Replies

Re: “Hopefully Greg won’t mind me getting ahead of ourselves here.”
Not at all :)) This is part of our path into joie de vivre! :))

Hi George,

I like the paradox that this question foregrounds :))

My way forward rests with the comment you quote, ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful.’ If we don’t mistake our models for what is, then we must hold our models with a certain provisionalness, tentativeness. That does not mean ‘what is’ does not exist, but using a term like “actual occasion” to point to what is, in some way, must be held with a kind of exploratory openness.

… If one’s epistemological intuitions are pragmatist, as mine are, there isn’t actually a strong sense in which ‘the statement x is useful’ can be true at the same as ‘the statement x is wrong’. From these intuitions, being ‘useful’ is what being ‘true’ is. IE the concepts help us do something (e.g. thinking further into some situation). The sense that the concepts must be held to be “wrong” comes, I think, from our commonplace, and in our cultures often unselfconscious, reliance on a ‘correspondence theory of truth’ – the sense that ‘truth’ is about a mapping from model to what is. If we don’t orient from that intuition – I don’t because my experience foregrounds a kind of fluidity and openness in the naming of what we find (Gendlin’s focusing practice is one place that is foregrounded, but there are also resonances in Christian negative theology (the sense that saying who or what God is is overreaching), and in Buddhist emphasis on non-referentiality) – then instead of thinking of our models as right or wrong (corresponding to what is accurately or inaccurately in particular respects) we can focus instead on when the concepts seem to be helping us, and what, in our experiencing, they seem to be missing.

I take Bob’s point that – within a given schema – one might say “actual occasions are actual”. That’s important, but it’s more about how the schema works than about how reality is. Each schema is just a model. As a whole it needs to be held with curious openness as its brought into speaking from, elucidating, our experiencing.

As I read Whitehead (and I am only a bit into his gestalt atm!), the point of “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” here is to look, in our experiencing, at what we are finding his term ‘actual occasion’ is pointing to. And then reorienting or refining or extending our schema if we find we need to.

I am finding myself puzzling about quite a number of his concepts atm, e.g. (from our readings) “Rocks and trees, hills and rivers are not simply facts in the world; they are also acts of self-realization.” ‘Self-realization’ *seems* to involve our usual boundaries between living and not-living dropping away … I find the intuition plausible … it resonates with my sense of the wonder of reality … but I don’t really have much sense of what Whitehead is saying here, and how one would bring out the usefulness-helpfulness – ‘accuracy’ – of this claim for someone who did not share this intuition. … A kind of dialogue, encounter, between Whiteheadian thinking and my experiencing is how I imagine this puzzlement carrying forward. And atm I don’t know where it will take me, of course!

Thanks,
Greg.