Hi DMB, On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 6:07 PM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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.
Steve: Harris doesn't hold any truck with radical empiricism. What are you talking about? He is a realist who subscribes to the correspondence theory of truth. He hasn't anything nice to say about either James or Rorty, and he wouldn't agree with you at all in supporting James over Rorty because he thinks they are both wrong. DMB: 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.) Steve: Harris thinks the same way about Jamesian pragmatism. He thinks it is debatable whether James did anything but screw up Pierce's pragmatism. DMB: > 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. Steve: Are you not operating within your perspective. How does that work? What Rorty thinks is that there is no belief that can not be made subject to criticism including every part of our provincial perspectives. DMB: 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. Steve: Ah, here we go. Part of you still thinks we can have and also need a foundation to "rest on." > 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. Steve: No one is saying that we have no route to truth. Rorty like every other pragmatist says that justification is the route to truth. As Matt aid, "now you can't say Rorty abandons epistemology." (For some strange reason you quoted this when trying to tell me that Matt agrees with you that Rorty abandons epistemology. I can only assume that you were trying to bait him.) DMB: 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? Steve: You still have a big problem since you have to say that the earth was flat but now it is round, and you can't say that slavery was wrong before anyone believed it was wrong. That is pure relativism, mister. DMB: 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. Steve: But you and James are missing an important distinction that Rorty and Putnam and pretty much everyone makes between the question of whether or not slavery is actually wrong and whether or not a given person has any good reason to think so at a given point in space and time. People like you who say that relativism is something we need to be concerned with are generally not content to say that what is true is no more than whatever can be justified in a given epistemic context, and they generally have a big problem with the notion that moral and descriptive truth is dependent on which epistemic context we are talking about. I could never figure out why pragmatists like Haack who presumably have stopped asking "is the quality in the subject or in the object?" would still be concerned with the question "is it absolute or relative?" but it is obvious to me at this point that the reason the retro pragmatists need to accuse Rorty of relativism is because they subscribe to a position that is not just open to criticism for relativism with respect to second order justification as Rorty is (how we can know that our justificatory practices are the right ones) but open to the basic charge of relativism with respect to both moral and descriptive truth. If you can't say that people used to believe that slavery was morally right, but even though they did it was nevertheless wrong, and if you can't say that people used to believe that the word was flat, but they were wrong no matter how far they could "ride" that belief to successful action, then you, my friend, are going to face some charges of relativism--that is, apparently, unless you can muddy the waters enough by accusing someone else of relativism loudly enough so that no one notices. DMB: 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. Steve: Isn't that exactly what we must conclude about James's theory of truth? If truth is no more than warranted assertibility, then what I am warranted in asserting is different from what you are warranted in asserting. What has been MADE true in my experience is different form what has been MADE true in yours. If a true idea is, as James says, "Any idea upon which we can ride," then many of us will always complain that we can ride ideas that just aren't true. If truth is just ride-ability, then "true for me" is exactly what you have. 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
