Steve said to dmb:
I wish you'd take Matt's suggestion: "It might be more profitable for you,
Dave, to articulate the specific reasons of why Rorty seems like he's working
with SOM assumptions, the things he says you wouldn't say, because anybody can
look at a block of text, pick out the use of words like "subject, object, mind,
world, in there, out there, etc." and claim the person's a SOMist. We can do
it to Pirsig.
dmb says:
I want to call attention to the fact that Pirsig is frequently and explicitly
opposed to SOM. So, no. No honest person could do that to Pirsig. To suggest
he's a SOMer would be silly and wrong in the extreme.
I'd also point out that Hildebrand, along with Putnam's help, makes a case that
the kind of thing I pointed out in the Fish article is not just a Freudian slip
but rather it is an integral part of his position that's implied all the time.
in other words, it would just be a pointless gimmick to hang such a thing on
Pirsig but showing this incoherence in Rorty, even Rorty admits, is well argued
and well informed.
Not only do I think these two cases are incomparable, other radical empiricists
talk about these issues in such a way that we don't have to wonder whether
they're operating within those assumptions or not. As I mentioned the other
days, it turns out that G. William Barnard makes the same argument in his book.
(Exploring Unseen Worlds: William James and the Philosophy of Mysticism)
"...I also note that in the context of James's radical empiricism, even the
very notion of a separate 'knower' and 'known' becomes problematic when viewed
through the lens of James's theory of 'pure experience.' This theory postulates
that everything that exists is inherently neither physical nor mental, but
rather, is an expression of a more primal nonduality (pure experience) that
forms the basis for traditional dualisms, such as subject/object or
mental/physical. The notion of pure experience is significant to the study of
mysticism not only because it overcomes the often negative assessment of
mystical experience as a purely subjective event, but also because it overturns
the philosophically problematic understanding of mystical experience as an
interaction between two ontologically separate 'things': the mystic and what
the mystic experiences. ....I seek to demonstrate that the truth-claims that
James makes for the reality of these 'unseen worlds' are justified not by any
alleged correspondence to some predetermined paradigmatic reality, but instead,
by the positive transformative effects 'on the whole' and 'over the long run'
which come about as a result of those mystical experiences."
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