> dmb says: > > My implicit claim that experience can do this testing for us?
Steve: I'm talking about your tendency to say that truth is "tested by experience." DMB: > Anyway, let me say a few words about your questions. How would a radical > empiricist test the claim that there is intelligent life elsewhere? He'd say > we can only speculate. Alien life, at this point, is beyond human experience > and so anything we say about it can only be educated speculation. We can try > to find some, and we are doing that. But no truth claims can be made in the > absence of experience. The existence of Jesus, like any other figure who > might be historical or fictional, can only be inferred from historical > evidence...See, if the claim is that truth is something that happens to an > idea within the course of experience, if pragmatic truth is what we "ride" > successfully within experience, then the question of which experiences count > as evidence for which claims doesn't really make sense. For the pragmatist, > true are ideas are ideas that function in experience. Steve: Yet there is some truth to the matter of whether or not there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, right? We just don't have a way of determing what the truth is. That truth won't be "made" if we find or continue to not find life. There is a truth here that transcends "warranted assertibility." (This is the sort of example that brought Putnam to withdraw his support for the pragmatic theory of truth.) Likewise, there either was or was not a Jesus of Nazareth. Whether we can imagine any way of verifying the truth or falsity in the matter, there is still some truth to be known. Someone who asserts that Jesus exists right now is either right or wrong right now rather than "made" right or wrong by verifying the belief in future experience. > > Steve: > So you agree that there isn't anything beyond nonhuman we can appeal to in a > conversation to say what ought to count as a good justification? Certainly we > can't say to someone who disagrees with us "well Experience says..." Even if > we say, "logic dictates..." or "according to scientific law..." we are still > not appealing to anything that floats free of all things human. As James > said, "The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything." > > > dmb says: > > If you're saying experience, logic and scientific laws are human, I agree. > But then you go on and reach a bogus conclusion ... DMB: > Notice that the pragmatists are not only rejecting SOM here but also taking > up those two categories of experience. Primary and secondary are dynamic and > static or preconceptual and reflective. Dewey also calls them Had and Known. > He, James and Pirsig are all the list of Pragmatic radical empiricists. But > Rorty is not one of these precisely because he rejects this other, non-SOM > distinction. Steve: I don't know what epistemological mileage you can get out of this primary/secondary distinction that Rorty can't get in other ways. DMB: Rorty's objections are aimed at entirely different claims about what experience can tell us and these objections don't make any sense when applied to pragmatic truth or experience as it's conceived in radical empiricism. And yet you keep applying them to both anyway. It's like you don't want to understand. > Seriously, I have no idea what non-human experience or non-human reality > could even mean, let alone rest my case on them. Steve: My objection is to your repeated objections to Rorty's claim that there are no nonconversational constraints on inquiry. Since you agree that non-human experience and nonhuman reality are incoherent, you shouldn't object to Rorty's criticism of philosophical attempts to appeal to something transcendental in their epistemologies. You agree to a point but then want to say that Rorty went too far. You say that he has left out the fact that the reality of the radical empiricist's sort can still be a constraint on inquiry. You say that empirical reality is neither nonhuman nor conversational. Maybe it is time for you to try to understand what Rorty means by "conversational" to see if he really does rule out any contraints that you would like to retain. I don't read him as ruling out any sorts of appeals whatsoever in conversation--even attempts to appeal to things that are supposed to be non human like Reason or Reality. Even those sorts of appeals CAN be attempted, but when they are they are made within the context of a practice of justification which Rorty characterizes as like a conversation between humans rather than like a divine decree where Reality and Reason transcend practice and force beliefs upon us. Those appeals to the nonhuman are only ever done in a human conversation, so they can't really have the force that they have in the past been thought to have. Reason and Reality don't literally force us to believe things, but at the same time, it will be tough to hold on to a belief, a habit of action, that doesn't help us get what we want or takes us places we don't want to go. Getting what we want is and always has been what inquiry is all about. It is nothing "nonhuman" in Rorty's use of the term as "practice transcendent," and it is not even so much a constraint on inquiry but simply the goal of inquiry. All I can see that you are getting out of radical empiricism from the point of view of epistemology in pragmatic terms is this: Some beliefs lead us to successful action and some do not. But then we already knew that. 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
