Steve said to DMB: In [DMB's] view, if Matt wants to be an anti-Platonist but doesn't want to do radical empiricism, then he must not understand radical empiricism. Matt is willing to grant that he may not understand radical empiricism, but he thinks that even if he understood it, he still wouldn't necesarily want to use it since he already has ways of doing anti-Platonism. But you keep insisting that either he does radical empiricism or he is a Platonist in your book. Then Matt just shrugs and walks away. He knows that he is not a Platonist, but he also knows that you are no more interested in understanding his sort of anti-Platonism as he is in better understanding your radical empiricism.
Matt: Let me augment two things to this account: 1) I think Dave is interested in understanding my "sort of anti-Platonism," the Rortyan neopragmatist sort, and this is why he's so frustrated with me for not being more conversable. My trouble in conversing (which Dave doesn't appear to consider to be legitimate) are 1) time, 2) energy, 3) understanding of the issues (I'm no longer reading this kind of stuff much) and 4) the problem of repetition. Dave brought up the frustration of having to repeat himself all the time, which is a sigh I have frequently with him, too, the only difference being that I must consider it more experientially, I guess--I don't just attribute it to stupidity or cotton in a person's ears (which is the only thing I can figure with all the deprecating remarks and parentheticals that often litter his posts to people, and not just me), so much as it might be a combination of any number of things I can't control, including my present ability to explain the things I'm saying in an accessible manner. That's my problem, and if I can't think of another way of expressing myself (because of, in part, 1, 2, and 3), then I "walk away." We all make choices, and I get a little extra annoyed by the particular kinds of efforts that Dave makes to convince me to make a different choice. (I can't tell, but I wonder sometimes about some of his descriptions of the situation, and whether or not they are entirely sincere, that perhaps some of them are flagrantly offbase--and he understands more than it appears--just to goad me into conversation. Rorty-baiting, as it were.) 2) I would tone down "[Matt] knows that he is not a Platonist"--one of the things I've learned about philosophy is that it is a process, and particularly a process of articulation. Anti-Platonism is not something you get over once, and then never look back, it is an ongoing pursuit, an ongoing vigilance. The way I see it, most of my protestations about Platonism are reminders to me about why I wouldn't repeat what was just said/written because of X, Y, Z. They are made public--like ZMM--in case others care about what I think about myself, and because of a marginal latent interest in helping the anti-Platonist cause. Steve said to DMB: I understand that you are comfortable with the paradox, but can you imagine that someone else could be less comfortable with paradox and choose not to say paradoxical things when it can be avoided? Do you think paradoxes are unavoidable? Matt: I'm reminded of something I wrote years ago, that began as an MD-conversation that I believe included my old friend Scott Roberts (who was also a paradox-monger): "If you leave a paradox, you don't get to baptize it. You don't get to say that that's just the way things are. You might say that leaving the paradox makes things more flavorful, like in poetry, but then you're not playing the game of philosophy anymore. Philosophers don't leave the playing field with unresolved paradoxes. That means they've failed in why they took to the field in the first place, to see how things hang together. (One should note that in the above I've defined philosophy in a certain way, which I've before suggested one shoudn't do. What I don't think we should do is hypostatize any definition. We should, though, define it for particular purposes, like seeing whether two people are playing two different games, talking past each other. Another way of putting my above implicit definitions is to say that paradox-mongering is okay in the game of philosophy-as-poetry, but not okay in philosophy-as-hanging-things-together-coherently.)" >From the close of: http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/04/dynamic-quality-as-pre-intellectual.html If one reads "philosopher" as "writer of a system," I think you'll get the hang of what I was gesturing at. DMB said: His [Plato's?] demand for intelligibility from the Rhapsodes and other artists was also a way to denigrate the ineffable aspects of reality. Steve said: What demand for intelligibility? Matt: Right--this was the problem with the discussion imprinted on my website. Dave made that claim about Rorty and me, and I wrinkled my nose because I was unclear what quadrant it came from. My effort to not denigrate the "ineffable" (don't fear the scare quotes!) is contained in the effort to suggest 1) that "intelligibility" (like "meaning," as I impressed on Ron's vocabulary) is something that only makes sense within language and 2) to talk a lot about linguistic unintelligibility (like the Davidsonian notion of metaphor) and how it is the motor of progress. Hey! Just like DQ! Steve said: [Quality] is undefined because it is inexhaustably describable. Matt: This is awesome because it never occurred to me to gloss Quality's undefinition this way. I've been glossing it as anti-essence for years, but this takes a big leap forward (at least in terms of integrating Pirsig and Rorty, which I don't require everyone to care about). Way to go, Steve. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Trusted email with powerful SPAM protection. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/210850553/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/md/archives.html
