What could Berkeley have said about Johnsons refutation?

@fresco,

Ah-hahahahahahahahahaha . . .

You two do have entertainment value, in a clownish sort of way. I'm sure you'd like to think that i were angry, or aggressive, because then you could portray yourself as calmly rational while i were the victim of ungoverned emotions. Note, however that JLN has already described me as a jerk, and you have in the past responded to me, when i merely asked you "whence" with vicious personal remarks. That attempt to lure me with a remark about history is typical of your pathetic method. The one here who really can't abide contradiction is you. You consider it blatantly unacceptable behavior that anyone would question your ex cathedra pronouncements.

You do entertain, though.

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@joefromchicago,

Where did I say "no" ?

And note that your attempted analogy to scientific models might be construed as evidence for your failure to understand postmodernism because "science" and "modelling" and even "paradigmatics" per se are considered secondary issues and candidates for deconstruction.

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@Setanta,

What two compliments on one thread ! Shocked

The best reply I can give to that post is to say that I think "hehehehehe" has the edge on "Ah-hahahaha" from a semantic point of view.

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@Setanta,

I didn't label you a jerk; I accused you of trying hard to be one, and wondered why.
And I might add that you have no entertainment value.

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@fresco,

BTW Set.

Sorry, I did not notice your (historical) post about dates for publications. I still don't know what point you are making. That "martyrdom" twaddle is surely beneath your intellectual abilities.
Interestingly (to me at least) it appears the "aether" has re-emerged as an acceptable functional term in particle physics...a point which may override anything either you or I might have written previously.

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@fresco,

Saying that i am angry or aggressive must surely be twaddle beneath your intellectual abilities, but this is not the first time you've resorted to such feeble minded claims.

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@JLNobody,

I'm not here to entertain you. Get a hobby offline.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Where did I say "no" ?

You didn't. That's my interpretation, based on the fact that you don't think anyone can understand your position without endorsing certain key aspects of it. By way of contrast, I'm confident that you understand Berkeley (remember him? this is a thread about Berkeley), but I wouldn't expect that you'd need to endorse key aspects of his epistemology in order to do so. Moreover, I'm confident that you would agree. It's a puzzle, then, as to why you think you can understand Berkeley without agreeing with him while someone else can't understand your position without agreeing with you.

fresco wrote:

And note that your attempted analogy to scientific models might be construed as evidence for your failure to understand postmodernism because "science" and "modelling" and even "paradigmatics" per se are considered secondary issues and candidates for deconstruction.

I don't adhere to post-modernism, so I don't know how my statement could be construed as evidence of my failure to understand it. But then I suppose that's one of the post-modernist things that I don't understand.

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@joefromchicago,

Quote:

but I wouldn't expect that you'd need to endorse key aspects of his epistemology

Well that's not exactly correct. Insofar that Berkeley can be said to have endorsed the necessity of the consideration of "an observer" in establishing ontological status, I agree with him.
The postmodernist perspective that you seem not to understand is that the Berkeley-Johnson clash cannot be meaningfully revisited because such clashes (what Derrida called aporia) are deemed to be inevitable. In short there are no assertions of "what is the case" which are not predicated on "what is not the case." ( Don't be tempted into a logical infinite regress about this statement as just another "assertion". Its import does not rest on formal logic, but on its contextual juxtaposition to alternatives such as naive realism) . The jargon phrase for this is "the denial of the metaphysics of presence". It undermines our (lay)assumptions about the word "is" and suggests adoption of the pragmaticists' alternative of "what works" - and what works is always relative to a shifting historical backcloth of social significance for contemporary observers which we cannot recreate.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Well that's not exactly correct. Insofar that Berkeley can be said to have endorsed the necessity of the consideration of "an observer" in establishing ontological status, I agree with him.

But agreeing with that aspect of Berkeley's position isn't necessary in order to understand it. The fact that you and Berkeley agree is accidental, not essential. In contrast, you think it's necessary for me to agree with certain aspects of your position in order to understand it.

fresco wrote:

The postmodernist perspective that you seem not to understand is that the Berkeley-Johnson clash cannot be meaningfully revisited because such clashes (what Derrida called aporia) are deemed to be inevitable.

