dmb said to Steve:
...relativism and foundationalism aren't the only two options and I'm opposed
to them both.
Steve replied:
I agree, and so does Rorty. The key difference may be that you see "other
options" as middle ground, while I see the alternative as dropping the notion
of grounding all together.
dmb says:
Exactly, I'm saying that foundationalism and relativism are the extreme
positions and the other options would be somewhere in the middle. See, dropping
the notion of grounding altogether is the purely anti-foundational move that
results in relativism. In this case, that's not an alternative to relativism
but rather the cause of it. Because he thinks no reconstruction project is
desirable or even possible, Rorty ends up holding the extreme position. As
Hildebrand puts it, "Rorty's neo-pragmatism harbors such a deep skepticism
about traditional epistemologies and metaphysics that it can accept only a
wholesale rejection of their projects" (103). As Rorty saw it, Dewey was either
intentionally slipping back into essentialism or he was doing so unconsciously.
Hildebrand calls this "Rorty's Fork", which I take to be a version of that
all-or-nothingism I keep seeing again and again. Rorty even suggest that we
bracket out all of Dewey's constructive work (bad Dewey) but applaud the
anti-foundationalism, anti-Cartesianism and the other similar demolition
projects. Rorty thinks Dewey was just so confused or whatever that when he
offered his reconstructions, Dewey somehow aligned himself "with doctrines he
repudiated, becoming, in effect, his own nemesis" (105). Hildebrand is making a
case here that this unflattering Janus portrait of Dewey is not untrue,
bracketing out the reconstructive side "eviscerates" pragmatism. I agree. For
all the same reasons, Rorty's neopragmatism would have cut out of the MOQ as
well.
By now it should be clear that central notions like primary and secondary
experience and projects seeking the generic traits of existence cannot be
expunged from Dewey's philosophy, nor do they need to be. Rorty's claim that
such notions only indicate Dewey's fealty to the obsolete tenets of traditional
metaphysics does not stand scrutiny. It is unfortunate that Rorty cannot shake
his conviction that ANY philosophical project that aims to describe the most
general features of reality must be seeking the divine. Dewey understood the
vice of overgeneralizations, and so he admitted generalities into metaphysic
only insofar as they could be functionally justified. In other words, he knew
that a metaphysical inquiry would only be worthwhile if it begins from a living
starting point and is set up with categories that can adjust to the tests and
revisions of future experience. An empirical metaphysics begins not with a
THEORY that life is interactive but with the interactions - the EXISTENCES -
themselves. (120)
By contrast, because Rorty's "approach is based on the demonstration that all
vocabularies are metaphysically equal - i.e., no vocabularies can claim to 'get
at' what we now know is a phantom, the 'really real' - it offers an opportunity
for the downtrodden humanities to take back power from thier scientistic
oppressors. It's a sexy fantasy, but not one on which Rorty's neopragmatism can
deliver" (124). Hildebrand even thinks that, at times, Rorty's "linguistic
pragmatism borders on whimsical nonsense". (124)
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