From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Mon Nov 03 2003 - 19:15:18 GMT
Paul
I sympathise with your problem, scientists
certainly often like to say they arer getting closer to reality
with their descriptions, the critical realist position can perhaps
suggest that nature does respond to our questions and therefore
participates in our language games, but you can imagine the implications
of this for problems, there is no language of nature, and nature joins our
conversations a bit like the delphic oracle.
regards
DM
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Turner" <paulj.turner@ntlworld.com>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 10:45 AM
Subject: RE: MD When is an interpretation not an interpretation?
> Hi Matt
>
> Paul said:
> Does this create a reality/Reality distinction?
>
> Matt replied:
> Sure, but this distinction is between two kinds of books with Plato to
> Kant to Husserl and Russell on one side and Protagoras to Hume to
> Nietzsche and James on the other.
>
> Paul:
> Is it fair to say that pragmatists replace metaphysical distinctions
> with philosophological distinctions? For example, reality is only
> "ideal" and "material" because there are idealists and materialists and
> there is no way of deciding which is correct. Does this therefore extend
> outside of metaphysical writing and into other types of literature? For
> example, is Tolkien's middle-earth as "real" as Plato's forms, Kant's
> noumena and James' flux?
>
> Paul said:
> Does this create a description/reality distinction or is "a
> description," for all intents and purposes, what pragmatists mean by
> reality? If so, does it follow that describing produces reality?
>
> Matt replied:
> No, there is no description/reality distinction because pragmatists
> don't think we can pull off our descriptions of reality and look at
> reality bare and naked. But neither is "a description" what we mean by
> "reality". That would be idealism. Pragmatists agree with realists
> that there is a world "out there," we just think that it affects us
> causally.
>
> Paul:
> I'm not convinced. If you believe that there is a world out there
> (reality) that descriptions don't represent, then the two (reality and
> descriptions) are not the same and surely you have made a
> description/reality distinction?
>
> If this is not the case, then all there is to "cause" a description is
> another description then another description and so on, therefore it is
> not possible for you to hold that there is a reality outside of
> description which pushes you around, and as you say, this is linguistic
> idealism.
>
> On the other hand, descriptions can be considered as *part of* the
> "reality that pushes us around," but this is not what the realists that
> you agree with are saying.
>
> The only other way out of it, as far as I can see, is to shrug off the
> distinction along with the rejection of metaphysics and treat philosophy
> as a form of fiction that is mainly concerned with writing a "good
> story" about a fictional place called "reality." It is then up to
> pragmatists to convince everyone who is interested that metaphysics (and
> physics, chemistry, biology, sociology and so on?) is also a form of
> fiction and no better at getting at reality than their "story."
>
> Is this a fair conclusion?
>
> Paul
>
>
>
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