Steve said:
This is not to say that radical empiricism may not do anything extra for you in
terms of metaphysics, it is just that it doesn't do anything for you in terms
epistemology that we can't have in other ways.
dmb says:
Well, people like me and Sam Harris disagree. I think Rortyism introduces the
kind of relativism that prevents us from being able to handle all kinds of
problems. The problem with pragmatism has always been the proverbial Nazi or
fundamentalist who says fascism or bible-thumping is true for his purposes.
Rorty openly admits that he has no way to get past this problem. And Sam Harris
tells us that Rorty's pragmatism won't help us negotiate the difference between
a culture that wishes they could all be California girls in Bikinis and a
culture where having a tan is punishable by imprisonment and being raped is
punishable by death. (The rapist gets a stern scolding.)
You see, Pirsig is doing an East-West fusion, which only makes sense given our
historical context, whereas Rorty thinks we're trapped within our provincial
perspectives. I think that is intellectually paralyzing and wrong for other
reasons too. But mostly, it doesn't work in this world. We desperately need
standards of truth that rest on something more than Rorty can offer. Recent
history shows that evidence matters. We went to war despite the lack of it and
the Republican Neocons in charge at the time believed that "perception is
reality" and mocked their Democratic opponents as members the "reality-based
community". A man who works as a spokesman for whatever cause his public
relations agency is being paid to advocate explained that in his business,
facts are optional. I kid you not. The notion of truth has literally turned
into a matter of cash value, as in "how much cash can I make". In the case of
the evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the premise of the w
ar, truth was a matter of life and death. (Truth lost, death won.) And so even
nonchalance toward the issue of truth (not to mention lies, bullshit and
propaganda) has always struck me as a kind of evil. It's not just an academic
issue, although it's that too.
If Susan Haack is right, Rorty is responsible for launching an army of
pretentious dilettantes who don't even understand the questions, let alone the
implications of Rorty's answers. Personally, I think she goes a bit too far and
her anger is predicated on a certain fondness for Pierce, who was barely
distinguishable from a positivists, but I also think she has a good point.
There is this simple minded adoption of the notion that since we can't have
"THEE Truth", we can't have anything theory of truth at all. You know, because
it can only be useless or a step backward into foundationalism.
Steve said:
Let me and that one thing that radical empiricism is quite good for is
critiquing traditional "sense impression" empricism as not being empirical
enough. As a form of anti-foundationalism it is good stuff. But when it gets
reasserted later as a quasi-foundation for supporting epistemology it is either
useless or a step backward into foundationalism.
dmb says:
That's exactly what Rorty says about Dewey. And Dewey's defenders say that is
exactly where Rorty goes wrong. That's exactly where this Pirsig defender says
you go wrong. This is very much related to my long-standing complaint that
Rorty defines the issues too narrowly and in terms of the failed theories. To
say you can't do epistemology without foundationalism is like saying you can't
have morals without God. It's like saying you can't do astronomy without the
crystalline spheres or you can't have creatures without a creator. We can
understand how these pairings made sense at certain periods in history but why
insist on retaining them? That would mean giving up on epistemology, astronomy
and creatures.
C'mon Steve, we throw out the bath water but we want to keep the clean, dry
baby. We can do without value-free objectivity, but we want the science. We
want our knowledge to be empirically based without dismissing everything that
can't be reduced to that which is directly observable. We can do without "THEE
single exclusive Truth". We do want many excellent paintings in the gallery of
truth and of course we need some standards of excellence if we're going to be
critics of those paintings.
Contrary to your apparent impression that pragmatic truth is a personal "true
for me" kind of thing, the pragmatic theory of truth is aimed at belief systems
as a whole. Worldviews. That's what's in the gallery, no? For James, personal
volition only comes into the equation in those cases where the choice can NOT
be decided on the basis of evidence. And even then, it has to be what he calls
a "live option", there's something about the choice that you find genuinely
compelling. And even then, it also has about something very important to the
way you live your live, it has to be "momentous". But the pragmatic theory is
never supposed to be at odds with the evidence. James was only pointing out
that sometimes the evidence won't help, that many different worldviews can be
equally supported by the evidence. And sometimes we must choose from among
them. That's how saw Empiricism and Absolutism. He could see the logic of the
latter and yet he was sicken and suffocated by the picture
it offered. The subscribers he described as prigs, and the thought itself as
too clean-shaven and buttoned up for his tastes.
See, James wanted to be an artist, but dad made him go to medical school
instead. So he invented psychology and became a philosopher, perhaps as an act
of revenge. In any case, the man was an artist and I think Pirsig's painting
gallery analogy is exactly the kind of thing he'd love and cheer. He'd say
"Yea, THAT is what I'm talking about".
Of course there's a lot of paint-by-number stuff that really doesn't merit the
nail on which to hang it in the gallery. Those are the ones that depict
worldviews that are not based on the evidence. Those are just finger paintings
of wishful thinking. That kind of "true for me", self-indulgent nonsense is not
pragmatic truth. Personally, I think people who buy into that are just buying
into autism or narcissism or something else that's not philosophical at all.
Sadly, this is what college kids are getting out of Rorty these days, much to
Haack's horror. I've sat and watched my professors cringe at some expression of
relativism and brace themselves for the task of issuing yet another set of
disclaimers. I mean, it was quite obvious they'd been through it all before.
I've seen it up close at least twice. So I tend to sympathize with Haack on
that much at least.
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