From: david buchanan (dmbuchanan@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Nov 20 2005 - 17:37:06 GMT
Matt and all:
This is the first half...
Matt said to dmb:
I'm not surprised by your reaction, but I just don't think you understand
what I'm saying. Which is fine, my fault, I just don't know how else to
catch you up to speed.
dmb says:
Actually, I think this post, your "Language, SOM, and the MoQ" post and my
own reading on the side have gone pretty far toward getting me "up to
speed". When you slow down and spell things out, as you've tried to do here,
is very helpful. Your lastest offerings have confirmed my hunch that
applying your Rortarian critiqe of the MOQ is wildly inappropriate and
unworkable. Its also pretty clear that your approach really does entail
constantly changing the subject away from mysticism and otherwise excluding
DQ from from the playing field. Maybe you did not intend to make these
confessions, but there it is.
Matt said to dmb:
...The problem you have yet to face is that once it makes itself complete,
you can't complain that the vocabulary in question "leaves something out."
It doesn't. It explains it, but it does it in its own terms. You may not
like those terms. Perfectly fair. Those terms may not allow you to do
something you'd like to do. Again, perfectly fair. But you can't say it
doesn't account for them because the only way to say that was if you could
compare vocabularies to how things, experience or reality or whatever, were
in and of themselves. Only if you had a standpoint outside of any particular
vocabulary to which you could use to determine each particular vocabulary's
adequacy to experience or reality. Otherwise, you're simply insisting on
your particular vocabulary to describe a given thing, that the other
vocabulary "doesn't get it." That's fine, too. A neurological vocabulary
will never help with Eastern enlightenment. Fine. The only way to "get"
Eastern enlightenment is to use something like a mystic's vocabulary. That
makes perfect sense to me. But that doesn't mean that the neurological
vocabulary is inadequate. It just means it won't help you for that purpose.
dmb says:
If the neurological vocabulary can't get at enlightenment experience and
won't help in describing it, then why can't we say it is inadequate? I'd say
"inadequate" is a perfectly adequate description of something that can't do
the job, wouldn't you? But that is a relatively minor point compared with
your larger point about "adequacy". This is where I think you are
inappropriately applying your critique of representationalism to the MOQ and
just about everything I try to say about it...
You say "the only way to" assert one description over another is to "compare
vocabularies to how things, experience or reality or whatever, were in and
of themselves."
You say that asserting one description over another is possible "only if you
had a standpoint outside of any particular vocabulary to which you could use
to determine each particular vocabulary's adequacy to experience or
reality."
As I understand it, here you are denying the possibility of an objective
standard, that we have access to reality "in and of" itself. But I'm not
making any such claims about the exclusive, objective truth of my assertions
about anything and the MOQ, as everyone knows, rejects this very thing. We
all agree that rejecting SOM is rejecting representaltionalims, right? I
mean, the idea of subjects having correct knowledge about the objective
world is the representational view and the whole point of the MOQ is to
overturn that, right? I think we agree on this much and the problem arises
during the next step, in what we take to be the consequences of that
rejection, the point and purpose of that rejection.
Does rejecting the representational theory of truth mean that we can have no
truth at all? Does the lack of an absolute certainty really mean it all
just come down to rival vocabularies? Does the rejection of SOM mean the
death of philosophy, where we can only have an ironic metaphysics? These are
the conclusions you seem to draw from the rejection of the mirror-of-nature
theory of truth, but I don't. And naturally I think Pirsig takes things in a
different direction too.
Anyway, here another example of you treating my statements as if I were
making them from an SOM perspective, from within the representational theory
of truth...
DMB had said:
Surely anyone can see the difference between an unknowable realm that can
never be experienced directly and an experience that can't be captured in
words? The first can never be known directly while the second can only be
known directly.
Matt replied:
See, this is the type of thing I'm trying to avoid. I'm not avoiding the
experience, though I am trying to avoid the theoretical imputation that it
_can't_ be captured in words. Afterall, how do you know that? Wouldn't
that be running together your carefully distinguished inexpressibility with
noumenal ineffability? ...I'm trying to avoid the idea that _words_ are in
the business of _capturing_. I think that's a remenant of the
representationalism that you say Pirsig eschews fully. I don't know yet....
dmb says:
You've focused on the word "capture" to construe my comments as SOMish. That
is not only one of the weakest and thinnest of arguments, it is an argument
that fails to acknowledge the actual content of my remarks. I was making a
distinction between intellectual abstractions about realities beyond our
experience on the one hand and actual experience on the other. I'm not
making any claims about getting beyond such limits to reach the absolute
truth, I'm saying there is no reality beyond experience. There is no realm
of things in themselves. Reality is experience and experience is reality in
the MOQ, right? You might recall that this whole thing began with my making
a distinction between categories of experience, not between experience and
reality. So I think its just a cheap trick to focus on the word "capture".
