[DJP]

LBird wrote:

I'm merely trying to help you see the differences between 'materialism' (perceptual existence, something to be sensed) and 'realism' (causal existence, a power to make things happen). 

Sorry last time I checked that is not what "realism" means..http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism/

[DJP]

ALB wrote:

I was just concerned that he was apparently ruling out ideas as being part of "reality" but I see he seems to be saying that thinking is a form of experiencing like hearing or touching and that experience is the only reality, so thinking is an experience of reality. But I'm still not sure where this leaves thinking about thinking.

There's this in "Realistic monism: why physicalism entails panpsychism"

Galen Strawson wrote:

For the purposes of this paper I will equate ‘concrete’ with ‘spatio-temporally (or at least temporally) located’, and I will use ‘phenomenon’ as a completely general word for any sort of existent. Plainly all mental goings on are concrete phenomena.11 More strictly, ‘concrete’ means ‘not abstract’ in the standard philosophical sense of ‘abstract’, given which some philosophers hold that abstract objects—e.g. numbers, or concepts—exist and are real objects in every sense in which concrete objects are. I take ‘spatio-temporal’ to be the adjective formed from ‘spacetime’, not from the conjunction of space and time.

ALB wrote:

Is he saying that German materialism is a form of his "naturalistic realism" or that "German idealism" is?

Can't quite work it out either but after watching the questions and answers in that video (the last 15 minutes) wouldn't be suprised if he is talking about Idealism..

[DJP]

I don't know where you get the idea that myself and YMS are liberals from. We are both libertarian free marketeers following the teachings on Ayn Rand, after all this is the majority position in the SPGB these days so it must be true.

[DJP]

So LBird how do you square the above with the fact that you are the ONLY person that has been putting forward certain viewpoints?

[DJP]

ALB wrote:

And I'm glad that I missed the subsequent descent into "post-modernism". Bring back ordinary language, I say.But to return to young Strawson (interesting and maybe revealing that his dad should have given him a non-christian name), I haven't listened to the whole of his talk but I thought I heard him say at one point that only the physical forms part of "concrete reality". But isn't thisbegging the question since "concrete" and "physical" mean more or less the same?

I think Strawson would say that there are concrete and abstract elements to nature. We can only abstract from the concrete and can't really know that much about the nature of the concrete. Concepts belong to the experiential side of the physical are abstract not concrete. Numbers, beauty and love exist but you can't touch them so they are abstract not concrete. Though mental goings on are part of the concrete..Or have I missed the point of what you're asking?Surely abstract and concrete is a valid way of classifying things? You have to employ them to read Marx…http://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/abstraction-abstract-labor-and-ilyenkov/FWIW a simular version of Strawsons talk is available in text here:http://www.metodo-rivista.eu/index.php/metodo/article/view/48

[DJP]

Yes he's the son of PF Strawson according to wikipedia. I'm glad that the linguistic turn was old hat by the time I started studying philosophy…The talk is called real naturalism, but he does see himself as a kind of materialist. I think he said he chose naturalism for the title as it is the widest of the terms. The real is related to realism as in scientific realism. Some of the content is the same as in the book "Real Materialism". He says the materialism of people like Dennett who deny the existence of pnenomology is not real naturalism since it denys the only thing we can only know.Might be worth a watch as it does touch on most of the stuff that we've been talking about…. The more I read or hear of this guy the more I'm persuaded..

[DJP]

Here’s a presentation by Strawson that is simular to the “Real Materialism” essay. Idealism (if you wait till the questions at the end), Philosophy of Science, why call it physicalism, Russell, Dennett etc it’s all touched on here…So much for materialists claiming to be sole guardians of The Truth….

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

So, no answer.

I thought I gave one a few posts back. But being as you word things so strangely it's hard to know what you want. Are you asking which school of philosophy of science Strawson and myself subscribe to?

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

Every time I've asked you to do the same, that is, tell me what ideology you use to understand the physical (or what ideology Strawson, or the other 'mind'-related theorists, whose links you have provided, employ), you haven't done so.

Read the book. I'm just using Strawson as an example of current "materialist" thought. No-one follows crude "mechanistic-materialism" these days (I include the Leninist's in that no-one as they really are a dying breed).Though there's definately a lot of overlap between Strawson, Dietzgen and Russell it seems..

[DJP]

1. We have perceptions 2. We label and classify these perceptions 3. We look for patterns in these perceptions 4. We use these percieved patterns to try and predict future perceptions 5. We then do things according to these predictions, if it doesn't turn out right return to step 3 or 1.Incedentally just come accros CR attempt to bring the 'is' 'ought' gap:

Quote:

If we establish some fact about the world, we are simultaneously implying that other people ought to believe it. This provides a model for deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.http://oro.open.ac.uk/20394/1/1._Hammersley_final_August_9_09.pdf

 But I don't think we need CR to understand Marx and attempting to use it to do so will be more of a hinderance than a help. After all you are not claiming that no-one understood Marx before the 1970's are you?

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

Why not the 'broad sense' of including 'idealism' within 'materialism'? Which is what Marx included.

