absolute, indivisible. ("atoms of obviousness and
intelligibility" - Descartes). whilst i'm all for the notion of using the
degree of complexity appropriate to the task in hand (and no more so), I
still have significant reservations about expecting universal agreement on
the nature of 'objecthood' for example. we tend to reasonably agree about
objects - they are 'topologically enclosed';....... unless you smell them,
hear them, and so on - in fact, many ways of apprehending information about
objects don't actually rely on, or even reveal this basic 'property' of
objects - the concept is essentially visual-sensation-derived. now I don't
have a problem with the idea that we all (as a species) evolved with visual
sensation as a fundamental part of our physiological apparatus (and this
applies to the visually impaired among us in that they of course share an
evolutionary commonality), indeed, research into mitochondrial DNA has
strongly suggested that we are all related to just a few thousand common
ancestors, and not too far back in our history. but my question is: how can
this most fundamental property of 'objects' actually inhere in the object
alone, when it is perfetly feasible to postulate a species (such as a mole,
earthworm, deep-sea creature, and so on) that cannot aprehend this
information. my point is, that the definition we use is wholly tied to our
viewpoint, hence empiricism in its standard form is undermined. [In the same
way, would we ever have evolved a notion of euclidean geometry, if we had
not the visual sensation].
In proposing a 'radical empiricism', is Pirsig actually proposing something
which is not empiricism at all? - or has he stripped empiricism of all its
distinguishing features, save the notion of "Quality"?
incidentally, in developmental psychology studies, the concept of objects
(or things) does actually develop earlier than the concepts of various
behaviours of such objects (trajectories, caused movements, self motivated
movement, etc)
just musings,
ppl
Peter Lennox
Hardwick House
tel: (0114) 2661509
e-mail: peter@lennox01.freeserve.co.uk
or:- ppl100@york.ac.uk
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