Matt said:...Because of the struggles of Quine and Sellars in breaking apart the last, bad vestiges of logical positivism, rooted as they were in traditional British empiricism, Rorty was caught up in continuing the struggle of differentiating what pragmatists were saying from, say, Locke and Hume and then Carnap and Ayer. So, to emphasize a difference, he suggests pragmatists from James to Putnam are really, despite a few differences of opinion here and there, are broadly trying to end what the old guard thought needed doing. [and] In other words, I think you read too much into it, though in your professional nit-picky role you have to choose and articulate these nits over those. In my role to oppose yours, though, I want to counter with, "There are fewer nits here to choose over than I think you think."
dmb says: Hmmm. I'm pretty sure that you've got the wrong idea about what I'm saying. In fact, I don't think it is at all a matter of picking nits. Quite the opposite. I think the difference between Pirsig and the names you've dropped here is huge and entails fundamentally different worldviews. It's hard to measure the distance between positivism and philosophical mysticism, except maybe in light-years. To characterize these discussions as nit-picky is really rather dismissive. "Phaedrus had taken a course in symbolic logic from a member of logical positivism's famed Vienna circle, Herbert Feigl", Pirsig writes at the end of chapter five, "but even then the assertion that metaphysics is meaningless sounded false to him". He explains that "we have a culturally inherited blind spot here" and it seems pretty obvious to me that the tradition that Rorty comes out of is very much involved in this blind spot. Matt also said: Your interpolation that "Rorty is to Skinner and Freud as Pirsig is to Campbell and Jung," think is pretty good (except for the inclusion of Skinner--to get the analogy better you might have said might favorite classicist right now, Eric Havelock). I don't like Jung, as compared to Freud, and Rorty would've felt the same way. I don't like Jung because the whole idea of a "collective unconscious" that isn't rooted in the materials of culture (like communicative processes) seems unDarwinian to me. Everything is rooted in "material," even if we can't _reduce_ everything to their material and still be able to talk about it understandably. dmb says:I can understand why you'd want to distance yourself from Skinner but this seemed a little unfair to me, so I looked into it. Admittedly, I'm just going by the superficial treatment given by Wikipedia but the fact is that Quine drew upon Skinner, particularly with respect to his analysis of language in terms of verbal behavior and was editor of the journal BEHAVIORISM. At least some large portions of Sellars work also is said to have been done from "within a strict behaviorist worldview". Again, this would be lightyears away from the MOQ. There is an interesting parallel to this in the case of Freud and Jung. The Freudians will tell you that Jung is 90% Freud and they tend to be dismissive of Jungians in a very condescending way. But the Jungians will tell you an entirely different story. In fact, Freud himself publicly denounced Jung as a mystic. Freud thought religiosity was a sickness while Jung thought human health was impossible without spiritual development. On that score, they could hardly be more opposed. Matt said: That being said, a friend of mine who is finishing her master's in psychology and her therapy internship recently confided that, despite not liking Jung for pretty much the same reasons as I, has found "Jungian therapy" to be her therapeutic principles of choice. I find this perfectly understandable and appropriate because, while we might find so-called metaphysical implications of Jung unacceptable, the practices they enable might still yet be useful _in practice_. The implications of this to metaphysics are a further conversation, but one that pragmatists have the upper hand in explaining (as opposed to reductive materialists would wield the word "lie" and have trouble explaining, then, the okay utility of lies). dmb says:Right. For certain purposes, Freudian therapy is completely useless. He was entirely incapable of helping psychotics, for example, while Jung was able to help about a third and completely cured another third. Freudian therapy can only help neurotic people adjust themselves to function in society while Jung thought society itself was sick and why in the world would you want to adjust yourself to that. This, I think, is parallel to Pirsig's view that we have culturally inherited blind spot, that rationality, for all its benefits, has cut us off from something central and vital. It also reflects, I think, Pirsig's own psychosis, from which he emerged as better than cured. That same episode can also be construed as a mystical experience, and enlightenment experience and Pirsig himself does not dispute either interpretation. I'm quite sure that Jung would smile and nod at that. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: E-mail. Chat. Share. Get more ways to connect. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t2_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/
