Hi DMB,
Matt said:
Your stance looks to me like a pro-experience-talk position, and you
then paint me as being pro-language/anti-experience. With regards to
radical empiricism, this isn't quite right. As I see it, once we become
radical empiricists, it _doesn't matter_ whether we talk about what we
experience or we talk about what we talk about. It simply doesn't
matter.
DMB said:
It doesn't matter? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I thought the
whole debate was about experience and language. As I understand it, you
and Rorty and just about everyone else believe that there is nothing
outside the text, there is no such thing as experience outside of
language. You know, all my awareness is a linguistic affair, its
turtles all the way down, etc.. From this textualist point of view
there can be no such thing as pure experience or at best it would be
considered meaningless as far as philosophers are concerned. Isn't that
your position, that pure experience is either impossible or (gasp)
trivial? As for radical empiricism, Rorty does well with the half that
says we can't add extra-experiential elements to our accounts. But when
it come to the other half, where we aren't allowed to ignore any kind
of experience in our accounts, he falls short and does so speciifically
with respect to pure experience. Isn't that what we're talking about
here?
Matt:
Yes, this is exactly the mis-apprehension of the pragmatism that Rorty stands
for (a misapprehension created in part by Rorty, in his salad days, and myself,
when I first started reading and talking about him) that I want to correct.
You've been resistant to this change, but I can tell you are weakening. Well,
at least--you are enjoying James and Dewey, which is a good first step, and
probably good enough in the long run (from my perspective ;-).
The massive redirection in focus I've been trying to effect is away from
experience v. language and towards the problems of
Platonism/Cartesianism/Kantianism/etc. The way I look at things (and the way
Rorty looks at things) is that the only way to really tell if a given
philosophical idiom is useful or not is to see how it works--and one of the
first things is to see what kind of problems it engenders. The
metaphilosophical attitude common to Rorty and the classical pragmatists is
that the only way to tell if we are progressing in philosophy is to see if
we've rid ourselves of problems.
Rorty is not an idealist. Neither is Pirsig. They sound idealistic at times,
but neither, at the end of the day, believes that rocks do not exist apart from
either language or from our experience of them. You understand that about
Pirsig. But I'm still trying to convince you that the slogan "il n'y a pas de
hors-texte" is not an ontological doctrine, but an attempt to debunk some
Platonic/Kantian problematics. The linguistic turn was not taken by those who
think the only thing that exists is language--what Quine called "semantic
ascent" was taken as a gimmick in the hopes that it might make the dissolution
of traditional problems easier. Even Sellars' psychological nominalism isn't
an ontological doctrine--it is simply the fairly commonsensical point that
there's no difference between a concept and a word and that all understanding
is linguistic--if you can't spell it out, then one is apt to say you still
don't understand it. That doesn't mean that Sellarsians are ignoring
Whitehead's "dim apprehension," it just means that, for the most part (and
particularly for the purposes of dealing with the Platonic tradition), what
humans call understanding and knowledge are circumscribed areas created when
humans use one, _one_, of their tools, a tool that no other animal, to our
knowledge, has been able to use, or at least to the extent that we've developed
it, i.e. language.
When you say that from the textualist point of view, there can be no "pure
experience," that depends. Yes, if it goes along any of the Platonic paths,
the ones typically associated to direct, pure, immediate, etc. If it doesn't,
I don't see why a textualist couldn't, I just don't know what "pure experience"
is supposed to be. I know what "experience" is. It just seems to me that
"pure" is a wheel that spins unconnected, as Wittgenstein would say.
And with this other missing half of radical empiricism, "where we aren't
allowed to ignore any kind of experience in our accounts," I wonder where
you're getting that from Rorty. To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure
where. But I'll say two things. 1) in 1965, in the paper that launched his
career, Rorty said, "As in the case of other infallible pronouncements, the
price of retaining one's epistemological authority is a decent respect for the
opinions of mankind." ("Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories") Rorty
said that, and kept repeating that riff throughout his career, because it may
be true that from your point of view you experienced God's voice, the harmony
of the universe, or the sight of water. We'll give you your experience, you
just have to allow for the fact that you might have been wrong, that your
self-descriptions may not be as useful as others' descriptions, that you might
just have schizophrenia, or you might just have been high, or it might have
just been a trick of the light in the desert.
2) When you say that we aren't allowed to ignore any kind of experience, you're
taking off from Pirsig's denunciation of the logical positivists, that the
positivists didn't think values were real. (Lila, 113) Pirsig, however, is not
only wrong about the positivists here, he's also not facing up fully to the
problems of radically different worldviews/philosophies/paradigms. The first
truth to realize about life is that
if we didn't ignore certain elements in our experience, thereby highlighting
other elements, we wouldn't be able to make it through the day
There are an infinite number of elements in our experience. Pirsig knows this
and it is implicit in the notion of a static pattern. But when we use the kind
of rhetoric you used, saying we aren't allowed to ignore any kind of
experience, A) on the positive end, it is impossible to experience all the
kinds of experience because there are infinite number of them and B) on the
negative end, it is commonsensically inadvisable because we should of course
ignore some kinds of experience, like the kid in class who's annoying you or
the cold weather that's depressing you. Ignoring things is a useful tool
sometimes.
I think you probably agree perfectly well with this last point. But I think
doing so puts us right in the position Rorty suggests we are always
in--balancing our self-descriptions with a decent respect for the opinions of
others. The problem that Pirsig doesn't face up to fully is that _all
philosophical accounts have a pigeon-hole for everything--that's what makes
them philosophical_. The trouble philosophers have with each other, the
problem Pirsig had with the postivists, is that they sometimes don't like the
pigeon-hole that other philosophers put the stuff they like in. The
positivists thought values were real--they just didn't think they were
verifiable in the way that rocks were, and were emotive responses, not rational
like physics. They don't ignore values--they have a pigeon-hole for them. A
philosopher that can't place something is just incompetent.
No, the real struggle is finding the best descriptions for things. Pirsig did
smell something wrong with the positivists, and so there was. The fight
between radically different worldviews isn't something easily cleared up, as
seems to be implied by the kind of rhetoric you and Pirsig use, as if we could
just show the positivist a value, or Bush a human right, and that would clear
everything up. The fight is much more harrowing than all that, a much bigger
struggle.
Matt
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