ELEPHANT TO DIANA ON STRUAN AND GLIBERT RYLE:
I'd like to try and keep this thread warm in case Struan wants to get back
to it with his explanation of what 'metaphysics' means. Diana, because you
brought him up I'm going to lecture a bit on Ryle, but you say several
things that seem intelligent to me...
DIANA:
> *Who exactly does hold a purely SOM position?*
>
> "A subject-object dichotomy is acknowledged in most Western traditions, but
> emphasised especially in Continental philosophy, beginning with Kant, and
> carrying through idealist thought in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and
> Schopenhauer. It is also prominent in internationalist philosophy, in the
> empirical psychology of Bretano, the object theory of Meinong, Ernst Mally,
> and Twardowski, and the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl."
>
> So why did Galen Strawson say that it was a straw man? I think probably
> because in spite of the fact that the SOM is an identifiable trend, it's
> also something that has been found flawed in the past and that today's
> academics know very well to be problematic. The effect of consciousness in
> quantum physics is something that can hardly be ignored for example.
> Strawson is a Oxford metaphysician, so it's a pretty good bet that he's
> read the work of Gilbert Ryle who was also an Oxford metaphysician. Ryle
> invented the "ghost in the machine" concept that has become a standard
> refutation of the mind-matter split. Ryle's refutation has been followed by
> others, so I suppose to Strawson, Pirsig's rejection of the SOM is
> redundant - it's something we already know.
ELEPHANT:
That's probably OK as an exegesis of where Struan is (an alternative to the
wittgensteinian hypothesis I put forward) - sure, he'd think this has
already been done, that SOM has already been defeated. But I want to point
out that what Ryle replaces the SOM with is nothing like what Prisig
recommends. More to the point, I will also argue that, properly understood,
Ryle is an oldfashioned (victorian) SOMist of the worst kind, perhaps the
worst of the lot.
You see, the reason Ryle doesn't think he is a dualist is that he thinks he
has got rid of the Subject as a special metaphysical category: he thinks he
can show that all talk about the subject can be cashed out into talk about
objects: talk about "behaviour". Ryle is the world's formost example of a
Behaviourist, and this is an ism which it is useful to know about it you are
relating MOQ to modern academic philosophy. Now, Ryle treats the
'behaviour' concept as a magic 'one size fits all' panacea to all the
philosophical problems you can think of: hence the 'ism' part. What does
the word 'monarchy' mean? Well, look at people's behaviour: there's your
answer. That seems sensible and innocent enough, and even has a pragmatic
flavour to it, concentrating on the "difference" the word makes. Except
that for James and Prisig, the important difference that something makes is
made in the value-suffused 'stream of consciousness', while for Ryle it is
precisely the value and the stream of consciousness which are supposed to be
'Ghosts in the Machine', which Ryle wants us to see as Phantasms, in
contrast to the 'behaviour' which Ryle thinks of as Real. Ryle doesn't just
treat 'self' as an illusion (we could all agree, to some extent, there), he
treats the flux of immediate experience as an illusion (and that's a much
more serious accusation). It is as if, from being a SOM dualist, Ryle
decided to move forward to monism by completely loping off the Subject part
(the branch we are all sitting on, in my veiw).
Nothing exists, for Ryle, unless it is Data: discrete scientifically
observable facts. Behaviour, he thinks, is this kind of Data, hence his
preferance fo it. Ryle uses behaviour as a sort of bypass to get all round
the old 'subject' territory without going through the metaphysical town
center. So: character traits can exist, but only in terms of observed
behaviour (this creates old fashioned problems along the lines of: X killed
Y at time T plus 1, but X hadn't murdered Y at time T, therefore at time T X
wasn't a murderer, but if X wasn't a murderer at time T, how could X have
killed Y at time T plus 1?). And for Ryle, meaning can exist, but only in
terms of observed behaviour (so the silent attempt to make sense of the
internal flow of experience is 'proved' not to exist, and language suddenly
becomes magically public without ever having made a connection with the
private realm). Motives can exist, but only in terms of observed behaviour
(so, we have the motives we have becuase of what we do, and not the history
of behaviour we have because of our motives). Likewise, Value can be said
to exist, but only in terms of observed behaviour (which is, again, bizarre,
because it amounts to saying that things are only valueable because we
choose them, and never choosen because they are valuable). Value, Motives,
Meaning, Character: all these have no substantial existence, and are merely
convenient names for certain patterns of behaviour - such is Behaviourism.
Now, to Gilbert Ryle this collection of total absurdities constituted a
monism which is an 'improvement' over the dualism of Subject-Object, doing
away completely with the subject he regarded as a "ghost" in favour of
something purely mechanical, whose workings were all exposed to veiw. But I
don't think Prisigians could agree with him.
The nearest parrallel between Ryle and something discussed in Lila is with
the Victorian Anthropologists, who thought it might be possible to
"objectively" ascertain a soceity's values through observation of scientific
facts about social "behaviour". This is the position which, quite rightly,
originally inspires Phaedrus' contempt and sets him to thinking harder about
the Indians, and on the road to ZMM.
A further point. Ryle, of course, did not deny that there was such a thing
as a Subject, he only denied that Subjects were a seperate metaphysical
category. That is to say, for him, subjects can exist, but only (surprise
surprise) in terms of observed behaviour (as a name for a pattern of
behaviour). The wonderful thing about this neat manoveur is that because
behaviour is an observable object or spatio-temporal pattern of objects, it
makes the Subject into a variety of Object, so that now there are only
Objects and their relations in the universe. So, yes, Ryle departs from
SOM. But the important point is that the *direction* in which he departs
from SOM is the precise opposite of the direction Prisig departs from SOM.
Prisig thinks that there are more, and more fundamental, types of being than
just 'Subject' and 'Object'. Ryle, on the other hand thinks that there are
****less**** kinds of being, and that SOM already contains the only and most
fundamental being one could ever need! Viz: the object.
Finally, in the sense which is relevant to Prisig, Ryle is an archetypal
SOMist. Because what Prisig finds objectionable, and characteristic, about
SOM, is that existence is only ascribed to particular or discrete things,
and not to value, or to the dynamic aesthetic continuum which is the basic
stuff of our everyday lives. This is the sin which Ryle commits with Bells
on. So long as the Subject remained as a separate metaphysical category
from objects, there was one possible remaining metaphysical hidding place,
even in SOM, for all the private, unscientific, value suffused undata one
can think of. Indeed, it was just this kind of undata that some people were
worried about when they condemned certain experiences and observations as
"subjective". But with the Subject successfully erased and turned into just
another object (behaviour), that last hidding place is gone. Ryle,
therefore, is a far more deadly SOMist than the SOMists ever were!
So, Diana, if Struan is a Ryle follower, ***God Help Him!****.
As to Strawson: I'm fairly sure he wasn't a behaviorist... so his reaction
to Prisig is still a slight mystery. I've said something about the envy
that can gnaw at an academic's heart when someone outside the union get's
public approval (after all, Strawson might think, it is we, the stipendury
philosophologists who are the state and peer appointed guardians of truth:
we must not be contradicted!). That's my best guess at the mo. Oh, and
maybe he was a SOMer too: that would explain his loud insistence that no
such thing exists (m'thinkf the lady doth proteft too much, m'lord).
As to todays academics knowing very well that SOM is problematic: well,
hell, that's part of the attraction for a lot of them. Where would they be
without a problem to discuss? How could a theory be a substantial theory if
it didn't have substantial holes to patch up? Occasionally I get the
impression that people have a similar attachment to the MOQ evolutionary
levels ...
ttfn
Pzeph
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