That's like a Roman Catholic saying "you can't understand communion if you don't accept transubstantiation." A Lutheran would respond to that by saying "I understand communion just fine - I just reject transubstantiation." I'm not misconstruing your postmodernist perspective, I'm just not mentioning it because I don't agree with it.

It's not always about you, you know.

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@joefromchicago,

In my view the Roman Catholic may be "making sense". His view of "communion" may place belief in transubstantiation as a necessary aspect of what an RC considers "communion" to be. Meaning involves a shared semantic backdrop of greater range than any particular focal issue. In more general terms, you cannot deny that certain words or phrases in one language may be impossible to translate into another. To take this to the extreme, Quine (the distinguished logician) eventually arrived at an argument for semantic holism.

Quote:

Semantic holism is a theory in the philosophy of language to the effect that a certain part of language, be it a term or a complete sentence, can only be understood through its relations to a (previously understood) larger segment of language. There is substantial controversy, however, as to exactly what the larger segment of language in question consists of. In recent years, the debate surrounding semantic holism, which is one among the many forms of holism that are debated and discussed in contemporary philosophy, has tended to centre around the view that the "whole" in question consists of an entire language

Wikipedia.

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@Setanta,

I stand corrected: that was entertaining.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

In my view the Roman Catholic may be "making sense".

I never said the RC wasn't making sense. I said that not everyone would agree with the RC's position.

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@joefromchicago,

Quote:

"you can't understand communion if you don't accept transubstantiation."

And I say that those who disagree with that position have not given sufficient thought to the word "understand"in the light of the concept of semantic holism. If acceptance of "transubstatiation" is not part of one's normal m.o. one cannot value its significance (aka understand it) with respect to RC's usage of the term "communion". Note that pragmatists equate belief systems with action systems which has implications for the term "acceptance".

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

If acceptance of "transubstatiation" is not part of one's normal m.o. one cannot value its significance (aka understand it) with respect to RC's usage of the term "communion".

Why not? I can understand and/or value the significance that Hindus place on cows. That doesn't stop me from eating hamburgers now and then.

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@joefromchicago,

A Hindu could claim you don't "understand" because you have no overview of the social reality against which such a single act has significance.
A group of Pacific Islanders flown over to England to demonstrate canoe building were paralysed with laughter when they saw people -walking dogs on leads. There was no way they could commune with British relationships with animals.
However we digress. I suggest that rejection of postmodernism in particular is largely based on its perceived iconoclasm. I refer you to the controversy over the award of Derrida's honorary degree at Cambridge.
The "Establishment " (professional analytic philosophers) did not take kindly to being told they had been barking up the wrong tree.

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@joefromchicago,

Interestingly, Quine was one of Derrida's major critics ! Rorty, a Derrida supporter, argued that Quine's conditioning within the tradition did not allow him to take a further step beyond his path to semantic holism towards the acceptance of Derrida's emphasis on the dynamism of context (you can never step into the same river twice).

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

A Hindu could claim you don't "understand" because you have no overview of the social reality against which such a single act has significance.

So what? He might be wrong.

fresco wrote:

However we digress.

Are you being intentionally ironic?

fresco wrote:

I suggest that rejection of postmodernism in particular is largely based on its perceived iconoclasm.

No, not so much on its perceived iconoclasm as on its real incoherency.

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@joefromchicago,

joefromchicago wrote:

fresco wrote:

A Hindu could claim you don't "understand" because you have no overview of the social reality against which such a single act has significance.

So what? He might be wrong.

fresco wrote:
However we digress.

Are you being intentionally ironic?

fresco wrote:
I suggest that rejection of postmodernism in particular is largely based on its perceived iconoclasm.

No, not so much on its perceived iconoclasm as on its real incoherency.

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@fresco,

Quote:

No, not so much on its perceived iconoclasm as on its real incoherency.

That looks like an admission of your failure to understand it to me.
Give an example of a postmodernist statement or concept you find "incoherent " and I will try to elucidate.

1 Reply

What could Berkeley have said about Johnsons refutation?

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