From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Tue Nov 25 2003 - 19:22:48 GMT
Matt:
"The reason I keep boggling at your persistence is because as far as the
pragmatist is concerned, she's related the linguistic with the
non-linguistic as much as she needs to. She thinks the idea of "dressing
up" the non-linguistic phenomena in language to be an ugly remenant of the
Kantian distinction between representations and reality. It just isn't
useful anymore. Instead of saying that language dresses up or represents
reality, pragmatists say that language is a tool for coping with reality,
for helping us manipulate it.
So, the relation between the linguistic and the non-linguistic is between
beliefs and that which causes beliefs. Pragmatists look at your relation
between a blue and a red coat, not between a coat Nature puts on and a coat
Nature doesn't, but between a useful description and a less useful
description."
DM: Well, I'll keep going. What I would like to get to is to use the Pirsig
DQ/SQ distinction but in the context of a more sophisticated acknowledgement
of the role of language in expanding the possibilities of experience and
activity. I suppose I only buy the ironist side of post-modernism and Rorty.
I do not think that this leaves us with relativism or incapable of doing
grand narratives. I really want to put science in its place, that it
extracts only a certain aspect of our experience and therefore onlyattains a
certain sort of limited knowledge and that this is always creative and
communal and provisional but nonethesless and positively it is involved in a
very effective means of gining knowledge just because of its very simplicity
and reduction of experience, mainly to quantifiable relationships and
patterns. Clearly, science is getting on with its grand narratives and I
can't see anyone stopping it doing so, nor would I want to, but in terms of
society and intellect we need to put it strongly in the
context of other more complex and therefore less reliable forms of
knowledge. It may also fall over, our grand narratives have no built in
reliability, to the extent I embrace post-modernism, but that would be great
& we would have to do even more thinking and be either more creative in our
attempts to understand existence. I think if we ackowledge any distinction
between linguistic and non-linguistic experience we are being a bit Kantian,
and hence not entirely post-mod, this is all I am saying I think, we can
talk about the experience of the colour blue as being non-linguistic even
though we can only really grasp and discuss what is blue and what is not
blue in a linguistic context, or what tastes of potato and what does not. I
also think Scott may have a point when he suggests that the nature of
sensations is a form of taste/sight/hearing/touching/smelling langauge. The
body certainly takes a data cut, it divides our taste encounters up in a
bittter/sweet difference in the same way linguistic language does, even
though it is clearly an activity (not determined) of biological activity
rather than social-communicative activity. I can't see how we can get away
from the idea that the visual colour spectrum we experience is not dressed
up by our use of the differences pink/blue/green/etc. Look at your idea of
tool. It needs unpacking. If you want to use language as a tool. Say you
need to collect big rocks rather than small rocks. You've first got to dress
up all the experience you have of rocks. You use a bucket. Anything that
fits the bucket is a small rock, anything that won't is a big rock. I am
happy to say that how you do the cut is either arbitrary or has a certain
use or is moral or aesthetic but you got to ask the rock a question, do you
fit
in my bucket (or do you have this spin, or weight, or length, or momentum,
or force, or energy, or mass, of colour, etc) or not? And you probably hope
that if you do the test again the rocks will continue to perform as fitters
or non-fitters in the same way, of course, in science you can always find
that this changes, that the system is more complex, that your bucket expands
in the heat, or changes size at the speed of light. Do you see what I am
saying about asking nature to answer our questions? And does this not show
how we ask the question, and answer it, does it fit? yes or not, yet there
is the fitting, there is something more to science than us asking ourselves
questions.
regards
David M
----- Original Message -----
From: "MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT" <mpkundert@students.wisc.edu>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Monday, November 24, 2003 1:54 AM
Subject: Re: MD When is an interpretation not an interpretation?
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