From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Tue Sep 23 2003 - 20:44:52 BST
Hi Matt
Enjoyed this post, this is the sort of thing I
think is very worthwhile developing in post-modernism.
I like the :'drain the realm of possibility', where does that
expression come from, one of your own?
Reminds me of Nietzsche's point that thinkers are
people who try to simplify the real. The real is, of course,
far more open than philosophers like to think. I remember
going to a lecture at university where the guy was suggesting
there was no such thing as free-will, I was compelled to leave! Ha ha.
David M
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 12:41 AM
Subject: Re: MD The Not-So-Simpleminds at play
> 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
>
>
>
> MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
> Mail Archives:
> Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
> Nov '02 Onward -
http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
> MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
>
> To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
> http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
>
>
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Sep 23 2003 - 20:43:50 BST