Hey Ian, I'd been trying for a while to think of a way of grouping people like DMB and Hildebrand (amongst a number of others) who both identify as pragmatists and want to turn back the linguistic turn (I think James Conant out of Chicago, despite being a student of Putnam's, might count). As I understand it, there's a significant movement of people, not just pragmatists, who want to turn that clock back. But, on the other hand, they can't just be "pragmatists" because they've lived and learned through the rage of language-obsession that marks at least 75 years of American philosophy. You have to mark the range of wisdom learned between James and Dewey and Hildebrand and Barry Allen with something.
The "confusion of causation with justification" is a direct allusion to Rorty, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In the chapter that opens the second part, the part that deals with representational epistemology, he titles one of the sections "Locke's Confusion of Explanation with Justification," which is roughly between knowledge _of_ where something came from and knowledge _that_ something is so and so. This leads to Davidson's distinction between reasons and causes, such that a reason (justification) can be a cause (can change your mind, spur you into action, etc.), but a cause is not in itself a reason. You can be caused to think you see water, but the fact that you see water is not, by itself, a reason to think so--it is only within a network of other beliefs, the whole context of the situation, that a caused-belief can become a reason-to-believe. For instance, the fact that you are in a desert, dying of dehydration, and gored out of your mind on shrooms might give one pause before transfering the sight of water to having a good reason to think there's water over that horizon ahead. Matt > Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:20:08 +0200 > From: [email protected] > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [MD] Quine and the Linguistic Turn > > Excellent stuff Matt, > > As well as "retro-pragmatism" and "obi-philosophy-kenobi" I > particularly like this phrasing ... "confusion of causation with > justification". Not seen that before, but sounds just like where I'm > coming from. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ SkyDrive: Get 25 GB of free online storage. http://windowslive.com/online/skydrive?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_skydrive_032009 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/
