DMB said:..I think our differences are quite real and are reflected in the current distinction between classical and neo-pragmatists.
Matt replied:And yet I remain unconvinced (stemming from my psychological-nominalism-functions-the-same-as-radical-empiricism thesis). ...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. dmb says:Think about how very different this is from Pirsig's "career". I don't have to tell you what sort of attitude Pirsig has toward historians of philosophy. Isn't McKeon the infamous chairman of the department in ZAMM? And Pirsig didn't calculate his career in philosophy so much as he was on a personal quest to answer a burning question. They're different kinds of guys, so much that its a bit remarkable that they have as much in common as they do philosophically. I wouldn't dispute your description of Rorty's path and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. Obviously, the man was successful in all sorts of ways. But it is quite a different path and requires a very different temperament. Somehow, this difference effects the end point, somehow IS the difference in the end points. I think the difference is kinda like that with us too.When you equate radical empiricism with "psychological nominalism", for example, it wouldn't really cover it to say I disagree. I mean, that does seem incorrect to me, to say that they are functional equivalents. But its more than that. It actually hurts somehow. I feel kind of sickened by it. It feels like the cold icy hand of scientism reaching in to strangle the actual, intended meaning. As I see, this perspective is infected with the same kind of flawed rationality that radical empiricism was meant to overcome in the first place and its just no accident that it comes out of logical positivism, philosophology and behaviorism. Its no accident that Pierce didn't like James's pragmatism right away. I think all this is very much part of the story. Not to mention the fact that Northrop's Meeting of East and West is Pirsig's central influence, he studied in Indian, has meditated for years and never was an academic philosopher. Not to mention that Pirsig is from the midwest and Rorty hails from the upper east side of Manhattan. Not to mention the fact that academic philosophers have named respective schools of pragmatism to mark the difference. So anyway, I'm actually quite astonished that you can shrug and say you don't see any real difference.If that hasn't already convinced you then I suppose nothing will.Thanks all the same,dmb _________________________________________________________________ Rediscover Hotmail®: Now available on your iPhone or BlackBerry http://windowslive.com/RediscoverHotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Rediscover_Mobile1_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/
