From: SQUONKSTAIL@aol.com
Date: Thu Mar 20 2003 - 19:48:27 GMT
Hello Matt EE, you forgot to respond to my points in the following post but
here is a reminder of what you wrote. Have been trying to get these through
but i think its all been too long?
You don't have to mind you!
Matt:
1. They think that having intuition be the gatekeeper of knowledge, that you
know things about the world by being in touch with it, raises needless
stumbling blocks like
forcing you to answer the skeptic ("how do you know your intuition is
right?").
2. As an alternative, Davidson and Rorty suggest that we think of
knowledge as something internal to beliefs. We have knowledge of our
beliefs, not of the world. Some of our beliefs are about the world, but
this only means that we have knowledge of our beliefs about the world. By
doing this, pragmatists can say that the world causes us to have certain
beliefs, which makes us "always and everywhere in touch with the world,"
without having to say that this cause is a reason for us to have this
belief.
3. The intuitionist wants to say that the world gives us reasons to
have particular beliefs about the world. The Rortyan pragmatist wants to
say that the world causes us to have particular beliefs and that reasons,
like knowledge, are internal to beliefs. Reasons are using one belief to
justify another belief. To have the world provide us with reasons and
knowledge is to have the skeptic always hounding your every step.
4. So, when I follow Davidson in saying that metaphors cause us to have
beliefs, I'm saying that these indecipherable sounds behave just like tree
branches on us. They can only cause us to have certain beliefs. They have
no logic, because logic is internal to beliefs. It is only after we
literalize a metaphor that it can become a reason for a belief because the
dead metaphor has come to express a meaning, it has come to refer to other
beliefs coherently.
5. The way I'm using essence is in a Lockean kind of way. Locke conceived of
objects as having an essential nature. It was up to us to discover what
this essence was. A discovered essence would basically be something like a
True Definition. This is why I think of Quality as being an anti-essence:
it's undefined. Quality can have no definition, so how can it have an
essence?
6. After taking the "Quality is Reality" metaphor seriously, we get
the picture that we shouldn't be looking for essences at all. Definitions
become internal to our beliefs, not as connectors to the world. In fact,
"Quality is undefined" is a metaphor, too. We can define the word
Quality. Words were meant to be defined. So, by saying that a particular
word is defined as "undefined" we are being completely and utterly
incoherent against the backdrop of our other beliefs.
7. "Quality is undefined" doesn't give us an cognitive meaning, it simply
causes us to
have beliefs like "Quality is Reality."
Matt
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