DMB, DMB said: Matt, you equate radical empiricism with psychological nominalism? (Also known as verbal behaviorism) It's just a matter of differing idioms? I don't get that. I don't even see how they relate, let alone how they can be equated.
Matt: I know. I've spilt some blood in the past over this, and I'm not prepared right now to do so again. I haven't been working on it lately. The gist is simple--my formula, that radical empiricism equals psychological nominalism, is done in a specific context: what happens if we look at the world for specific, philosophical, universal cuts in it? Radical empiricism was a monistic-like response to the distinction between experience and reality--it denied it and equated the two. Radical empiricism was formulated in a conceptual milieu that took for granted the distinction (roughly, a post-Cartesian one that separated the Mind (experience) from Reality). Likewise, Sellars' doctrine was formulated in a conceptual milieu that took for granted a distinction between language and experience (one could find it variously in the analytic/synthetic distinction or the scheme/content distinction, both Kantian), one that said, "Hey, there's the stuff that's given in experience, then there's the concepts we add to it, place on top of it." Sellars thought this notion of the "Given" was a myth, and so collapsed the language/experience distinction. Ultimately, I would argue, both radical empiricist and psychological nominalist has to collapse the leftovers into the other one they weren't looking at, and become full metaphysical monists. Pragmatists, in response to "Where is reality cut at the joints?", have to say "Reality has no joints," and so to people looking for joints they will appear as monists. Sellars, for one, wasn't so good at this, and Rorty hammered him on it in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. DMB said: You're quite right to point out that the realism/antirealism debate between Putnam and Rorty is pretty much the same as the 19th century debate between idealism and realism. (Which could be described as a debate between subjectivism and objectivity.) Hildebrand says that this is a sure sign that Rorty is missing something important in Dewey and classical pragmatism because the latter already disposed of that debate, thus we pragmatist should already be "Beyond" that debate, as one may have guessed from Hildebrand's title. He says it shouldn't still be raging and wouldn't be except for the neo-pragmatist's mistake. Matt: Well, I'm not sure what you mean by the realism/antirealism debate _between_ Putnam and Rorty, they are basically (with severe reticence by Putnam, and slight by Rorty) on the same side. And I would strongly dissuade people from calling it a debate between subjectivism and objectivity because I think that misses what they wanted to do. But, when you say that the classical pragmatists wanted to dispose of the realism/idealism debate, you're absolutely right, and that's one reason why Rorty never chose sides in that debate, but actively argued giving up the debate (between, more rightly, people like Thomas Nagel as realist and Michael Dummett as anti-realist). Rorty, over his career, kept getting saddled as an anti-realist, but that shouldn't surprise us since Dewey kept getting saddled as an idealist, just as both kept getting saddled as relativists (and worse). They both kept trying to shirk the mantles and show how they differed, but that's the way it goes sometimes. And you're right, the idea of relativism does still exercise not just the minds of some intellectuals, but also the minds of regular folk. I take the task of pragmatists, though, to be to shrug off that moniker for what's going on in the relevant areas of interest (political rages over the teaching of science, how we should educate, whose literature we should teach, how we should conduct academic politics) and to suggest different tools for discussing them. There are real problems out there, but I think labeling them with "relativism" casts more shadows than light as to what the problems are and how they should best be treated. Specifically, I think treating the threat of "relativism" as real and important aids political conservatives. For instance, if I was faced with a conservative who feared that relativists were writing up our lists of books our children should read, I think it pretty easy to dispose of it by saying, "Oh, yeah, that would be bad. Relativism, being the view that one particular thing isn't any better than any other particular thing, would be horrible. But it is also self-refuting and anybody who takes any particular action is by that very act refuting it. So, since life is one damn action after another, what are we really talking about here? What is it you really fear, since it couldn't possibly be people acting relativistically?" The debate then would, no doubt, move to cultural relativism, but there are fairly easy answers for that, though worth addressing as they come. DMB said: But tell me more about "the really important stuff in James, Dewey and Rorty, which going back to Emerson helps to see". I'd be very interested to know what this important stuff is, exactly. Matt: I don't have anything exactly to say at the moment. It's still a path I'm traveling. But, if you are actually curious, I could suggest Stanley Cavell's Senses of Walden. I take Emerson and Thoreau to be America's first great indigenous philosophers, but completely unprofessionalizable, and Rorty and Pirsig to be two of their heirs (Rorty the Emerson to Pirsig's Thoreau). Cavell's sensitive treatment of Walden, plus the 2nd edition's inclusion of two essays on Emerson, impacted me greatly in helping along the process of refocusing attention away from the problems of professionals, to a more personal, amateur philosophy. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t1_allup_explore_012009 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/
