From: Paul Turner (paulj.turner@ntlworld.com)
Date: Mon Feb 02 2004 - 10:07:57 GMT
Matt
Matt said:
Pragmatists think that saying that value is the "primary empirical
experience" is an old-fashioned way of conflating Sellars' "all
awareness is a linguistic affair" and a pragmatist "conception" of
truth.
Paul:
I think this is a mistake made by pragmatists, how can all awareness be
a linguistic affair? What about the fairly common existence of
pre-lingual infants? This is exactly what the MOQ does *not* say. It
agrees with Buddhism that awareness is fundamentally beyond and prior to
the construction of words and intellect. If this, above, is how
pragmatists have to interpret the statement then I think most of the MOQ
is lost before you go any further.
Matt asks "stupid" questions:
Once you open the door to epistemology, you will recieve an endless
barage of questions like that. "How do you know it has high value? Are
you certain? How can you be certain?"
Paul, pointlessly, replies:
I can only be certain of what beliefs are of high value to me. As for
knowledge in general, it can be described as an aggregate of what is of
high value for everyone in the way of belief.
Matt said:
As I said before, how do we interpret it, what are the consequences of
the redescriptive move, how does it help us, what does it help us with?
Paul:
Lila is supposed to answer some of that, and this forum (sometimes) goes
into that. I accept that the last post of mine didn't go into it, but
I've tried in the past and would like to try in the future if we ever
get past the endless stream of interpretations and comparisons.
Matt asks more "stupid" questions:
Oh, and since we are playing epistemology, How do you _know_ value has
reality? Well, actually, that's the easy question answered by Pirsig.
The much more difficult question is How do you _know_ value is the
primary empirical reality? How do you _know_ Quality is all there is?
How do you _know_ it grounds everything?
Paul, in the depths of pointlessness, replies:
I know that it (value as primary empirical reality) is better than any
other explanation of experience I've heard of but can offer no more
"proof" than that.
Paul previously said:
You pragmatists seem to spend more time telling everyone what you aren't
doing than what you are. If describing epistemology and ontology this
way makes them less upsetting for you then fair enough. :-)
Matt said:
We only spend as much time telling everyone what we aren't doing as
metaphysicians tell us what we are.
Paul:
Fair point.
Matt said:
I mean, I hope you just drop all of those stupid questions from above.
I think them quite pointless and my effort in proliferating them is my
effort in trying to persuade you that carrying the mantle of
epistemology and/ontology is not worth the trouble.
Paul:
OK Matt, despite the somewhat petulant style of your post, I think your
efforts are well intended and well informed. I know you have arrived at
a realisation about the ultimate futility of metaphysics but, once it is
accepted that all intellectual knowledge is provisional and speculative,
I think it is still interesting and useful to examine and set out a
system of beliefs and assumptions to see how it fits together and to try
it out against your experience. If you would prefer to refer to this
activity as "philosophy in the broad sense of seeing how things in a
broad sense kind of hang together on weekends" instead of "metaphysics"
that's OK :-)
In this respect, "epistemology" and "ontology" are useful philosophic
terms I used to try and help clear up the differences in our
understanding of the static hierarchy employed by the MOQ system.
Unfortunately, you find these terms upsetting and pointless and so we
ended up "here," again.
Perhaps, as you were keen to point out, you've been on this forum longer
than I have and have heard it all before so you're just plain bored.
Perhaps we can move the conversation on by inventing some new terms?
Diet-epistemology? Ontology-lite? Perhaps, from the fact that we are
having this conversation again, we are to conclude that there is nothing
further to be gained from our discussions?
One simple question, and it's a genuine one - you've spelled out what
you think is pointless and what neo-pragmatism *doesn't* do, so rather
than waiting for metaphysicians to "accuse" you of something, what would
you say neo-pragmatism *does* do, in terms of philosophy and in terms of
this forum?
Cheers
Paul
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