From: Paul Turner (paul@turnerbc.co.uk)
Date: Tue Jun 14 2005 - 16:55:30 BST
Scott,
--- (I've changed the subject line, was Barfield or Garfield?, since the
--- only
--- Garfield's I am aware of are an ex-US President, and a comic strip cat.
--- If
--- you had some other meaningful allusion, let me know.)
Paul: Not meaningful, just a (clearly misguided) attempt at light-hearted
relief. You said that Barfield succeeded in putting a bell on the "cat,"
i.e. SOM. I said he didn't, implying that maybe he is also a "cat," i.e.
still espousing SOM. Garfield is a cat...
Jokes just aren't as funny when you have to explain them.
--- Scott:
--- Do you deny that there is a difference between what we perceive with our
--- senses and what we know about the inorganic universe? The former is a
--- matter
--- of wind in our face, trees, and rainbows, while the latter is a matter
--- of
--- moving air molecules and photons. Barfield is only emphasizing that
--- naive
--- realism doesn't work, yet we presuppose it when we talk about anything
--- other
--- than physics, e.g., in thinking about evolution.
Paul: Hang on, he explicitly states that "particles" refers to a neutral
objective reality which he defines as "reality insofar as it is independent
of our awareness." Add to this the notion of a subjective consciousness
which is only aware of its own creations and I think we can see some
whiskers...
Sorry, I mean -- I think we have evidence of a thesis which maintains some
subject vs object distinctions.
It is not Kantian, in
--- that
--- Barfield argues that we do in fact know things about what is "behind"
--- the
--- sense experiences.
Paul: But he is still talking about the unrepresented reality behind the
appearances of collective representation, right?
That knowledge is a matter of concepts, and it is
--- only
--- the modernist nominalist bias that leads to Kant. By nominalism, I mean
--- the
--- assumption that the conceptual universe is something that developed --
--- somehow -- in human beings only.
Paul: That's not nominalism, is it? Doesn't that mean that anyone that
thinks that only humans speak and write in propositions is nominalist?
--- It should be obvious that nominalism
--- and
--- SOM are mutually dependent.
Paul: Yes, but not so sure about your definition. I don't think that
believing that only humans speak and write in propositions is tying one down
to SOM.
This assumption arose from *forgetting* that
--- what we now call "nature" is a system of representations, a system that
--- changes as consciousness evolves.
Paul: This talk of "representation" is surely tying Barfield to SOM. I
also think Barfield's wholesale acceptance of the primacy of consciousness
(i.e. idealism ) is suspect.
Regards
Paul
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