From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Nov 24 2003 - 02:50:12 GMT
Bo,
Matt said:
The pragmatist point is, yes, that it is a truism that opinions emanate from human beings. The pipe dream of SOM is that Reality will have opinions of its own so that it will be able to tell us when we are right, and that we don't have just opinions, but absolutely certain knowledge. Pragmatists want simply to take the truism and stop analogizing reality to people.
Bo said:
Are you trying to show that no analogizing (generalization) is possible? Can't be, your statement is supposed to be generally valid. That no human uttering corresponds to any reality outside the individual? Scientific theories predicts the outcome of experiments so there are natural laws (static inorganic patterns in moqish).
But if you insist on this reductionist approach, can't it be reduced further? It's easy to prove that everything is uttered by way of language - spoken or written, so everything is language. No, there aren't any people because "people" is a concept - an analogy. Nay, not even language because "language" is language. Would you approve of such a "tabula rasa"? If not why not?
Matt:
I have no idea what all of that was. Pragmatists, I think, agree with Pirsig more so than others here do that "everything is an analogy". So that's definitely not it. What the pragmatist thinks about language is that it doesn't represent reality, it copes with it. I've spent too long trying to unpack that recently, though, to go for another spin. I'll simply have to refer you to the recent thread between me and Paul, which started as "When is an interpretation not an interpretation" at the end of October. The whole dialogue between me and Paul is a pretty good introduction to what pragmatists think. On pragmatism's antireductionsim, see the recent exchange between me and David in the same thread.
I guess the only question I can answer is "would I approve of tabula rasa?" Sure, people are born with only inorganic and biological patterns, and their social and intellectual patterns are imparted from their parents and society. Problem with that answer is that I really don't know what in my statement so bothered you. I'm not sure what I'm saying is relevant or anything.
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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Nov 24 2003 - 02:51:28 GMT