Hi DMB,
Steve to Ham: > I thought I was defending certain beliefs from the obligation for evidence. > > dmb says: > That's pretty much what I got out of it. I would replace "defending" with > "exempting" but that's not a huge difference. More or less amounts to the > same thing, I guess. Anyway, that is what we disagree about. > Steve to Ham: > I must not have read my own essay carefully enough. > > dmb says: > > In that case, I'd suggest you look it over one more time and then ask the > author what he meant. Kinda like this... > > > > The author of Steve's essay said: > .."the point of holding beliefs is not to seek Truth but to gratify > particular desires," that "we need to try to get our beliefs to cohere with > [others'] beliefs." > > Steve: Ham had asserted that the whole point of pragmatism is to get people to agree. If the author of Steve's essay had thought that Ham was actually interested in what the essay said instead of just trying to find a way to insert his Essentialism into the conversation, he probably would have pointed out that the above means that one of our desires is to get agreement with others but this isn't the whole point of pragmatism. > dmb says: > > Gratify desires? Is that as crass as it sounds? Please elaborate because, > as I understand it, "the idea that satisfaction alone is the test of > anything is very dangerous, according to the MOQ. There are different kinds > of satisfaction and some of them are moral nightmares. The Holocaust > produced a satisfaction among the Nazis." I realize that Nazism is just > about the last thing that you or Rorty would desire. But you're just > messengers of this neo-pragmatic view of the nature of beliefs. It's the > message that concerns me. Steve: No one said that satisfaction alone is sufficient to be useful as the test of anything. But before you could devise a test for something you would need to figure out what that thing is supposed to do (and whether that is a good thing to do). Once you establish that, the pragmatic test is simply to ask, does it do what it's supposed to do? For example, scientific beliefs are supposed to help us help us control and predict our experiences. What are religious beliefs supposed to do? DMB: > The idea that it's just about gratifying desires can be taken up by > somebody else who is looking to gratify very different desires. Steve: That what is just about gratifying desires? If you are talking about the desire to hold true beliefs, this means that we want our beliefs to be logically coherent, to agree with experience, and be parsimonious. Is there something wrong with trying to gratify such desires? * * *Best,* *Steve* 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/
