Matt said:
...Radical empiricism says experience IS the world. I want people to notice
how the verb "to know" appears in the first, but not the second. The difference
is that in traditional empiricism, you had to do epistemology, you had to study
how we know things. In the second, you don't because it is assumed that we
already know things about the world because we already are always connected to
the world. This is why, if empiricism is an epistemological doctrine,
pragmatists find themselves in the strange position of asserting a position
that denies the problem area (much like their offering of a "theory of truth"
that isn't a theory at all).
DMB said:
Hmmm. I don't think I follow you here. How does the switch to radical
empiricism mean we're now longer doing epistemology? Our last reading for class
was Dewey's "the Pattern of Inquiry" and it seems pretty clear that he's
redefining knowledge and truth along these new lines, not to mention radical
empiricism itself. Is there some sense in which these are not epistiemological?
I mean, "we are already connected to the world" and so there is no longer an
unbridgable epistemic gap, but there is still the task of sorting out different
kinds of knowledge, the methods of inquiry and what counts as truth or
warranted assertions, as Dewey'd put it.
Matt:
As you said, Dewey's process of reconstructing philosophy included redefining
many of the key terms and projects, experience, reality, metaphysics,
epistemology, etc. Rorty's trajectory from Dewey and James mainly involves the
rhetorical choices in which terms we are going to bother haggling over with the
traditionalists. I agree, Dewey is redefining knowledge and truth along new
lines, and the sense in which they are not epistemological is the sense in
which they don't answer any of the questions that Descartes and Kant built into
the subject area of epistemology--they deny the questions (like, how do we get
the subject and object back together?), which is why Dewey sometimes derisively
referred to contemporary philosophers as being involved in the "epistemology
industry".
What Rorty argued in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is that once one gets
rid of the epistemic gap, then nothing really remains in the area to form a
suitable subject. All you have left to do is find suitable redefinitions of
things like truth and knowledge so as not to repopulate that area. As an
example of trying not to repopulate the area, take one of your examples of what
philosophers would still be employed to do: "what counts as truth or warranted
assertions". Would philosophers really be involved in that? Why would a
scientist ask a philosopher if he's making a warranted assertion? Doesn't he
already know if he's making a warranted assertion given the context of his
scientific work, his hypothesis, experiments, evidence, etc.? I see most of
the candidates you listed as repopulating the should-be-evacuated area because
they sound like Kant's notion of philosophy as a super-science. I think
pragmatists should be wary of that.
Don't get me wrong: this doesn't spell the death of philosophy. There are
things for philosophers to do, principally of the sorting kind of thing,
getting things to hang together, as Sellars said. But I think we need to be
wary of continuing old projects, and I don't think we should be too attached to
old rhetorical flourishes, like "the study of knowledge."
Matt
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