It only evades the point, which is that you're confusing Pirsig's DQ with a
Kantian realm of things-in-themselves. You keep glossing over this point as
if I haven't been making it. You keep unmaking the distinction with phrases
like, "things, experience or reality or whatever, were in and of
themselves." And in the next one you use the phrase, "experience or reality"
in that same dismissive way, which then leads you to the Rortarian critique
and off the topic once again...
Matt continued:
You, me, and Paul all think that thinking of language as trying to represent
or capture experience or reality is a bad idea, but I'm not sure if Pirsig
fully got himself out from under that rock. ...because I see so many people
like yourself draw out implications from Pirsig, implications that don't
look wrong, stuff that has textual support, and these implications move in
the direction of my worst philosophical fears, that of essentiatlism and
representationalism, rather than towards my highest philosophical hopes,
pragmatism.
dmb says:
When we add this constant, and seemingly deliberate, misreading to the
weakness of assertions like "these implications move in the direction of"
and "the sentiment is there" - well, it doesn't add up to much if you ask
me. But in the name of conversational progress, let me focus on the whole
sentence to make my point. You said that we "all think that thinking of
language as trying to represent or capture experience or reality is a bad
idea, but I'm not sure if Pirsig fully got himself out from under that
rock." As I understand it, the MOQ is a form of radical empiricism. In the
MOQ, experience is the ultimate authority and defines the limits of reality.
That's what makes the Kantian noumenal realm disappear. If it is not
experienced, it does not exist. It exists as an abstract idea, but its just
one of those empty categories, a theory with no basis in experience. Of
course the MOQ rejects the representational or correspondance theory of
truth, but it certainly does NOT assert any such epistemological gap between
experience and language. Again, we are just talking about different kinds of
experience, different levels of experience. Your suggestion that the MOQ is
leaning toward representationalism or essentialism, as I understand these
things, would be like suggesting that Jackson Pollack leans toward
representationalism. It only makes me wonder how long its been since you've
read Pirsig's books or seen Pollack's paintings. This little phrase,
"experience or reality" wouldn't be much to complain about if you weren't
also quite explicit about confusing that unknowable Kantian realm with a
category of experience....
Matt continued:
...So the idea behind my avoidance plan for representationalism is that we
not disjoin knowing from knowledge, knowing from linguistic use, but that we
also stop thinking of language as trying to capture anything. It was only
when we thought of language as trying to capture adequately bits of reality
or experience (the Kantian Thing-in-Itself, experience or reality as it is
aside from our descriptions of it) and these bits as being more or less
capturable (rocks more so, mystical experiences less so) that we catch
ourselves in problems.
dmb says:
See, you've taken a leap that I'm not willing to make. Its one thing to
realize that our words don't simply reflect a pregiven reality. Its quite
another to say that language can't "capture anything" or that language
shouldn't or can't agree with experience. Even the mystical experience. The
idea here is simply that this experience is intellectually unknowable and
beyond intellectual definitions. But we can describe it. We can talk about
what it is NOT. And if you recall, this thread began with an assertion about
the kind of language that is and is not good for such descriptions.
You keep responding with something like, "the experience is ineffable. That
means we can't talk about it. And since truth is determined within language
practices, the ineffable is off the table."
But from my MOQ perspective, that's just a re-assertion of the problem
Pirsig set out to tackle in the first place. The problem is a limited
rationality with exclusive standards of intellectual truth. What you've
proposed is limited and exclusive in a way that's differs from SOM's
objectivity, but in terms of its blindness to mysticism there is no
difference. It unsolves the problem.
And besides that, you keep exaggerating the nature of "ineffability" as if
ineffable experiences could never be described or expressed in any way, as
if there weren't already ten thousand names for it, as if there were no
myths or religions that express it. To say that this experience can't be
captured in words is just a way of saying that mystical experience shouldn't
be confused with or reduced to intellectual concepts or fixed definitions,
with the "things" of sensory experience. To say that this experience is
ineffable is just a way of saying that this is a category of experience that
can't be judged in those terms or held to those standards, that it has to be
known on its own terms, so to speak. To say this experience is ineffable is
to say it is intellectually unknowable, which is like saying you can't know
shakesphere's plays by measuring their weight and volume. You may recall
that I have already mentioned epistemological pluralism several (million)
times in this thread.
Thanks.
dmb
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