Re: Reality vs. Perception of Reality

From: <Daddycaylor.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 23:56:22 EDT

Tom 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

I don't think Colin and Bruno were talking merely about opinion and
effectiveness, but I'll let them speak for themselves.
 
Tom
 
Received on Fri Jul 29 2005 - 23:57:58 PDT