Arlo said to Marsha:
... When you hit the point where "anything can mean anything I want it to",
then you've removed yourself from any dialogue and become nothing more than a
carnival mirror.
dmb says:
That's right. That's what Plato said about the Sophists but Pirsig takes their
side and paints Plato's treatment of them as unjustified slander. William James
makes this same point about those who similarly slander the pragmatic theory of
truth. Marsha thinks she is defending the MOQ but she's actually taking sides
with the slanderers. Usually, it is the openly hostile critic who reads "the
silliest of possible meanings into our statements" but Marsha takes the
silliest meanings seriously and defends them as if they weren't deeply
insulting to the MOQ and to pragmatism. It's a fun house mirror indeed, the
kind that turns everything upside down. In "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth"
(p.588) James talks about this "impudent slander" in fairly gentle terms but he
also says it is as "discreditable" as anything known to him in recent
philosophic history. For James, language that strong is quite rare. He's about
as angry here as he ever got, in public anyway. In private he was saying these
critics were dumber than rocks. I kid you not.
"With this admission that there are conditions that limit the application of
the abstract imperative, THE PRAGMATISTIC TREATMENT OF TRUTH SWEEPS BACK UPON
US IN ITS FULNESS. Our duty to agree with reality is seen to be grounded in a
perfect jungle of concrete expediencies.
When Berkeley had explained what people meant by matter, people thought that he
denied matter’s existence. When Messrs. Schiller and Dewey now explain what
people mean by truth, they are accused of denying ITS existence. These
pragmatists destroy all objective standards, critics say, and put foolishness
and wisdom on one level. A favorite formula for describing Mr. Schiller’s
doctrines and mine is that we are persons who think that by saying whatever you
find it pleasant to say and calling it truth you fulfil every pragmatistic
requirement.
I leave it to you to judge whether this be not an impudent slander. Pent in, as
the pragmatist more than anyone else sees himself to be, between the whole body
of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense
about him, who so well as he feels the immense pressure of objective control
under which our minds perform their operations? If anyone imagines that this
law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day, says Emerson. We have heard
much of late of the uses of the imagination in science. It is high time to urge
the use of a little imagination in philosophy. The unwillingness of some of our
critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements
is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in recent
philosophic history. Schiller says the true is that which ’works.’ Thereupon he
is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest material utilities.
Dewey says truth is what gives ’satisfaction.’ He is treated as one who
believes in calling everything true which, if it were true, would be pleasant."
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