Hi DMB,
> 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. Steve: Well that is exactly how it looks to me when you try to do the same to Rorty who also explicitly opposes SOM. DMB: > 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. Steve: It was no Freudian slip. He just wasn't saying what you thought he was saying. DMB: 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. Steve: It is just as wrong to try to hang SOM on Rorty. Rorty's blurb is an example of Stout's claim that "no American intellectual in his generation responded with more grace in response to his critics." You are just using the fact that he is not a dick against him. He never said that Hildebrand was right about him. He just said that Hildebrand did a good job arguing against what Hildebrand took to be Rorty's position. In other words, he did a good job beating up on a straw man. Rorty was apparently too nice a guy to say that. DMB: > 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..." Steve: Postulating such a metaphysical notion as a "primal reality" can in itself easily be construed as Platonism and as setting up an appearance-reality distinction. The difference between you and me is that I recognize that taking such language that way is a misreading of James. I see it is a useful turn of phrase for making a particular point that should not be used as an affirmation of some other point. The analogous reading would be for me to alledge that this is one more example of Jamesian otherworldliness which is actually integral to his philosophy. Nonsense. DMB: ...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." Steve: Oh my gosh! Did he really just start talking about "unseen worlds"??? What a Platonist! Why is it that Rorty's denial of linguistic idealism in saying that the world is "out there" gets construed by you as an affirmation of realism or positivism. but James gets a pass for talking about "unseen worlds"??? (Of course I think he should get a pass. To take this is Jamesian "otherworldliness" would be a mistake.) You keep asking for one good statement of rejection of SOM by Rorty, but all his pithy denials of one side of the SOM argument get taken by his critics as affirmations of the other side. (James has the same problem wih his critics. You do know that James has critics?) This is the nature of the beast called SOM. One who thinks in terms of SOM will always see his denials that way. You are seeing it that way when you accuse Rorty of being a realist one day and an idealist the next. You point out that others read him as incoherent. Of course they do. This is the SOMers complaint for anyone who tries to deny both sides of an SOM dualism. It can't be done! If you want to understand Rorty's position on the issue, you'll need to read more than one of his pithy slogans. If Pirsig could have rejected SOM in a single pithy slogan, he wouldn't have needed to write two books. In the following from "Consequences of Pragmatism," Rorty rejects SOM as capital-p Philosophy--the idea that the way to try "to believe more truths or do more good or be more rational [is] by knowing more about Truth or Goodness or Rationality." SOM is the notion that to be Philosophical, we should be asking about the nature of these things. The traditional difference of opinion about the nature of Truth has fallen into two camps which Rorty identifies with the Platonists and the positivists. Rorty: "Within Philosophy, there has been a traditional difference of opinion about the Nature of Truth, a battle between (as Plato put it) the gods and the giants. On the one hand there have been Philosophers like Plato himself who were otherworldly, possessed of a larger hope. They urged that human beings were entitled to self-respect only because they had one foot beyond space and time. On the other hand – especially since Galileo showed how spatio-temporal events could be brought under the sort of elegant mathematical law which Plato suspected might hold only for another world – there have been philosophers (e.g., Hobbes, Marx) who insisted that space and time make up the only Reality there is, and that Truth is Correspondence to that Reality. In the nineteenth century, this opposition crystallised into one between “the transcendental philosophy” and “the empirical philosophy,” between the “Platonists” and the “positivists.” Such terms were, even then, hopelessly vague, but every intellectual knew roughly where he stood in relation to the two movements. To be on the transcendental side was to think that natural science was not the last word – that there was more Truth to be found. To be on the empirical side was to think that natural science – facts about how spatio-temporal things worked – was all the Truth there was. To side with Hegel or Green was to think that some normative sentences about rationality and goodness corresponded to something real, but invisible to natural science. To side with Comte or Mach was to think that such sentences either “reduced” to sentences about spatio-temporal events or were not subjects for serious reflection. It is important to realise that the empirical philosophers – the positivists – were still doing Philosophy. The Platonic presupposition which unites the gods and the giants, Plato with Democritus, Kant with Mill, Husserl with Russell, is that what the vulgar call “truth” the assemblage of true statements – should be thought of as divided into a lower and an upper division, the division between (in Plato’s terms) mere opinion and genuine knowledge. It is the work of the Philosopher to establish an invidious distinction between such statements as “It rained yesterday” and “Men should try to be just in their dealings.” For Plato the former sort of statement was second-rate, mere pistis or doxa. The latter, if perhaps not yet episteme, was at least a plausible candidate. For the positivist tradition which runs from Hobbes to Carnap, the former sentence was a paradigm of what Truth looked like, but the latter was either a prediction about the causal effects of certain events or an “expression of emotion.” What the transcendental philosophers saw as the spiritual, the empirical philosophers saw as the emotional. What the empirical philosophers saw as the achievements of natural science in discovering the nature of Reality, the transcendental philosophers saw as banausic, as true but irrelevant to Truth. Pragmatism cuts across this transcendental/empirical distinction by questioning the common presupposition that there is an invidious distinction to be drawn between kinds of truths. For the pragmatist, true sentences are not true because they correspond to reality, and so there is no need to worry what sort of reality, if any, a given sentence corresponds to – no need to worry about what “makes” it true. (Just as there is no need to worry, once one has determined what one should do, whether there is something in Reality which makes that act the Right one to perform.) So the pragmatist sees no need to worry about whether Plato or Kant was right in thinking that something non-spatio-temporal made moral judgments true, nor about whether the absence of such a thing means that such judgments are is merely expressions of emotion” or “merely conventional” or “merely subjective. “ This insouciance brings down the scorn of both kinds of Philosophers upon the pragmatist. The Platonist sees the pragmatist as merely a fuzzy-minded sort of positivist. The positivist sees him as lending aid and comfort to Platonism by leveling down the distinction between Objective Truth – the sort of true sentence attained by “the scientific method” – and sentences which lack the precious “correspondence to reality” which only that method can induce. Both join in thinking the pragmatist is not really a philosopher, on the ground that he is not a Philosopher. The pragmatist tries to defend himself by saying that one can be a philosopher precisely by being anti-Philosophical, that the best way to make things hang together is to step back from the issues between Platonists and positivists, and thereby give up the presuppositions of Philosophy. One difficulty the pragmatist has in making his position clear, therefore, is that he must struggle with the positivist for the position of radical anti-Platonist. He wants to attack Plato with different weapons from those of the positivist, but at first glance he looks like just another variety of positivist. He shares with the positivist the Baconian and Hobbesian notion that knowledge is power, a tool for coping with reality. But he carries this Baconian point through to its extreme, as the positivist does not. He drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether, and says that modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope. His argument for the view is that several hundred years of effort have failed to make interesting sense of the notion of “correspondence” (either of thoughts to things or of words to things). The pragmatist takes the moral of this discouraging history to be that “true sentences work because they correspond to the way things are” is no more illuminating than “it is right because it fulfils the Moral Law.” Both remarks, in the pragmatist’s eyes, are empty metaphysical compliments – harmless as rhetorical pats on the back to the successful inquirer or agent, but troublesome if taken seriously and “clarified” philosophically." Steve: I already anticipate your response. "Where in there was a denial of SOM???" Right? 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/md/archives.html
