RE: MD Empiricism

From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri Nov 19 2004 - 03:22:00 GMT

  • Next message: Scott Roberts: "RE: MD Empiricism"

    Simon,

    > >[Scott:] Please tell me how sense experience verifies that no ratio of
    > >integers is the square root of 2.
    >
    > The answer is that none of the answers that you can come up with to that
    > mathematical question have quality. You are looking for an answer that
    > fulfils a harmony, you know when you have found that harmony because you
    > sense it, even before you have fully committed the answer to mathematical
    > expression.

    Huh? There is a perfectly good answer, namely its proof, still taught to
    mathematics students 2500 years after it was first realized. The point is
    that the proof does not depend on sense experience.

    [Scott prev} > Nor
    > >is it phenomenal. The point of the MOQ is that value precedes the
    > >phenomenal/noumenal distinction.
    >
    [SM}> From the Copleston paper on Anthony McWatt's website:
    >
    > Copleston: For the empiricists who embraced phenomenalism tended to
    reduce
    > both physical objects and minds to impressions or sensations, and then to
    > reconstruct them with the aid of the principle of the association of
    ideas.
    > They implied that, basically, we know only phenomena, in the sense of
    > impressions, and that, if there are metaphenomenal realities, we cannot
    know
    > them.
    >
    > Pirsig: This is what the MOQ states. Right away it diverges from the
    > absolute idealism that follows. Quality is a phenomenal reality.

    I stand corrected, that is, I see that Pirsig treats value as phenomenal.
    So now my question is: what is not phenomenal? What I am getting at is that
    what SOM divided, Pirsig is reuniting by ignoring one side of the division,
    as materialists do, by relabelling, rather than finding common ground.
    Thus, he extends empirical to cover what used to be rational *as distinct
    from* empirical, and objective to what used to be subjective. Of course,
    the MOQ was supposed to go behind these distinctions, but the more I look
    the less I see that it has.

    - Scott

    >
    > SM
    >
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