DMB, DM,
Let me just state now, again, how wrong both of you, and more than a few
professionals I hasten to add, are about this part of Rorty.
Rorty has never forgotten, whoops, as if they just slipped his mind,
non-linguistic aspects of our experience. Only a very narrow reading of what
Rorty is saying suggests something like that, it involves a massive
misunderstanding of what a post-positivistic understanding of the linguistic
turn is, totally gets Sellars' "psychological nominalism" wrong, and it largely
ignores the fact that Rorty's professed goals, by and large, are therapeutic,
involved in the dissolution of Platonic problems.
You can both find his narrow goals shallow or short-sighted and not as rich a
source of wisdom as other writers. But you guys are getting him just plain
wrong when you say things like "he goes too far" in his philosophy of language
or essentially follow people like Hildebrand and Brian Leiter in calling him a
"linguistic idealist." Rorty just wasn't in the business of offering big,
gigantic views about everything. Treating him as such gets you into trouble.
DMB, I was using "pigeon-hole" in the same sense as you were using the term
"distinction," as in when you said to Ian that, of course we can make
distinctions after dualisms, don't be crazy. Here's a distinction: when Johnny
raises his hand in class, I ignore him because when he has that stupid grin on
his face, all he wants to do is crack a fart joke. Here's a dualism: kids who
smile with their hands raised should be ignored. The second is stupid, but
_from experience_, why shouldn't we ignore Johnny? What I'm talking about are
ad hoc distinctions we create as tools, learned from experience, to deal with
our experience. I'm not talking about Platonic pigeon-holes.
And DM, Rorty wants to "end philosophy"? That is so 1987. I thought most
people were over the fact that Rorty sometimes sounded like that. Rorty spent
most of the last 30 years of his life trying to shrug off that label, which is
absurd if you think that life is possible after Plato (which everyone obviously
does...), but to say that Rorty "fails to admit" that non-dualist descriptions
were possible is to totally miss the boat on what he was up to after PMN:
redescription--remember? I suggest rereading Rorty's 1988 update of Dewey,
"Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation,"
one of Paul Turner's favorite Rorty essays. This, the idea that Rorty is a
spurned Platonic/postivist that thinks philosophy is over, is the key idea that
hinders my relocation of the thrust of radical empiricism. If you want to call
what Rorty was doing in the aforementioned essay "epistemology," or what he was
doing in his essays promoting Dennett's philosophy of mind "ontology," be my
guest. Because what he was doing was essentially the same as what James and
Dewey were doing--redescribin' shit.
Matt
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2007 00:49:58 +0100
> Subject: Re: [MD] subject/object: pragmatism
>
> Hi DMB/Matt
>
> Your last section below is spot on DMB.
> And I agree with you that Rorty goes too far and forgets
> that a pragmatic approach to life and knowledge involves
> non-lingusitic aspects of our experience and very non-linguistic
> physical actions. Our non-linguistic responses to experience
> tell us what is good and bad, painful and pleasurable. Our actions
> as agents help us to determine what works, what is possible,
> and what is impossible. Dewey tells us all this. Rorty, whilst
> updating Dewey with some advanced ideas about langauage that
> Dewey did not have, goes too far. I position myself between the
> two.
>
> David M
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "david buchanan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 2:21 AM
> Subject: Re: [MD] subject/object: pragmatism
>
>
>
> Matt said:
> You brought up your problems with Rorty and how he supposedly rejects
> radical empiricism (which, under certain specifications, I deny) and the
> notion of "pure experience," so I thought I might return briefly to the
> subject. The reason I've gotten in the habit of regarding Rorty as much of a
> radical empiricist as James or Dewey is because I take the thesis to be the
> collapse of the metaphysical/epistemological divide between subject/object,
> knower/known. The question then becomes, "What of pure experience? What role
> does it play?" ...Pure experience aside, I think most of our haggling still
> consists over this notion of the "linguistic turn." .. 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 says:
> 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?
>
> I'd say the only way associate pure experience with the myth of the given is
> to construe it as something like raw sense data or the pre-cognitive
> biological response. I don't know if you're seeing it that way, but its easy
> to see how one could.
>
> Also, of course we don't want to be like babies. The experience of infants
> is simply meant to illustrate a feature of adult experience that goes
> un-noticed. Its not that we outgrow this undifferentiated state so much as
> it falls into the background as our conceptual habits accumulate. Its that
> cutting edge of experience as in the train analogy or the immediate response
> in hot stove example.
>
> Thanks
> dmb
>
>
>
>
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