dmb said:
As I understand it, Rorty abandons the notion of truth in favor of
intersubjective agreement while pragmatic truth in the MOQ is neither social
nor biological but intellectual. (Truth is an intellectual species of the
Good.)
Ron replied:
I guess I simply do not understand the distinction between intersubjective
agreement and intellectual truth.
As I understand the argument and this may not accuratelly represent your
viewpoint, Rorty is making an assertion about biological good, the good and the
true is what satifies, you make the point in regard to the Nazis and relativism
and you make a social level appeal to the good of fellow humans, they are both
intellectual arguments concerning different levels of values, You seem to be
banging on the lack of social level intellectual values in Rorty's assertions.
I was trying to apply the four intellectual levels of pragmatic truth to
illuminate the disagreement you have with Rorty and relativism, guess it did'nt
work.
dmb says:
I don't think Rorty's position has anything to do with the four levels of
static quality. In fact, he reads Dewey's naturalism as if there was no
qualitative difference between single celled organisms and ourselves. It's just
a matter of degree. According to the Stanford article, "To be a naturalist in
Rorty's sense,
is to be the kind of antiessentialist who, like Dewey, sees no breaks in the
hierarchy of increasingly complex adjustments to novel stimulation—the
hierarchy which has amoeba adjusting themselves to changed water temperature at
the bottom, bees dancing and chess players check-mating in the middle, and
people fomenting scientific, artistic, and political revolutions at the top.
(ORT 109)"
Steve posted a quote in which Rorty says he thinks it's okay to challenge his
bigoted, fundamentalist students because he serves a better cause than they do,
but ultimately, he says, his perspective is not more justifiable than the
Nazis. Both liberal democrats and Nazis can only justify their respective
causes within their separate contexts and neither has any way to make an appeal
to justification for their believes on the basis of anything outside those
contexts. Thus, he thinks, all we can do is try to convince and constrain
others by way of conversation. As the Stanford article says...
"The upshot of Quine's and Sellars' criticisms of the myths and dogmas of
epistemology is, Rorty suggests, that "we see knowledge as a matter of
conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror
nature." (PMN 171) Rorty provides this view with a label: "Explaining
rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say,
rather than the latter by the former, is the essence of what I shall call
‘epistemological behaviorism,’ an attitude common to Dewey and Wittgenstein."
(PMN 174)"
As you may have noticed, by the way, Dewey scholars like Hickman and Hildebrand
think that Rorty misreads Dewey to the extent that he "eviscerates" Dewey's
pragmatism. In fact, there is a long list of such scholars who say this about
Rorty, so long that at this point, I think that is quite obviously true. Again
from the Stanford article....
4.2 Claim to Pragmatism
One particularly contentious issue has arisen in connection with Rorty's
appropriation of earlier philosophers; prominent readers of the classical
American pragmatists have expressed deep reservations about Rorty's
interpretation of Dewey and Peirce, in particular, and the pragmatist movement
in general. Consequently, Rorty's entitlement to the label "pragmatist" has
been challenged. For instance Susan Haack's strong claims on this score have
received much attention, but there are many others. (See, for example, the
discussions of Rorty in Thomas M. Alexander, 1987; Gary Brodsky, 1982; James
Campbell, 1984; Abraham Edel, 1985; James Gouinlock, 1995; Lavine 1995; R.W:
Sleeper, 1986; as well as the essays in Lenore Langdorf and Andrew R. Smith,
1995.) For Rorty, the key figure in the American pragmatist movement is John
Dewey, to whom he attributes many of his own central doctrines. In particular,
Rorty finds in Dewey an anticipation of his own view of philosophy as the
hand-maiden of a humanist politics, of a non-ontological view of the virtues of
inquiry, of a holistic conception of human intellectual life, and of an
anti-essentialist, historicist conception of philosophical thought. To read
Dewey his way, however, Rorty explicitly sets about separating the "good" from
the "bad" Dewey. (See "Dewey's Metaphysics," CP, 72-89, and "Dewey between
Hegel and Darwin", in Saatkamp, 1-15.) He is critical of what he takes to be
Dewey's backsliding into metaphysics in Experience and Nature, and has no
patience for the constructive attempt of Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Rorty
thus imposes a scheme of evaluation on Dewey's works which many scholars object
to. Lavine, for instance, claims that "scientific method" is Dewey's central
concept (Lavine 1995, 44). R.W. Sleeper holds that reform rather than
elimination of metaphysics and epistemology is Dewey's aim (Sleeper 1986, 2,
chapter 6)."
The short answer is basically just that Rorty is all about the linguistic
whereas classical pragmatists are all about experience. This is not to deny
that conversation counts as experience, of course, but experience is a much
larger category that also includes, importantly, non-verbal experience. This is
the big difference. For James, Dewey and Pirsig this non-verbal category is
quite central to the whole project. In Pirsig's case, for example, the
non-verbal is Dynamic Quality. If you take that out of the MOQ, you get the
metaphysics of nothing.
Does that help? I hope so.
dmb
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