Dave, Thanks, it does help clarify the arguement tremendously, my own reservations just from conversations with Matt,center around just what is meant by human experience. I think Quine made a statement something like "one chimpanzee is no chimpanze" stressing that the human being is only found within a society. Matt made the comment about how much of human experience is colored by intersubjective agreement that to assert a sort of virgin preconceptual experience as a foundation for truth is not really taking this into account in a meaningful way. I havent found a way to counter this arguement. -Ron
----- Original Message ---- From: david buchanan <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thu, February 11, 2010 11:26:40 PM Subject: Re: [MD] Demanding Evidence From Theists 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 _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Trusted email with Microsoft’s powerful SPAM protection. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469226/direct/01/ 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/ 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/
