From[Bill Williams 14 June 2004 12:00 AM CST]
[From Bill Powers (2004.06.14.0614 MDT)]
Bruce Nevin (2004.06.12 22:00 EDT) --
>>This, in my view, is a proper challenge to the radical subjectiveness
>>against which Bill Williams has been inveighing.
> What "radical" subjectivism?
Your "radical" subjectivism. We have been having this argument for amost 20 years now. You consistently go back to an insistence upon "individualism." And, the basis of this individualism is your slogan that "All we know is what we perceive." However, you recognize that you can not build a persuasive methodological justification for your work on just this slogan. So, as you percieve a need, other constructs are introduced into your conception of PCT.
So, PCT from the outside looks like a string bag. It takes whatever shape it has because Bill Powers found it useful to put this or that inside the bag. But, Bill Powers could change his mind tomorrow and PCT might be quite different. You have never put the effort into developing a self-consistent, sustained exposition of PCT because you don't think you ought to have to. Basically you have a contempt for people stringing words together when the real work is being carried on elsewhere-- like in the shop where the models are being built. The result has been that your, from time to time, descriptions of PCT are not to the same standard of your modeling. And, the result is that a reasonable person reading what I call your sophistology may come away with the impression that you don't know what you are talking about. Despite being a reasonable person, they would be mistaken. You do know what you are talking about about. But, you don't know how to talk about what you've done in a!
way that most otherwise reasonable people find persuasive.
It seems to me that Bill Williams is arguing for a radical objectivism in
claiming that the individual does not even exist.
Of course this has nothing at all to do with my position. Radical objectivism? Bill Powers has room for two ideas. His idea which is obivously right. And, then there is this other idea which is different from Bill Powers idea, and therefore obviously wrong. It doesn't matter what in particular this other idea is about because whatever it is, it is obviously wrong. This is an indication of Bill Powers' radical subjectivism-- he isn't interested in what other people think. Either they are going to learn to think the same way that Bill Powers thinks, or they are "resistent." There isn't room for any third alternative such as perhaps Bill Powers got it wrong.
Has he, or have you, suddenly become infallible in observing that
societies and cultures "really" exist, other than in your perceptions?
Can anything other than an individual perceive at all?
Since there is obivously no such thing as an individual, if there is a process of perception going on somewhere, then it can not be in individuals.
And, once again we are back to square one, "All there is, is perception." Has anything been learned it taking one more lap and coming back the the starting yet once again? Aparently not. If you argue with a radical subjectivist, all they really have to say, to the extent that they are consistent radical subjectivists is that, "All there is really is, is perception." And, this it is claimed is "All that we can really know." This argument seems at least to Bill Powers to be irrefutable. I would suggest, however, that there is something that we can know. We can watch people who say, "All there really is, is what I perceive." And, we can observe how they behave. Then we might learn to know how to percieve people who say, "All there really is, is what I perceive." And, eventually we come to a conclusion as to whether or not this is a simple truth that is going to set us free.
Bill Williams