What could Berkeley have said about Johnsons refutation?

Brilliant response, Fresco. Your grasp of post-modern thought leaves me far behind. My aging is most demonstrated by a loss of energy which strengthens my appreciation of your intelligence qua energy.
The "potential" world--indeed the so-called permanent possibility of phenomena--is, it seems to me, what feuls the perspective on reality as objective phenomena. My "mystical" hobby horse drives me to see the world as both mind and matter. When I seem to stress the essential nature of mind I also want to stress that the content of consciousness is critical to its nature. I repeat my favorite mantra: Tat tvam asi: That art thou, or I am my consciousness and it is its content,

It is just amazing to see meaningless babble expressed in such a deceptively meaningful manner. That's what you call your basic bullsh*t artist.

I think we do, to some extent. We can refer back to berkeley's texts to get a tentative response to johnson's refutation.

Also not saying that berkeley wouldn't have moved on. We all do. Happens. But he wouldn't have the type of knowledge or understanding of philosophy that we currently possess. History is mean that way.

Correct, we can make the attempt. But can we really immerse ourselves in Berkeley's vested interest as a priest at that time trying to substantiate "God" as the ultimate observer.... or the expectancy of Johnson's fans for him to produce the bon mot ? I do not intend to witter on about Derrida, except to say that he does point out that the parergon or "frame" surrounding what we call "the text" can be just as important as the text itself.

In short I suggest that "the attempt" at an answer involves a current negotiation in which the original question may have little specific importance compared with the analysis of the attempt itself.

No chip on my shoulder that I'm aware of, and I'm satisfied with my knowledge of modern philosophy. It's not that I'm unfamiliar with your philosophy, it's that I understand it and reject it.

Pete and Re-Pete.

This is the intelligible summary of Heidegger I used to refresh my memory of those points. (5 clips totalling 25 mins).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaGk6S1qhz0

In all of this sea of drivel, i can never get anyone to tell me, if there is no objective reality, and it's just the consensus of observers, whence the observers. When i ask Fresco that, he gets personally abusive. I see JLN has not seen fit to respond, but i'll put the same question to him. If there is no objective reality, whence the observers? Whence the "languaging?" Whence the negotiation?

It is a common tactic of Fresco to allege that those who do not agree with him are incapable of understanding what he is saying. How very convenient for him!

Setanta. This is absolutely an abuse free response.
Your question "whence" assumes (1) that causal arguments are necessary for what we call "explanation" and (2) that there is an absolute origin at the front the causal chain and (3) that the dichotomy "observer-observed" has ontological and/or epistemological status. There are philosophical arguments which counter each of these assumptions. No modern philosopher disputes the utility of causality despite the concept having no formal status in physics, but they do dispute its applicability in the study of the observational process itself (sometimes called perception). In simplistic terms, "you cannot cut butter with butter."(I am aware that I am avoiding the fact that you can cut diamond with diamond !)
Now it may be that what you want to dismiss as "drivel" IS "drivel", but it is equally likely that you may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater given the useful insights and applications of some of these counter-intuitive ideas in what we call "cognitive science".

Of course there is objective reality, even though we cannot access it--aside from the fact that we observers-of-it are it--except subjectively (and that's an objective fact).
What I was "driveling" was that that potential world consisting as it does of the permanent possibility of phenomena is what fuels the usual perspective on reality as objectively "real" rather than subjectively illusory. To me the objective and subjective are both real, two sides of a single process. When I see something I am seeing both an "object" and being an experience of it. Together they are my True Self. I am both the observer and the observed.
Reconsider: Tat tvam asi.

It's good that you put "cognitive science" in quote marks, because there's no science in modern philosophy, and contemporary philosophers only refer to science when it's convenient for them to (falsely) allege that their word chopping is underpinned by science. Quantum mechanics only applies to events at the quantum level (you'll have a field day with your silly word salad with that one, i'm sure, starting with the word event). You treat science as though it were some useful handmaiden for your ontological and epistemological pronouncements, to be discarded if found to be contradictory to the claims you make. You are not well informed about science, either. As an example, you claimed that Einstein's remarks about the nature of light in his theory of special relativity were informed by Clerk-Maxwell's hypotheses. The problem with that was that Einstein made his claim that light has both wave and particle properties in his paper on optics, which he wrote before he wrote his paper on special relativity--it just happened to have been published at the same time.

Essentially you have here dodged the question. Except at the quantum level--which one again only applies to considerations of quantum mechanics--cause and effect and temporal, sequential relationships are not only acceptable, they are necessary to an understanding of scientific investigation. Causality is essential to an understanding of modern physics, except at the quantum level. It is only at that level that a reliable claim can be made that observation affects the object observed.

I give you a fail in your response because you haven't answered the question. As Joe so pungently put it, i understand what you're saying, i just don't agree with it. (For an exact quote, see Joe's post.)

Your "Tat tvam asi" is the most vague and silly appeal to authority i have yet seen in these types of discussion. Your religious experiences of the cosmos have absolutely no applicability in a discussion of the nature of reality. As always such pronouncements as yours ignore the distinction between descriptions of reality and objective reality. Objective reality exists whether nor not you accurately describe it, and you could not describe reality it there were no objective reality.

I take a "fail" from you as a compliment relative to your normal style !

Despite your respective protests, there is no evidence that either you or Joe "understand" postmodernist perspectives. I have provided a useful clip to ease those interested into what is generally acknowledged as a very difficult, counter-intuitive intellectual area, but one can, as they say, "take the horse to water....etc".

I'm not too sure what the Einstein diversion is about other than a move in the game of " discredit fresco". My citation of Clerk-Maxwell is usually regarding the function of "the ether" as "the elastic medium" which underpinned the original basis of his successful equations. I don't remember how I worded this but no doubt an obsession with "the game" can bring it forth. On the other hand if you really want to get into a discussion of the ontological status of mathematical entities, I suggest we both have a hell of a lot of reading to do !

Oh . . . a move to discredit Fresco . . . poor Fresco, what a martyr. You don't need any help in discrediting yourself. Clerk-Maxwell's luminiferous aether was shown to be non-existent by the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887, more than 15 years before Einstein published. This is just another example of how little you know about science, despite your pretensions to the contrary.

The only game here is your pathetic word game, in which you pretend that you're a victim and that others are incapable of understanding you.

Do you believe that it is possible for someone to understand (or "understand") postmodernist perspectives without agreeing with them?

Yea, I too have a "fail" from Set. What I don't understand is why he is trying so hard to be a jerk. What psychological drive is he satisfying?

Ah yes, if someone doesn't lap up your drivel, that makes them a jerk. What a wonderfully witty way to characterize those who don't agree with you.

I think understanding postmodernism minimally requires appreciating the inadequacy of naive realism (at the level of understanding Kant say), and also an appreciation of the rise of phenomenology. Where you go from there is to some extent your own business, but it is worth bearing in mind that a figure like Wittgenstein rejected his earlier contributions to logical positivism in favor of a pro-postmodernist stance which focused on contextual semantics and rejected the correspondence theory of truth.

So I guess you're answer would be "no." And that's where I have a problem. You can't accept that I can understand your position without endorsing it. That puts you in the same position as those who couldn't understand how the heavens could work if the earth revolved around the sun, or how combustion could take place without the presence of phlogiston. You are, in short, operating from within an outdated paradigm.

Hmm. A psychologist might say that his aggression is a sign of his underlying insecurity !
Yet...in anticipation of an enraged counter-attack to that... I would simply say that he doesn't like people (me in particular) standing up to his blatantly unacceptable behavior, which tends to detract from his relative expertise on historical topics.