From: Case (Case@iSpots.com)
Date: Tue Sep 13 2005 - 14:14:08 BST
> Scott said:
>> My own view is that all these terms (plus intellect) are ultimately
>> undefinable because, like Quality, they each point to different shades of
>> basic reality. Everything else needs to be defined in terms of them,
>> rather
>> than attempting to define them in other terms.
>
> [Case replies]
> Scott you are cracking me up. If we strip away the exess verbage we will
> be
> left with a materialist philosophy rooted in Taoism and Zen?
>
> Scott:
> That's strange. I figured I'd be accused of idealism, not materialism.
> Anyway, I am not following your criticism here. What are you considering
> to
> be excess verbiage? Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that we can do
> without the terms Platt mentioned. I just don't think we can define them,
> much like set theory in mathematics gets along swimmingly without defining
> what a set is. In mathematics this is done by putting forth axioms that
> place restrictions on how the word 'set' is to be used. Philosophy can't
> be
> that precise, but I think it works in roughly the same way.
>
> And I'm all for a philosophy rooted in mysticism, but there are various
> ways
> that can be done (see my last post in the DEsRIP thread to Mark M with the
> Magliola quote for more on this).
[Case replies]
Sorry Scott I was not trying to be critical I was being 100% facetious. But
I think it is facetiousness ground in misunderstanding. So here is the "He
said"/"He said":
Platt listed these terms: "experience, awareness, sensation, perception,
feeling, consciousness, etc. not exclusively of course" and you added
intellect. He said that if we could reach consensus on their meaning maybe
we could stop bickering. I suggested agreement on Platt's definition of
experience so we could move on the defining Value. I think even for an
undefined term it is misused more than it deserves to be. I also suggested,
and here my reference was not very clear, that we just throw out the rest of
those terms which would leave us with MoQ: a materialist philosophy grounded
in Zen.
When you responded with "And so I disagree with Case that they should be
thrown out. Philosophy just is fighting over the usage of these and other
terms. So to want to throw them out just is putting forward a materialist
philosophy." You reminded me of Adams' sages and I thought you were kidding.
At any rate all of those terms including intellect strike me as belonging in
the domain of psychology. Psychology as a discipline began to move forward
in my view precisely went to threw them out. Instead of asking "What is this
thing thinking about?" they asked "What is it doing". It was the move away
from idealism,-essentialism-Platonism and toward nominialism-materialism
that proved fruitful. This is true in other areas as well, chemistry and
astronomy come to mind. Of course, psychology never really threw them out
but it is interesting to look at how much progress was made in their
absence. I am still new here so I do appreciate being pointed back to past
threads, I have trouble keeping up the stream of new ones everyday and my
attempts to look through past ones are hampered by a total lack of context.
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