DMB said:
..., the idea of using mysticism to save the correspondence theory is a pretty
jarring idea. Pirisg says does the opposite of that and the mystical experience
itself would be conceived as non-conceptual so that we could call it unmediated
experience but not unmediated knowledge. This would be related to Quality or
pure experience more than the pragmatic theory of truth, however, and it's not
the sort of thing that can be used as evidence for propositional sentences.
Steve replied:
I can't think of how else to say it. The argument is from around page 175 in
The End of Faith.
dmb says:
Okay, I just read that section of Sam's book and I can see what he's doing. Sam
is suffering under a misconception about the nature of mystical experience.
He's using it as a kind of uber-realism wherein the mystic can know reality
perfectly and he "must be right or wrong realistically". This is in the midst
of making a case for realism under the correspondence theory of truth as
opposed to Rorty's linguistically inspired relativism. I suspect Sam is framing
mysticism in these terms because that's the frame that Rorty uses to deny the
possibility of unmediated knowledge.
In any case, no matter where he's getting this conception of mysticism, this is
very different from the claims made by Pirsig and James. Basically, Sam's
misconception is the result of trying to understand mysticism in terms of SOM
and realism. Under this notion, there is an objective reality that can be
directlly known by the mystic in a way that is not mediated by language. He
mistakenly thinks we can get propositional sentences out of such experience
whereas James and Pirsig are saying that such an experience is pre-conceptual
and pre-intellectual. It is known directly and unmediated by language so that
it would be a logical contradiction to claim any propositional knowledge or
factual knowledge on it's basis.
If we make these qualifications, however, we are still closer to Sam than to
Dick. According to radical empiricism, cognitive or linguistic experience is
not the only kind of experience and they insist that anything experienced has
to be accounted as real in the sense that it really was suffered, enjoyed or
otherwise gone through. When we talk about it, like right now, of course it has
to be expressed in language but that does not mean that non-verbal experience
is unreal or unimportant. As Pirsig puts it, mysticism "is sometimes confused
with 'occult' or 'supernatural' or with magic and witchcraft", as we see in
Krimel's case, "but in philosophy it has a different meaning". He says that
Swedenborg (WJ's dad was a Swedenborgian), Zen Buddhists, and many other
philosophical mystics share a view in common, namely the view that "the
fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things
up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided". If we r
ead the mystic's claims about direct knowing or unmediated knowledge with this
in mind, then you don't have to explain how the mystic gets propositional
knowledge from a reality that's outside of language.
As I see it, it's not quite correct to say that Sam is attacking pragmatism.
His objections are directed against relativism in general and Rortyism in
particular. His concerns are not so easy to pin on classical pragmatism, which
puts the emphasis on experience and the practical consequences of our beliefs
rather than language and intersubjective agreement.
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