From: david buchanan (dmbuchanan@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Oct 24 2005 - 02:35:04 BST
Matt, DM and all:
And thanks for the encouragment, Gav.
Matt said:
One of the things my gut reactions tell me is that we should be wary of
Pirsig's descriptions of SOM. I've mentioned for a while that I think
Pirsig conflates two enemies in an unhelpful matter, representationalism and
materialism.
dmb says:
Wary? It wouldn't hurt to be explicit about all the various permutations and
inter-related issues, but I don't think his broad and commonsesical concept
is bad for being broad and commonsensical. Drawing out the connections and
distinctions between representaltionalism and materialism, for example,
would probably help to clarify or deepen the reader's understanding of SOM.
As I understand it, SOM is given different names by various thinkers. I
guess I'm saying that the broadness of the term is useful for Pirsig since
he is not taking sides with subjective idealists or any kind of physicalist.
He's using the term SOM to condemn the whole lot of them.
Matt said to DM:
I think we can see that played out in your descriptions of the problem. You
keep pegging me with some kind of reductive materialism, when the only
problem I can see with materialism was that it was reductive.
Matt said to dmb:
A description is only reductionistic if it adds, after the details of the
description, "this is how things really are." This is not how non-reductive
physicalists describe things.
dmb replies:
I don't know how John Dupre "argues that materialism without reductionism is
meaningless", but I am struck by at least two things here. You seem to be
saying that non-reductive physicalists can talk just like reductive
materialist as long as they don't assert it as the absolute truth or
something like that. This kind of move strikes me as quite odd. Its like an
open declaration that you've given yourself permission to equivocate every
time the philosophical going gets tough and I don't like it.
But more than that, reduction isn't the problem. I mean, you neo-pragmatists
seem to have a strange alliance with science, which operates with the kind
of naive realism that allows most scientists to believe that the physical
sciences explore the real world and the scientific method of observation
with the physical sense is really the road to the truth about reality. As I
understand it, the position that "the limits of my language are the limits
of my world" is supposed to be extremely skeptical about the sort of naive
realism. Its at the opposite corner of the SOM box, asserting an
intersubjective reality rather than an objective one. And yet this strange
alliance, pretending to reject only the reductionist part. If you want me to
believe that one, you'll definately have to draw me a picture.
DM sadi to Matt:
I agree that there is a lot of ideas about understanding and
recontextualising SOM in philosophy we could use: Bergson, Schelling, Hegel,
Heidegger, Richard Tarnas, Merleau-Ponty, Rorty, Derrida, Levinas, etc.
dmb says:
I'd like to see that.
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