Hi Matt
I am perfectly happy to embrace the below, and I understand why Rorty adopts
the stance he does.
I kinda think that he had to state a strong case to make clear where he
stood against the tradition
and scientism. And I think as time goes by he changes his rhetoric to become
more inclusive
of the less romantic side of science and knowledge that is also part of the
way science and
knowledge operate. My position is positive towards this and I desire to
explore the language,
concepts and metaphors we use to try to make sense of both normal and
revolutionary
discourse. Once again once you have seen that the mountains are not
mountains you can
go back to talking about them as mountains most if the time but in the
context of the knowledge-
experience that at times the mountains can melt in the air.
For me we do have some philosophical-culural work to do to create a
non-scientistic
understanding of science that scientists can happily embrace. I see no
reason why this
cannot be achieved but work is required to explain how this is possible and
some
of what Rorty has said is very hard for scientists to make sense of it given
their less romantic
endeavours. But also the need in science and technology to get your hands
dirty with
very pragamatic interactions with nature, working out what behaviours are
possible and
can be physically produced and those that are impossible, is about the facts
of what is
the case, what was the case, what can be the case -often with human
intervention,
and what cannot be the case no matter the intervention or due to some limits
of energy
or resource. And on top of this, the urgent need to discuss what to do with
the powers
of our science and technology, and what sort of world, of the many we could
realise,
do we truly value and want to realise.
Scientism, and even secularism, and also fundamentailsm, all help to confuse
us
about the need to see that most of our social differences are about
different values,
that we have to find ways to live with each other given these differences,
and that the democratic ethos does need to be rediscovered.
I think I sit somewhere between you and DMB on this. I am a natural bridge
builder rather than a taking sides kind of person any way. I'd still like
Dewey's
talk of experience and nature and think this has more pragmatic flavour than
redescription and 'human interests', so I side with DMB on this. When it
comes
to 'truth' and language I don't think DMB has seen how important and useful
Rorty is on this, and that politically Rorty is on the same side as DMB, and
I expect you and I too.
The other elephant in the social room is where we fail to question where
free
markets, overly big business and globalisation may come into conflict with
our values.
Thanks for the post below.
David M
> DM said:
> If I say Rorty does not take descent account of the need to test our facts
> I mean something like this. Is there a biscuit in the biscuit tin? Whether
> it is or not is a fact, within the common language we are using. I do not
> think Rorty would deny this notion of fact. He would call it trivial. This
> is my problem. Not that we cannot agree what is going on here but that it
> is trivial for Rorty. I think this fails to understand what science does.
>
> Matt:
> I agree, I think we might be talking past each other, but let's see. What
> I don't get is this "does not take decent account of the need to test our
> facts". Rorty is fairly explicit in accepting the notion of fact you lay
> out. The distinction Rorty would want to make is between "our facts" and
> "the notion of a fact." What we call "facts" are those things crowding
> around one of the ends of the intersubjective continuum. Rorty might
> indeed call this trivial, but only under certain contexts, e.g. the
> philosophical context where you are rebutting SOM/Platonism. On this end,
> it is important that the notion of a fact is trivial, because it was only
> exciting because of the things Plato/Descartes/Carnap said it could do.
> However, actual particular facts, these have contexts of their own in
> which they can indeed be quite interesting.
>
> This is the non sequitor I think DMB made in his essay on Rorty. I don't
> think there is any connection between Rorty's calling the notion of facts
> philosophically uninteresting and trivial (after all, we all know
> commonsensically that you don't call a fact something only you and your
> Dungeons and Dragons friends agree is true) and the notion that some facts
> are very important indeed--like the Nazi Holocaust. The fact that the
> Nazi Holocaust shares the same trait as "rocks fall to the ground" is
> uninteresting, it doesn't enlighten us at all. The fact _of_ the Nazi
> Holocaust is a different story.
>
> One might bring up, to counter, the existence of the Ayatollah, and press
> the claim that the fact that the Holocaust is a fact is actually quite
> important. This has a lot of prima facie plausibility, about having to
> explain to people what evidence and argument are and the like. But it is
> again a non sequitor, as Platt rightly knows: he has been throwing against
> Rorty for years the fact that just because a lot of people believe it,
> that itself does not make it true. Telling Holocaust deniers that they
> don't understand what a fact is is not only question-begging, but by and
> large ineffective because usually what we are dealing with are different
> worldviews, worldviews that differ in _what_ they take to be evidence and
> authoritative lines of argument. The struggle with people like that is a
> cultural life and death struggle. At root, the line I'm taking would
> suggest that the notion of "facts" are philosophically uninteresting,
> though possibly politically interesting, becau
> se wrapped up in the notion of the Western, democratic lebensform.
> (Though again, by "philosophically uninteresting" I mean within the
> tradition of theory begun by Plato.)
>
> On the notion of a "dialogue with nature," I've said in the past that I
> think you're getting Rorty wrong on this score. If the only thing you
> mean by this metaphor is that we go back and forth between the pressures
> of rocks and our experimental ways of dealing with rocks, then nothing
> Rorty's said has diminished this dialectic, or even underplayed it, I
> would say. Certainly he emphasizes the part we play with language, but
> that's because he's promoting the Romantic tradition in an area that is
> largely Scientistic. If scientism had gone away, he would have sung in a
> different key. But it hasn't, so he continued singing the Romantic song
> of linguistic genius. But he's never said that scientists could get on
> without, say, experiments.
>
> "If 'scientific method' means merely being rational in some given area of
> inquiry, then it has a perfectly reasonable 'Kuhnian' sense--it means
> obeying the normal conventions of your discipline, not fudging the data
> _too_ much, not letting your hopes and fears influence your conclusions
> unless those hopes and fears are shared by all those who are in the same
> line of work, being open to refutation by experience, not blocking the
> road of inquiry. In this sense, 'method' and 'rationality' are names for
> a suitable balance between respect for the opinions of one's fellows and
> respect for the stubbornness of sensation." ("Method, Social Science,
> Social Hope," CP, 194-5)
>
> I think the above is exactly what Pirsig meant by scientific method in ZMM
> and what Dewey meant by bringing the experimental sciences to the rest of
> life. In this sense, what Dewey wanted to promote was the scientific
> ethos, which I would suggest is coextensive with the democratic ethos.
> And in this sense, Rorty is on Dewey's side of the cultural war.
>
> Matt
>
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