Hey DMB, Yes, it's true, I want to make you work harder to find our disagreements. I'm not exactly sure where they are, though we're both pretty sure they are around the area of the notion of "pure experience," but I'm still not convinced that it makes landslides of difference.
The broad outline of the map I'm working with that locates the various pragmatists and their enemies (the one I'm slowly working on in a longer paper) goes something like this: I think James was right both times when he said first that radical empiricism was an optional corollary to pragmatism and then that the two were tightly bound. The reason I think so is that I take pragmatism to be the core instigator in the changes in views that Peirce, James, and Dewey enacted to various degrees. I take radical empiricism to be optional because it requires one to talk in a certain philosophical idiom--that of "experience". I take it to be tightly bound because if you _are_ going to talk philosophically in the idiom of experience, then if you are a pragmatist, you are also a radical empiricist. James was obviously both and commentators are making it more commonplace to see Dewey as one, too (in his making of "experience" and "nature" nearly synonymous and his notion that "reality is an evaluative concept"). Peirce is different though. Peirce isn't obviously a radical empiricist because he doesn't talk about experience as much. The reason many mid-century American philosophers became intrigued by Peirce is because, since they were convinced analytic philosophers intent on using the idiom of language (rather than experience), Peirce seemed to have taken the so-called "linguistic turn" earlier than most others--a home grown linguistic philosopher. It is my contention, however, that the shift between talking about language and talking about experience is a shift that leaves most, if not all, of the problems of Cartesianism in place. When Peirce says that "my language is the sum total of myself," I think he is articulating the exact same corollary in the idiom of language as James would in the idiom of experience. A pithy title for this parallel corollary to James' radical empiricism, in following Rorty following Wilfrid Sellars, is "psychological nominalism." There are differences between talking philosophically about experience and about language. Rorty attempts to articulate some of these differences first in his paper "Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism" and further in his paper "Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin". The gist is that idealism was a step towards pragmatism, but that it took bad metaphysics, the appearance/reality distinction, still too seriously. James and Dewey were attracted to idealism--but were not idealists--for that exact reason: it looked good, but they were in the process of articulating a way past the live alternatives between idealism and realism. Pragmatists at the end of the past century were still attempting to articulate that way, now between idealism-turn-anti-realism and realism. I don't struggle with radical empiricism per se. The part that strikes me as odd is how the notion of "pure experience" even survives once one becomes a pragmatist/radical empiricist. If we follow Dewey in thinking there's no difference between experience and reality (which I take to be the purest articulation of the contention of radical empiricism), then how does one wedge in a difference between pure and unpure experience/reality, one that doesn't look like the appearance/reality distinction? But more importantly, what would that distinction do if it wasn't leaning on the A/R distinction? For instance, say we move from the idiom of experience to that of language. There is a corollary to the problem I see in the above, the notion of "pure language." That notion is the Kantian notion of "analytic" as opposed to "synthetic." But almost every analytic philosopher these days is post-positivistic, that is to say, post-Quinean, even if they don't identify as pragmatists. Rorty identifies the Quinean attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" as one of the three great pillars of latter-day pragmatism. (The others are Sellars' attack on the Myth of the Given, which I've seen you, DMB, say nice things about, and Davidson's attack on the scheme/content distinction.) A lot of people agreeing to something doesn't make it true, but I mention the tide of contemporary philosophy in order paint the map of what I see as the progress of pragmatism. The linguistic turn wasn't by itself a pragmatic progression--in the long run it will be seen as simply a change of idiom, like being able to say everything you want to say in English, and then switching to French and being able to say pretty much all of it. The progress was made by the various attacks on what Dewey called the epistemology industry--it was the cleansing of our philosophical palates of all the Platonic-turn-Cartesian-turn-Kantian weeds that we'd grown used to putting up with. Lockean empiricism required a knower/known distinction. Radical empiricism was precisely radical for collapsing the distinction between knower and known, between things given to us by reality and things added by us. At the turn of the century, empiricism was the way forward because nobody wanted to be rationalist, thinking that there were hidden drops of divinity in us that made us different than animals. But idealism seemed like the way forward, too because it avoided so many epistemological problems. Thus radical empiricism--a non-rationalistic empiricism that looked like idealism. So, no, radical empiricism isn't the tricky part in articulating pragmatism. Once one starts thinking in terms of avoiding problems, one can begin to see the parallels between philosophers and what they do despite idiom differences. I think the tricky part is "pure experience," because if that pillar is not co-extensive with radical empiricism (which until now I had kinda' assumed it was), then I think more articulation is needed. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live Hotmail and Microsoft Office Outlook – together at last. Get it now. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA102225181033.aspx?pid=CL100626971033 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
