DMB, DMB said: 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. Matt: I would, after a fashion, object to the use of "emphasize" simply because I don't think it's a difference between emphasizing our experience of the world and emphasizing the language we use to talk about the world. I think both classicals and neos do both at different times, or at the least can do both at any time they wish. I think the difference is the way in which they talk about stuff, the idiom of experience and idiom of language. Dewey talks about epistemological problems in terms of experience, Sellars, Quine, Rorty in terms of language. I won't deny that there are differences between the epochs, but I think as history sweeps forward, just as T. S. Eliot thought Modernism was a huge break from Romanticism, people looking back will see fewer differences and more continuities. My Rortyan contention with radical empiricism is that if one becomes a radical empiricist, then the end point is that there is eventually very little to say about epistemology as distinct from the sociology of knowledge. Cartesian epistemology was an area of inquiry that was distinct from the practices of accumulating knowledge, and if radical empiricism is what we call the demolition of that problematic, we are left to focus on the various practices of the various areas of inquiry, which is what Dewey did move on to after a fashion. The connection between radical empiricism and Rorty's slogan of "changing the subject" is that radical empiricism closes one subject to move to another. Dewey's not trying to underwrite knowledge, as traditional epistemology had composed itself (like by trying to prove the existence of an external world), he's trying to help our practice of gaining knowledge, e.g. by trying to clear away the bad ways in which we had tried to describe the process of gaining knowledge and replacing them with new descriptions. One way: inquiry isn't a matter of trying to represent an object better, inquiry is about resolving a doubt. The former creates a meta-problem for inquiry: how do we know we're representing an object better? This requires an answer in addition to the stuff that the inquiry actually does. The latter, pragmatist formulation does not, because the parallel question would be: how do we know we've resolved a doubt? This question can be answered fairly simply with, "BECAUSE I DON'T DOUBT IT ANYMORE, DUMBASS!" There is no extra area of inquiry created, which closes the old area, and changes, or if you prefer, refocuses our attention on a different area. Part of why I want to make this connection between radical empiricism, psychological nominalism, and Rorty's slogan is because I think you are playing on an ambiguity when you say, as you often have, that "a Rortyized version [of Pirsig's philosophy] takes the metaphysics and the quality out of the metaphysics of quality." I would halt Ian from saying that I or Rorty would agree to this formulation because one of the things I've constantly tried to do is point out the ambiguity of the word "metaphysics" in Pirsig's usage as compared to Rorty's usage. Rorty's enemy is the appearance/reality distinctive version of metaphysics, which you agree is not the version Pirsig is using. The version Pirsig uses is something wide like, "a general framework of understanding," and in this sense there's nothing to theoretically object to, as it is just like Sellars' definition of philosophy as "seeing how things, in the widest possible sense, hang together, in the widest possible sense," a definition that Rorty adheres to. What Pirsig calls his "Metaphysics of Quality," I would transmute to "Philosophy of Quality," and I don't think anything in particular is lost. What requires more ink is, as Ian points out, the "Quality" bit, because both you and I ascribe different importance to its usage in Pirsig's philosophy. In my eyes, as in Ian's, part of this hangs on why we use "pure" at all in our use of "experience." You think it is very important that we do, I don't. In my attempts to explain Pirsig's use of Quality, I emphasize two of his formulations: his reduction of experience to reality to value, making all three philosophically quasi-synonymous, and his anti-definition of Quality. The former destroys the Cartesian problematic of representationalism, while also insightfully making the Deweyan extrapolation that "reality is an evaluative term." The latter destroys the Platonic problematic of essentialism: Quality is an anti-essence, a statement about the relational play of all points of definition. Reality cannot, en ensemble, by defined because it is in a constant state of evolution, change, flux. If I'm not totally off, I think you would agree with both of those formulations, but you would insist that Pirsig's philosophy is not only incomplete, but disastrously impaired if a third is not added: the bit about pure experience, the pre-intellectual cutting edge of experience. To my mind, these passages in Pirsig are reducible to the first two formulations. You think there is dangerous amputation happening. I'm just not sure why we need to say that "Dynamic Quality is the lived, flux of pure experience" as opposed to "Dynamic Quality is the lived, flux of experience." Pure experience has to contrast with something, and I'm not sure what it is. People are at pains to deny the obvious contrast of "impure experience," and I can understand why, since calling static patterns, en ensemble, impure seems just about as hazardous as saying that reality has an essence. Why is democracy, which would otherwise be called one of the greatest static patterns we've come up with, impure? We can give many kinds of answers (ranging from a Buddhistic maya-style answer to a Churchillian "but it's the best we got" answer), but most of them seem disingenuous since the implication is that there is something purer than democracy that it is a lesser form of. Purity just seems out of place when talking about static patterns. I think it creates a needless pathos, one that the masochistic/ascetic might go in for, but not one for a pragmatist. I would agree to a Deweyan construal of Pirsig's DQ/static patterns distinction. From a metaphysical standpoint, DQ is the flow of lived experience and static patterns are the train of past experiences with which we interpret new experience. When an anomaly occurs, we seek to accommodate it as best we can, but sometimes it calls for an entire reappraisal of the train. From an epistemological standpoint, the Dynamic point of view is the one in which we live life as it happens. The static point of view is a special case in which we look at the way in which we have been living life. In the former we are looking forward, out past the head of the train, in the latter we are looking behind ourselves at the train of experiences that shape how we are living life. The first is non-reflective, instinctual living of