gav said: ...after reading this post it occurred to me that both matt and dmb are right, in a way. anyway this is what i am thinking...comments appreciated as it is not totally thought through yet... experience, pure experience, is primary, but experience occurs in a reality that is a product of the archetypal language of the mythos. so language does kinda produce reality - in the beginning was the word (mythos)...but experience is the present eternal moment - the irruption of the infinite - the dynamic- into the (static) mythic reality....continually revivifying and updating the mythos. chicken and egg?
dmb says: Right. Language does kinda produce reality. As Pirsig puts its, the world we inhabit is built of analogies. I believe Matt and I essentially agree on this point, but Matt pushes it to the extent that language becomes a kind of closed system. Rorty's aversion to epistemology has a way of sealing off everything non-linguistic. If it can't be presented in the form of a sentence, it doesn't count. When his let's-change-the-subject attitude is added to this, we get a pragmatism that can't very well include Pirsig's primary empirical reality precisely because it is pre-linguistic. This exclusion not only has an impact on the mysticism of the MOQ, it also moves the emphasis from direct everyday experience to conversation. Think about this in terms of Pirsig's central complaint against Plato. Pirsig's quality and Plato's good seemed very much alike, but the fatal move by the latter was to turn the good into The Good, a permanent, fixed form. Pirsig wants to say that, yes, the good is real but it can't be indentified in advance of actual experience. Its not something given to fixed concepts, not something that words can pin down. He wants to say that quality is known in experience and manifests itself in ways that are constantly novel, surprizing and unique. This emphasis on experience is undercut by Rorty's insistence on the primacy of conversation. He's not making the good into a Platonic form, but the effect is similar. His emphasis on language makes fixed, static forms into the coin of the realm. But he also scores some points for rhetoric over dialectic and I love the way he and Pirsig both lead us to conclude that philosophers and scientists should be seen as creative artists. Rorty makes an excellent argument against positivism and scientism. There are important points of agreement, but I think the differences are too big to ignore. As Hildebrand says, Rorty presents a kind of all-or-nothingism, a closed hegelian system, a kind of linguistic idealism. And he sets things up so that the quality of experience has to be converted into language before it can be admitted into that system. This puts things like dynamic quality in a very disadvantaged position. I suspect that has everything to do with Matt's inability to make any sense of "pure experience". His reactions to that exemplify what neopragmatism does to the MOQ. Or so it seems to me, dmb > david buchanan wrote: > Ian said: > I'd still be really interested where DMB fundamentally disagrees with Matt > .... not for the sake of argument, but fundamentally, pragmatically? > > dmb says: > I've discovered that there is a contemporary debate between classical > pragmatists and neopragmatists and I think my disagreement with Matt pretty > much draws the same line. Anderson's "Philosophy Americana" describes > neopragmatism as a forced merger between anglo-american analytic philosophy > and classical pragmatism. To make this work, the classical form has to suffer > some amputations, he says, and Rorty's way of sorting good Dewey the social > critic from bad Dewey the metaphysician exemplifies this amputation process. > Apparently, there is a neo-Peircian school that does the same to him. Like > Rorty, these hacks also from a post-positivistic background. > > More specifically, what's the difference between adopting radical empiricism > on one hand and on the other saying that we should change the subject? > > I haven't forgotten about the common rejection of SOM and all that, but > classical emphasizes experience and neoprag emphasizes language and that > largely shapes their overall character. Rorty seems more interested in > producing a kind of anti-positivism and adopts parts of classical pragmatism > to serve that end. Anyway, this difference makes classical and neopragmatism > into distinctly different creatures. The terms I'm using here are ones you > can find in any book on the topic, apparently. "Classical" and "neo" have > popped up in Anderson and in my school textbooks. > > My emphasis on "pure experience" in particular is just a very specific > version of the experience/language difference. Its that same old complaint > I've always had, that a Rortyized version takes the metaphysics and the > quality out of the metaphysics of quality. But its clearer to me now and > comforting to know that our little debate reflects a larger debate among > professionals. I like to think it's evidence that we haven't been wasting > time. Not all of it, anyway. _________________________________________________________________ Put your friends on the big screen with Windows Vista® + Windows Live™. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/shop/specialoffers.mspx?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_CPC_MediaCtr_bigscreen_102007 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
