Re: Reality vs. Perception of Reality

From: Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 13:48:48 -0700

On 29-Jul-05, you wrote:

> May I offer the following quote as a potential catalyst for Bruno and
> Colin:
>
> If thought is laryngeal motion, how should any one think more truly
> than the wind blows? All movements of bodies are equally necessary, but
> they cannot be discriminated as true and false. It seems as nonsensical
> to call a movement true as a flavour purple or a sound avaricious. But
> what is obvious when thought is said to be a certain bodily movement
> seems equally to follow from its being the effect of one. Thought
> called knowledge and thought called error are both necessary results of
> states of brain. These states are necessary results of other bodily
> states. All the bodily states are equally real, and so are the
> different thoughts; but by what right can I hold that my thought is
> knowledge of what is real in bodies? For to hold so is but another
> thought, an effect of real bodily movements like the rest. . . These
> arguments, however, of mine, if the principles of scientific
> [naturalism]... are to stand unchallenged, are themselves no more than
> happenings in a mind, results of bodily movements; that you or I think
> them sound, or think them unsound, is but another such happening; that
> we think them no more than another such happening is itself but yet
> another such. And it may be said of any ground on which we may attempt
> to stand as true, Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum ["It flows
> and will flow swirling on forever" (Horace, Epistles, I, 2, 43)]. (H.
> W. B. Joseph, Some Problems in Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1931),
> pp. 14-15)
>
> Regards,
> Tom Caylor

So what? Of course without any context, simply looking at physical
processes doesn't allow one distiguish "true opinion" for "false opinion".
True and false are the linguistic analogues of effective and ineffective
action. Wiiliam S. Cooper as written a nice little book on this called
"The Evolution of Reason - Logic as a Branch of Biology".


Brent Meeker
Received on Fri Jul 29 2005 - 17:03:16 PDT