Matt said: 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.
dmb says: What are you saying here? Is Johnny and his fart joke an analogy for James and his doctrine of pure experience? As I see it, talking about this doctrine is a way of talking about the MOQ's central concept; Quality. I thought we had just identified this as THEE point of contention and were just about to focus the debate on that in a specific way but here it seems you want to dismiss that as a childish distraction. That could very well be a valid point but you'd have to explain some things before I can see it as such. I don't mind meta-philosophical generalizations or the efforts to defend Rorty's general reputation, but I still don't understand why you reject the doctrine of pure experience. And I'm only interested in Rorty to the extent that he gives you reasons for that rejection. As you know, this is my oldest and most persistent complaint about your take on the MOQ. As I used to say, it takes the Quality out of the MOQ. 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: Okay, it seems we agree that radical empiricism collapses the subject-object divide. We also agree that the world is known through language. And I think we agree that an important question then has to be asked: What role does pure experience play? In effect, this question asks what role does Quality play in Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality. Are we agreed as to the content of the topic, at least? That's certainly what I'm talking about and it seems to me that we have very different answers to that question. As I said last time, pure experience is that cutting edge of experience as in the train analogy or the immediate response to a low quality situation as in the hot stove example. It seems central and essential to me. I'd say that both classical pragmatism and the MOQ would both be empty and incoherent without it and you seem to be saying it just doesn't matter, that it is as trivial and distracting as a childish fart joke. I don't get that. I mean, WHY do you think its okay to ignore it? HOW do you justify the claim that it doesn't matter? See, I'm asking you to be very specific because its not clear what path you've taken to reach such conclusions. To put it in very basic terms, we have Dewey saying that there is a big difference between having and experience and knowing you had an experience but, for reasons that are very fuzzy to me, you and/or Rorty seem to be saying simply that there is no difference between had and known. As I see it, the classical pragmatists (Pirsig, James, Dewey and now I would add Mead to the list as well) are all in agreement as to the central role played by pure experience. They all take it to be the original impulse that guides all subsequent development. As I understand it, rejecting pure experience is a rejection of the MOQ and pragmatism in general. Rejecting that means that your position can't rightly be called pragmatism and this is what Rorty's critics are saying when they call him a neo-pragmatist, a linguistic idealist or a mamby pamby positivist. They're all saying that his view is to be distinguished from classical pragmatism. Ideally, to get right at the heart of our debate you would do something like present Rorty's reaction to that specific doctrine, present some quotes from him where he discusses that feature of classical pragmatism in more specific terms. I need to see the argument that gets him to the conclusion that it just doesn't matter. It could very well be that you're directly addressing this issue when you distinguish between the early and late versions of Rorty or when you describe his aims and goals in meta-philosophical terms. But I don't see how. That mode of discussion doesn't work for me. As I see it, switching to that mode is really just a way of changing the subject to something other than pure experience. Just yesterday I read a piece about Mead by Sandra Rosenthal (Mead: Behavior and the Percieved world). In the first paragraph she explains that SOM spawned all sorts of debates; realism versus idealism or objectivism versus subjectivism, etc. Like Hildebrand, she says that the contemporary version of this debate "is to be found, in more updated garb, in the realist-anti-realist debate" (Classical American Pragmatism, page 59). Her central thesis in this piece is that Mead, unlike guys like Rorty, "undercuts the either/ors of these various alternatives" (CAP, page 60). Here's the second paragraph in its entirety... "Mead's position is in agreement with the claims of contemporary postmodernists such as Rorty and Derrida that our awareness cannot mirror an independent reality and that our awareness is symbolic in nature; nonetheless, it categorically rejects their claims that as a result we are denied any access to a 'hard' independent reality and are instead confined to self-contained conversation or the play of differance. Conversely, although agreeing with those who posit an independent reality that enters into our perception, Mead denies that this reality can in any way provide us with a picture of itself independent of our interactions with it. He avoids the pitfalls of either extreme by turning to human behavior in its primordial, prereflective active engagement with and openness onto a think natural universe as the holistic context within which the percieved world arises." This single paragraph fairly well summarizes THEE point I've been trying to make for at least a year. I imagine you already see what I mean but for the sake of clarity and for the sake of any MOQers who are following this debate I'll ask you to notice that Rorty and Mead agree insofar as they both reject the reflection paradigm. It seems that we have no disagreements on this point either. But I'll also ask you to notice the Rortarian position categorically rejected by Mead. He rejects the view that we are "confined to self-contained conversation" as a result of rejecting the mirror paradigm, as a result of rejecting SOM. And please notice that Mead avoids that conclusion by turning to our "primordial, prereflective active engagement" with the world. This prereflective activity is Mead's version of Quality or pure experience and it is also exactly what distinguishes his view from Rorty's. Mead is saying that our "linguistic structures ..are not 'free floating' constructions" but rather that they are "ultimately rooted in the ..universe in which we are embedded". These structures grow out of the universe as an emergent property, one that can't be reduced to the structures from which they spring. And here Mead is parallel to Pirsig in asserting that there are levels of reality and that these levels exist together in an evolutionary relationship - and that we are all those levels at once. Anyway, it seems to me that Rorty becomes an anti-realist precisely because there is no anchor in pure experience or anything like it. This is what leads his critics to charge him with a kind of idealism, where linguistic structures are "free-floating" so that they can only ever be compared to other "free-floating" structures, thus he rejects Objectivity in favor of intersubjective agreement or Solidarity. So I'm hoping that this debate will move forward with a reply from you that specifically explains 1) How Rorty escapes this charge or 2) Why Rorty rejects pure experience or 3) How the realism/anti-realism debate ISN'T just an extension of the debates spawned by SOM or 4) What you think of the role played by pure experience or Quality. As you can see, I'm more convinced than ever that this issue makes or breaks the MOQ in particular and classical pragmatism in general. Without something like a doctrine of pure experience, James, Dewey, Mead and Pirsig are just dime-a-dozen postmodernists and not very good ones at that. And now its time for me to read some of the first assigned Rorty readings for tommorrow's class. Thanks, dmb _________________________________________________________________ Climb to the top of the charts! 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