From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 23 2003 - 00:41:34 BST
Sam,
Sam said:
I hope you're not going to go away. I greatly appreciate your input and creative thinking. But I know that banging your head against DMB's intellectual walls can lead to despair; the only tonic is to take a break from it and recover some ironic detachment. I'm sure you've got the resources to do that.
Matt:
Nah, I never intended to go away. I always threaten that I will, and then I pout for all of 5 seconds before being distracted from my exile by a post. I appreciate you and Ian saying I should buck up, 'cuz you guys are right. I didn't even pretend this time I was leaving. I just said I wasn't going to dialogue with a few certain people.
Sam said:
You'll have to unpick the reference to Sellars for me, I'm unfamiliar with him/her. My point is really the non-idealist one, that reality as a whole doesn't depend upon what we think about it. If value is the fundamental framework of the MoQ, ie that all of the inorganic level, to begin with, is structured from value, then our opinions don't play a part in it. I'm open to the idea that our opinions (ie value judgements in the sense you're using) structure our reality at the higher levels, but I don't think we can identify them in places other than the third/fourth levels.
Matt:
Wilfrid Sellars (a male professor formerly of the Univesity of Pittsburgh) developed psychological nominalism partly in response to logical postivists' emotivism in ethics. What it means is that reality, as a whole, _does_ depend upon what we think about it. What it means is that we cannot pull the referant off of the refered, the signifer off of the signified, the subject off of the object, the human off of the inhuman. Reality is the way it is partly because of the way we talk about it. The partly is important, though, because this isn't to say that a tree will move out of the way if you speak about it differently, as some opponents of Sellars and post-modernism (which has the same point) caricaturize it. Words aren't magic, they are coping tools. The environment will still do what it does, but our words help us cope with the stuff that nature keeps throwing at us. The point of Sellars is that we cannot have knowledge of nature without talking about it, so when we c
ope with nature by talking physics, we cannot pull the "nucleous" off of the phenomena "nucleous" refers to. (Does that make sense enough?)
You say, "If value is the fundamental framework of the MoQ, ie that all of the inorganic level, to begin with, is structured from value, then our opinions don't play a part in it. I'm open to the idea that our opinions (ie value judgements in the sense you're using) structure our reality at the higher levels, but I don't think we can identify them in places other than the third/fourth levels," but I think Pirsig agrees with me when he says, "It is important for an understanding of the MOQ to see that although "common sense" dictates that inorganic nature came first, actually "common sense" which is a set of ideas, has to come first. This "common sense" is arrived at through a huge web of socially approved evaluations of various alternatives. The key term here is "evaluation," i.e., quality decisions. The fundamental reality is not the common sense or the objects and laws approved of by common sense but the approval itself and the quality that leads to it." Now, Pirsig sound
s like an idealist here, but I think it is easy to jettison the idealist talk and leave the intersubjective, psychological nominalism parts.
Sam said:
I'm not sure I would want to avoid the 'temptation to transcendence' of course, but perhaps we could have a little dialogue on that to clarify what I mean. My thoughts could do with a little untangling there.
Matt:
Its true, I dislike the word "transcendence" because I think its misleading at most times. Not at all times, though. The temptation I mean is the temptation to think that we can out distance or drain the realm of possibility. This is what Kant wanted to do. He wanted to draw a border around the realm of possibility and clearly mark what was possible and not possible. The pragmatist doesn't think we can do this.
The reason I said this in the context of a discussion of psychological nominalism and being able to pull off the human from the inhuman, is that realists, those who think they can make the correspondence theory of truth do something, who think that they can pull the human off of the inhuman, would like to end discussion about rocks. They think there is an essence to rocks that, once we correspond to it, will end the discussion about them. This is another way of saying that the essence of a rock curbs the possibilities of a rock, demarcates the borders of what we can say about rocks. Pragmatists don't know how we would ever know a border that cannot be pushed if we saw it. This type of essentialism in rocks also goes for things like ethics and aesthetics: pragmatists don't want to draw borders around these things, but the realist wants to say that, once we discover the essence of Good, we can stop discussing it and simply do moral algebra for solving moral dillemmas.
One of the senses of "transcendence" that I don't have much of a problem with is the sense of "moving beyond our former selves", where "self" can mean individual or group, like a nation. Moving beyond means becoming better people, a better nation. In this case, transcendence doesn't refer to a desire to achieve an objective standpoint, the God's-eye view that can see the entire realm of possibility and choose the best one. It simply refers to a very contingent, historical event of self-overcoming.
Matt
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