Matt said: Well, first, let's be clear that all the classical pragmatists are dead, which is why I wanted a new handle.
DMB said: Firstly, you're suffering from a misconception if you think all the classical pragmatists are dead. I'd call myself a classical pragmatist and its my assertion that Pirsig is too. Living academic philosophers such as Hildebrand, Rosenthal and Stuhr describe themselves as classical pragmatist precisely to distinguish themselves from neo-pragmatists, especially Rorty. Further, this distinction is not predicated on whether or not one adopts the insights of the linguistic turn nor upon whether or not one looks to the dead originators of pragmatism. All pragmatists, more or less, share those things in common. The contemporary philosophers who describe themselves as classical pragmatists insist that radical empiricism is a crucial ingredient. The neo-pragmatists don't hitch their brand to radical empiricism. Matt: Again, I don't see where we disagree. I think a contemporary American philosopher calling themselves a classical pragmatist obscures more than elucidates, but I can't see that it matters much because my handle "retro-pragmatist" still roughly grabs the same thing you're roughly grabbing with "classical pragmatist." DMB said: And like I tried to explain above, I think our differences are quite real and are reflected in the current distinction between classical and neo-pragmatists. Matt: And yet I remain unconvinced (stemming from my psychological-nominalism-functions-the-same-as-radical-empiricism thesis). For instance, you say, "Pirsig, for example, confesses that he was underwhelmed by the Vienna Circle types and never really saw much value in the logical analysis of language or as a handmaiden to science." Rorty was never convinced for very long that there was anything interesting picked out by "logical analysis of language," nor did he ever have any truck with the notion that philosophy was a "handmaiden to science." Rorty was taught be historians of philosophy (like McKeon and Strauss), out of sync Whiteheadians (like Hartshorne and Weiss), and in vogue positivists (like Carnap and Hempel). He gravitated to the historians and Whiteheadians, but picked up pretty quickly that if he was to have a career, he needed to learn what Carnap and Wittgenstain were talking about. But I don't think one has to look much further than his '61 paper comparing Peirce and Wittgenstein, which first sentence is "Pragmatism is getting respectable again," to get the feeling that he was always skeptical about positivism. I don't know--you think something big and important happens when you accidentally (because of contingent circumstance) trend from mysticism to pragmatism as opposed to when you accidentally (because of contingent circumstance) trend from analytic philosophy to pragmatism. Me, not so much. I just see a lot of different flavors and emphases that, once one has absorbed the principle outlook of pragmatism, reduces the broad outlook of the various exponents to just that, different flavors and emphases. One can still distaste Putnam's entire first volume of essays (as I do), about half of his second (as I do), and like most of his third without feeling the need to think the distaste has significant philosophical import. That's just me. I tend to think that the more one goes in for pragmatism, the more lax one will become in trying to arrange a set of interlocking philosophical principles, the more one will amusingly enjoy Kenneth Burke's "system" in A Grammar of Motives, a system for people who don't like systems. He calls it "dramatism" and arranges things in sets of five: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose. And then he arranges Realism, Materialism, Idealism, Pragmatism, and Mysticism in corresponding relations of emphasis, pulling out of each philosophical tradition the wisdom obscured by their over-emphasis. The joke is that he says, "nominalism and rationalism increase the kinds of terminology to seven. But since we have used up all our terms, we must account for them indirectly." There can be nothing more unprincipled than that--"You know when I told you that everything under the sun is in my system of five? Yeah, well, here's a few more I want to talk about." It punches up that one's system is what designates necessity, rather than necessity creating the system. "The system wants to push me around into thinking shit's gotta' come in fives, but I'm gonna' talk about this stuff anyways." DMB said: I mean, to put it simply, our dispute reflected the debate between two already named schools of thought. I think we should both be flattered by that. It serves as a reality check and puts us in the same context as a current, living debate. Ouch! I just strained my arm patting myself on the back. Matt: Yeah, except that, having seen the debate and context before, and decided it best to shirk them as needless, I tend to think of you as trying to get me to regress. I'm not flattered so much as impatient. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Rediscover Hotmail®: Get quick friend updates right in your inbox. http://windowslive.com/RediscoverHotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Rediscover_Updates1_042009 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/
