From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Sun Oct 12 2003 - 17:32:48 BST
Hi
I'm OK with that stuff Matt. What I am trying to provoke is a discussion
of this strange ability of beings to differentiate between aspects of their
experience such as the tiger's food / non-food distinction. Or the moth's
mate / non-mate distinction. This implies the kind of meaning-like treatment
of perceived aspects of their experience that we usually only associate
with language and Derrida's difference. I am starting to think that I am
unable
to draw a line between the way I handle symbols and the way I handle
so-called
perceived objects. There are no perceived objects (more or less alienated in
the
directionn of the full SOM divide) without cutting up reality, and that
seems to be the
case with or without the use of what we would usually refer to as a
language. What was
our 'experience of a tree' before the word tree? If we used to live in them,
we were
certainly able to pick them out and isolate them in the environment (our
whole experience).
This ability to identify and differentiate is, I suggest, an entirely
non-verbal language, we
can suggest beyond this something that causes these visual-memes, but we
cannot move beyond them,
although we might 'see' a whole new world if a eskimo explained to us the
two hundred different types
of snow that they experience. I suggest that linguistic-language is only an
extension of the visual-language
of our experience, its main advantage being that it enables a move to
greater abstraction, and this is all
about enabling us to understand the richness of what is possible, and from
there to the manipulation of the
future, or technology as we now call it.
Does this make any sense?
regards
David M
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2003 8:51 PM
Subject: Re: MD Intellectual level - New letter from Pirsig
> David,
>
> You tagged me the other day about language. You said, "Is all experience
a form of language? (Matt what d'ya think?)
> Does language speak Man?"
>
> Now, I haven't been following much of any of the conversations lately, for
reasons that will become apparent in an hour or so. So, I simply comment on
the language bit and what pragmatists think about that.
>
> "Is all experience a form of language?" That's a loaded question. First,
I'm not sure what to make of "a form of language." If you had just asked me
if all experience was linguistic, I would have a much easier time answering.
So, I'm going to pretend you did. Pragmatists are partial to the
Heideggerianism "language speaks Man", so in one sense, yes. And I think
Pirsig shows the signs of agreeing with it when he says in ZMM (somewhere,
towards the back I think) that man didn't create religion, religion created
man.
>
> When a person says that all experience is linguistic, they are agreeing
with Wilfrid Sellars' who said that "all awareness is a linguistic affair",
what Sellars' called his psychological nominalism and Rorty called at one
time epistemological behaviorism. What psychological nominalism means is
that all of our knowledge is linguistic knowledge, it is internal to
language. We do not have what Russell called "knowledge by acquaintence",
knowledge of "raw feels", i.e. what Pirsig calls "the pre-intellectual
cutting edge of experience". We don't have _knowledge_ of this cutting
edge, though we are certainly effected by it. The pragmatist line is that
to know something is to talk about. Knowledge is not what the mystics are
after.
>
> Now, we are brought back to this issue of experience, though. Don't we
have non-linguistic experience? Sure, all the time. The distinction the
pragmatists want to make, following Davidson, is a seperation of "causes"
and "reasons". Our experiences cause us to have certain beliefs, like "I
see a tree." But non-linguistic experience does not give us reasons for
belief. Knowledge is our set of beliefs that we call true, like "trees
create oxygen" and "Shakespeare was a genius". Knowledge is justified
belief. The justificatory process is a linguistic process in which you give
_reasons_ for your belief. If you say "there's a tree outside" and person
asks "how do you know?" you can reply "I saw it." "I saw it" is short-hand
for "the world caused me to have this belief, 'There is a tree outside.'"
It did not give you a reason to think it, it caused you to think it.
Showing the person the tree, rather than telling him "I saw it", isn't a
reason either. It is simply givi
> ng him the same experience you had that caused you to have the belief.
>
> The other objection to Sellars' formulation is that can't we say that
babies and other higher animals have knowledge, like knowledge of when they
are hungry and such. This is where Sellars distinguishes between
"awareness-as-discriminative-behavior" and "awareness-as-knowledge". The
baby discriminates between patterns such as non-hunger and hunger and tiger
between food (humans) and non-food (trees). (Too bad for Roy that the tiger
forgot to make that discrimination.) The tiger and the baby don't have
reasons to believe these things (if we ascribe them beliefs), they are
caused to believe them.
>
> Matt
>
>
>
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