This is confused because you seem think that "idealism" means "ideas" and "materialism" means "matter (which excludes ideas)". In short you seem to be stuck in a dualist way of thinking.

LBird wrote:

So, if 'idealism-materialism' is to be condemned as an oxymoron, 'materialism' is part of the problem, too.

So presumably when we criticize people on the same grounds for using the term "state-socialism" we are making a criticism of socialism which is "part of the problem, to"?

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

But then, for 'materialists', this is a pointless exercise, because they have access to 'The Truth',

More junk. Why do you persist with the same strawman crap?

LBird wrote:

Why not read the book ALB says is recommended reading by the SPGB? That is, Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy edited by Bottomore and Rubel. At least it's a start for critical thinking about Marx's 'materialism'.

That was actually one of the first books about Marx a read many years ago thanks to a find in a charity, and before I'd even heard of the SPGB.But I'm stopping now because as far as I'm concerned you're just trolling…

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

DJP wrote:

It just that 'mental' is a catergory of "material" phenomena…

So why can't the ideal supervene on the material, and the material supervene on the ideal?If the 'mental' is 'material', then ideas must produce material.You deny this by arguing for 'physicalism', which is just the modern term for 'mechanical materialism'.

Superveince is to do with levels of explanation, much the same as emergence is. Your question just doesn't make sense…

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

Put simply, Marx wasn't a 'materialist', in the common usage of that term, which is the exclusion of the 'ideal'.

And this is where you are going wrong. Most people that use the term "materialism" will not be denying the existence of ideas / mental phenomena / experience etc (though they won't be calling it the 'ideal'). It just that 'mental' is a catergory of "material" phenomena, just as "cow" is a catergory of the phenomena we refer to as "animals". You just seem to keep reverting to the same Cartesian dualisms..I'm putting a longer quote in the hope that it might inspire a ligtbulb moment…

Strawson wrote:

Materialism is the view that every real, concrete phenomenon in the universe is physical. It is a view about the actual universe, and for the purposes of this paper I am going to assume that it is true.It has been characterized in other ways. David Lewis once defined it as ‘metaphysics built to endorse the truth and descriptive completeness of physics more or less as we know it’, and this cannot be faulted as a terminological decision. But it seems unwise to burden materialism—the view that every real concrete phenomenon in the universe is physical—with a commitment to the descriptive completeness of physics more or less as we know it. There may be physical phenomena which physics (and any non‐revolutionary extension of it) cannot describe, and of which it has no inkling, either (p.20) descriptive or referential. Physics is one thing, the physical is another. ‘Physical’ is a natural‐kind term—it is the ultimate natural‐kind term —and no sensible person thinks that physics has nailed all the essential properties of the physical. Current physics is profoundly beautiful and useful, but it is in a state of chronic internal tension. It may be added, with Russell and others, that although physics appears to tell us a great deal about certain of the general structural or mathematical characteristics of the physical, it fails to give us any further insight into the nature of whatever it is that has these structural or mathematical characteristics—apart from making it plain that it is utterly bizarre relative to our ordinary conception of it.It is unclear exactly what this last remark amounts to (is it being suggested that physics is failing to do something it could do?), but it already amounts to something very important when it comes to what is known as the ‘mind–body problem’. Many take this to be the problem of how mental phenomena can be physical phenomena given what we already know about the nature of the physical. But those who think this are already lost. For the fact is that we have no good reason to think that we know anything about the physical that gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea that mental phenomena are physical phenomena. If we consider the nature of our knowledge of the physical, we realize that ‘no problem of irreconcilability arises’. Joseph Priestley saw this very clearly over two hundred years ago, and he was not the first. Noam Chomsky reached essentially the same conclusion over thirty years ago, and he was not the last. Most present‐day philosophers take no notice of it and waste a lot of time as a result: much of the present debate about the ‘mind–body’ problem is beside the point.[…]Genuine materialism requires concerted meditative effort. Russell recommends ‘long reflection’. If one hasn't felt a kind of vertigo of astonishment, when facing the thought, obligatory for all materialists, that consciousness is a wholly physical phenomenon in every respect, including every experiential respect—a sense of having been precipitated into a completely new confrontation with the utter strangeness of the physical (the real) relative to all existing common‐sense and scientific conceptions of it—, then one hasn't begun to be a thoughtful materialist. One hasn't got to the starting line.Some may find that this feeling recurs each time they concentrate on the mindbody problem. Others may increasingly think themselves—quietistically, apophatically, pragmatically, intuitively—into the unknownness of the (non‐mental) physical in such a way that they no longer experience the fact that mental and non‐mental phenomena are equally physical as involving any clash. At this point ‘methodological naturalism’—the methodological attitude to scientific enquiry into the phenomena of mind recommended by Chomsky—will become truly natural for them, as well as correct. I think it is creeping over me. But recidivism is to be expected: the powerfully open state of mind required by true materialism is hard to achieve as a natural attitude to the world. It involves a profound reseating of one's intuitive theoretical understanding of nature.

[DJP]

Looks much better. Are the letters in white protruding or do they just look like that on my phone?

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