life, the second reflection on our instincts (which is no less instinctual, since it requires a special set of instincts to guide the process--hence the apparent problem of "boot-strapping" and the search for a final resting place, a foundation to avoid infinite regress). But in none of these construals do I see an important need to use "pure," "direct," or "pre-intellectual." Insisting on them looks either suspicious or insular. DMB said: 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. Matt: I don't see the push. Rorty's point is that language is _not_ a closed system. It is an open, evolving system. In fact, pushed to its limits, Rorty's philosophy of language makes us suspicious that we should even be using "system" in conjunction to "language". (Davidson once put the point by saying that if "language" is construed in any of the ways that philosophers have usually done it, then there's no such thing as "language," which I take to be a Deweyan point of view that our marks and noises are just evolved tools like arms and hammers.) Rorty doesn't seal off the non-linguistic, he is just being careful not to treat the non-linguistic the way philosophers since Plato have been treating it. That, I would suggest, is what produces the strangeness you feel. Rocks, lakes, beauty, all of these things count. Rorty is just trying to move us away from a representationalist account of language, and part of that problematic, so he argues, is the idea that there are some things we inherently cannot express through language, some things that cannot be "presented in the form of a sentence." Language isn't, in this sense, in the expression or presentation business. Instead of claiming that some things are ineffable, that some things--as you put it--"can't be presented in the form of a sentence," I've tried to suggest that some things are just difficult to talk about. I take part of Dewey's means/end continuum to be, in reference to the evolution of language, that metaphor expands our language by overshooting what we can currently make sense of and eventually creating a space where sense is made. On this account, when we have difficulty putting something into words, it is not because we sense our words falling short of a target, as if we see the target perfectly well, it is because we sense that there are problems in the words we are using. Ironing out these problems creates new meanings and words, and thus creates new logical space. We don't have an idea of what we want to say that we are falling short of, we have an idea of what we _don't_ want to say that we want to avoid (Stanely Cavell has put this point brilliantly in an old paper about Austin and so-called ordinary language philosophy*). Whitehead's "dim apprehension," on my reckoning, isn't an apprehension of something just ahead of me, it is an apprehension that there is a problem behind me. A good encapsulation of why I don't like your formulations of the problem is because when you say, "moves the emphasis from direct everyday experience to conversation," I want to know when conversation is not something I do directly everyday. This is the problem with saying that static patterns are indirect, or impure, with saying that reflection is indirect. If we collapse the experience/reality distinction, then reflection is as direct as any other experience to reality and it would seem to be as in point to say, in the philosophical manner and level at which we are speaking, that playing soccer is as indirect an experience of baseball as reflection about baseball is an indirect experience of baseball. We get the point that talking about or thinking about baseball is not the same as playing baseball, but so is playing soccer not the same as playing baseball or thinking about baseball. Direct and indirect seem out of point, if for no other reason than once you collapse the Cartesian problematic, you are always directly experiencing whatever it is you are experiencing because there is no longer a distance between knower and known. DMB said: It's 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. Matt: Might there not be a good reason why, even as you said, Rorty talks about the primacy of _conversation_? Conversation, unlike possibly language, definitely refers to a lived, dynamic experience. Even more, as I intimated above, the very existence of a thing called "language" that is made up of fixed, static forms is a myth--part of the work on the philosophy of language that Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Rorty and others have been at is that language is _not_ this fixed thing that we place on top of the flux of experience. The choice between the idiom of experience and the idiom of language, I would continue to argue, is insignificant at the level of destroying Cartesianism. You might agree, but continue that we don't just want to destroy Cartesianism, we want to do other things, too. I would certainly agree, but point out that not only does Rorty not preclude the use of other idioms, does not preclude the doing of other things, but that I think pressuring this point on Rorty would be like me saying that all of Pirsig's talk about experience leaves out the wonderful things that poets do with words (try fitting "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;/All mimsy were the borogoves,/And the mome raths outgrabe" into an experience). Or worse, that Pirsig's philosophy precludes the playing of baseball, that reading and writing philosophy precludes going out and watching a sunset. You might think that absurd, particularly since Pirsig is at pains to try and point out to us that there are other things in life than philosophy, but as absurd as you find that accusation, I find it absurd that an economist, after writing a book about the importance of economics, must write, "But you might also spend your time watching a sunset, hunting tigers, eating apples, reading poetry, having sex, smoking a cigarette, doing shrooms, killing parental figures,..."--a list that could go on indefinitely--so as not to accidentally preclude other activities. Matt *Cavell builds three insights out of how Austin writes as a better beginning towards a description of how ordinary language philosophy proceeds: "(1) that one can as appropriately or truly be said to be looking at the world as looking at language; (2) that one is seeking necessary truths 'about' the world (or 'about' language) and therefore cannot be satisfied with anything I, at least, would recognize as a description of how people in fact talk—one might say one is seeking one kind of explanation of why people speak as they do; and even (3) that one is not finally interested at all in how 'other' people talk, but in determining where and why one wishes, or hesitates, to use a particular expression oneself." _________________________________________________________________ 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/
