>>Well, maybe some of the above helped to explain it. Basing stuff
>>on "1st person" has a long history. That's what everyone, it seems
>>to me, did before the scientific era (about 1600?). So far as I know,
>>nothing
>>has ever come of it.
Its been the cornerstone of modern philosophy since the 1600's. It defines
the moment the 'scientific era' begins. In the realm of indubitable facts,
that I exist is one of them. It is established to me, for myself if not you,
just by the fact I have 1st person experiences going on. No doubt you know
this, perhaps it will incur your ire that Im reminding you of it, but this
subjective fact unfalsifiable though it is, has more certainty than any
'objective' scientific truth. Why not build from this certainty?
wrt sarcasm, because it is common amungst scientific realists and their ilk.
It isnt really sarcasm at all, its exasperation - directed at themselves. It
stems from the fact that they cant marry third person descriptions with
first person descriptions. They cant reduce the one to the other in any
appreciable way. To employ realist form to a non realist position one might
sigh, and go 'Oh come on! how can a description of cells, chemicals and
compounds ever match up with the feeling that corresponds to being apart
from a lover, or whatever'.
To be sure, psychological facts might ultimately be found to reduce to to
phisiological facts, but right now, phisiological language simply has not
accrued the explanatory or descriptive power, for all the Daniel Dennets, to
do the same to psychological language. I cant see that the latter reduces to
the former at all.
Ofcourse, linguistically trained goats might yak on about their perceptions,
as Lee points out, but is that reason to ignore 'subjective experience'? The
perjorative nature of words like 'yak' do not change the fact the goats are
yakking about something certain to them, whilst all else they yakked about
would be to a greater or lesser degree uncertain. Its true, we should expect
them to yak on as they might, but im not sure that gets us anywhere, because
Newton was not suprised when the apple fell. There are suprising results in
science but they are reached by a consideration of what is normal and
expected.
Realism is the philosophical equivolent to Ebenezer Scrooges dictum 'Bah
Humbug!'. The intractability of phenomenology leads realists to ignore it
entirely. Notice that the argument is weaker than a complete denial of
phenomenology - sometimes it gets that absurd - but rather a conclusion that
it is 'irrelevent' to any meaningful description of the world. 'Meaningfull'
no doubt has a pragmatic definition in such arguments, and 'pragmatic'
implies some sense of 'ability to manipulate the world'. Whatever, I think
the feeling that definitions are being pushed on us is natural. Knowledge is
being limited semantically, through narrower and narrower definitions.
Even here its odd, mental abberations like blind sight help us moderate our
third person descriptions of how brains operate only by recourse to 1st
person accounts of what has been perceived. So, these useless things have
some use. Perhaps this is evidence for quantum mind theories? the existance
of a phenomenological use/useless duality. Perhaps Realism is just a bit
inconsistant.
Private subjective experiences exist more certainly than the objective and
public world. It requires a satisfactory explanation, it isnt that
convincing to watch it continually ignored . Futhermore, in ignoring it,
disciplines that have every right to be described as scientific, rational
and illuminating suddenly become 'soft' and suspect.
Regards
Chris.
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Received on Thu Aug 11 2005 - 14:46:16 PDT