Bruce,
I think your post today made a good point-- that is your argument, as I
understand it, that it ought to be realized that the conception of
private experience can only be disucussed because there is a social
context in which the question can be considered.
Some might argue that there can be a private ‘discussion’ – taking
different sides and alternating one’s point of view without ever speaking
aloud. But that’s private use of public means, with benefit of
imagination. So yes, I agree with this.
But prior to considering whether discussion depends on social context,
there cannot even be a conception of private experience except in
contrast to non-private experience. That’s more what I had in mind.
There is I think a sense in which a
recognition of this aspect of experience is similiar to the philosophic
notion of what must be admitted a priori before inquiry or discussion
is possible.
I’m been reading Susan Hacck on Logic and the theory of inquiry recently
to see if I can improve my understanding of this and similiar issues.
Dewey, quite some time ago, argued that there is a circular element in
inquiry. But, the circularity wasn’t neccesarily vicious or even
neccesarily faulty.
Dewey has been on my unread want-to-read list for a long time. He was one
of Harris’s influences, and in the methodology of linguistics there is a
kind of spiraling progress that can appear superficially to be circular
iteration – a bootstrapping process.
But Dewey didn’t, as far as I am aware develop
this thought expllicitly. Now, the issue seems to have become a focus of
explicit consideration.
Bill Williams
Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form indicates a relation between
existence and the making of a distinction. This is relevant to my comment
above that there cannot even be a conception of private experience except
in contrast to non-private experience. As is this, perhaps, from Bruce
Gregory’s book on physics:
The energy associated with gravity is opposite in sign to the energy
associated with matter. If the universe has just the right amount of
matter – and there appears to be close to this amount – the matter will
exactly balance the negative gravitational energy, and the net energy in
the universe will be zero. But if the net energy of the universe is zero,
it could be created out of “nothing” without violating the
conservation of energy. The net electric charge in the universe appears
to be zero as well. In fact, nothing
physicists now know is inconsistent with the net of all conserved
quantities being zero at a sufficiently high temperature. But if this is
true we can talk about the universe being created spontaneously from
nothing (physicists call this a vacuum-state fluctuation) without
violating any of the conservation laws. The universe would then be what
the vacuum produces when left to itself! In the words of the American
physicist Alan Guth, “The universe could be the ultimate free
lunch.” [Inventing Reality: Physics as
language, p. 168.]
/Bruce
···
At 11:54 AM 11/24/2003 -0600, Williams, William D. wrote: