> Steve said to dmb: > ... you will face some uncomfortable questions like, is this truth that > objective reality does not exist found or made? If it is found, you affirm > objectivity. If it is "MADE true in experience," as you like to say, how is > that done? How do we VERIFY (in James's sense of making true) that objective > reality does not exist? > > > dmb says: > The same way we verify that santa doesn't exist. Just kidding. Everybody > knows it's impossible to prove a negative.
Steve: Well this is a big problem for anyone who doesn't keep justification and truth as separate notions, isn't it. If what is true is MADE true in experience, how is any negative MADE true? How is it MADE true that objective reality does not exist? DMB: But yes, of course, the radical empiricist is saying that objective reality was made, not discovered. In his essays, James says that the idea of things-in-themselves is one of the transexperiential entities, one of those metaphysical fictions, invented to deal with SOM. He sets the parameters of his empiricism so that such fictions are only ever taken as such. They can be acceptable on pragmatic grounds, if they're useful. But as a general rule, if it can't be known in experience, we should just keep it out of our philosophies and call it what it is; pure speculation about something that, by definition, we can never know. If it's outside of experience, it is outside of reality. There is a nice symmetry here too. If it is known in experience, you better have a place for it in your philosophy. That side of the doctrine opens up a whole range of experiences that had been marginalized, ignored and actively avoided by the traditional empiricists. Steve: If your pragmatism is merely MADE, why should anyone take it seriously? If the idea that objective reality exists is made, then so is the idea that objective reality does not exist. You said, "if it can't be known in experience, we should just keep it out of our philosophies and call it what it is; pure speculation about something that." Doesn't that apply just as well to the idea that objective reality does NOT exist as well as it does to the notion that objective reality DOES exist? What I'm saying is that you should keep the notion that objective reality does not exist out of your philosophy. the whole question of "objective reality" ought not be part of the pragmatist's vocabulary. That is why you won't find Rorty denying it and why we found Pirsig denying that the MOQ denies it. DMB: > I'm just stunned by this. I thought you were one of the people who understood > the MOQ but it looks like you've got no use for the central ideas and you > don't mind taking sides with SOM, its central enemy. It's no wonder this > conversation has been so frustrating. Steve: Well then, I guess the list of people who understand that MOQ is down to just you and Bo. DMB: The rest of your reply made even less sense to me. You seem to be offering a wildly incoherent view of truth wherein Rortyism and realism are mixed in with a rejection of everything except SOM. Steve: I wasn't even talking about truth. I was talking about the issue of language as something that ought to be transcended--whether a pragmatist ought to agree or disagree with the mystic who says that the fundamental nature of reality is out side of language. I was helping you with your misunderstanding of Rorty as saying "we can never use that world to justify our beliefs because there is no way to get outside our language." Perhaps you could try reading it again and tell me where I get all SOM on you. I don't see how since I was criticizing the Pirsigian notion of getting outside language as being an SOM idea about language intervening between a subject and an object as he did in his lens metaphor: "The culture in which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret experience with, and the concept of the primacy of subjects and objects is built right into these glasses. If someone sees things through a somewhat different set of glasses or, God help him, takes his glasses off, the natural tendency of those who still have their glasses on is to regard his statements as somewhat weird, if not actually crazy." I think he is using an SOM metaphor to attack SOM. What the heck could it mean to take the glasses off? No he sees the world as it actually is instead of with SOM blinders? I said: As for the ability or inability to "use the world to justify beliefs," this is a big can of worms. I think your question relies on the subject-object picture that you accuse Rorty of maintaining. There is never "the world" on one hand and linguistic justifications of beliefs on the other. You are right that Rorty doesn't see any value in the notion of getting outside language. Nor do I, but I do recognize that Pirsig clearly does. I agree with Rorty, pace Pirsig, that the notion is incoherent once we drop the subject-object picture. While Pirsig sees the mystic as saying that the fundamental nature of reality is outside of language, Rorty is saying that that notion is incoherent unless you imagine reality in one hand, you on the other, and language as what James sarcastically called a tertium quid intermediate between the two. Since, as Wittgenstein said, "It is only in language that one can mean something by something," how could it mean anything to talk about a fundamental nature of reality that is outside of language? Language is a part of reality, and so are you. How could you ever talk about which bits of reality are infused with language and which ones are "pure" without using language to do it and spoiling the whole endeavor? This isn't a *failure* of language to be adequate to reality unless your view of language is one of correspondence. Dewey offered an alternative view of language as a tool where this question about comparing language to the fundamental nature of reality simply never comes up. In the Deweyan view, language doesn't fail to adequately represent (this is your misread of Rorty as a dissapointed positivist) when it is not seen as representation of something else at all. Language for Dewey is a tool like a hammer about which we would never think to ask "does it adequately correspond?" For Rorty it is even more like an extention of yourself than a tool that can be separated from yourself. A person is not something distinct from her thoughts. "One can use language," says Rorty, "to criticise and enlarge itself, as one can exercise one’s body to develop and strengthen and enlarge it." Trying to compare language to something else that is outside of language is in this analogy an attempt to step out of your own skin. Why would anyone who has already dropped the correspondence notion even think of trying to do 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
