Matt:
... Even if he [Rorty] doesn't come up a lot in your writing here, if he looms
large in your imagination as the thing you don't want to be, I'd advise a more
sensitive understanding of what he stands for (by which I mean, a better
understanding than such heavyweights as Hilary Putnam and Bernard Williams
showed when they punched the image of Rorty).
dmb says:
I disagree with the suggestion that I need a more "sensitive" understanding
before I should be allowed to dislike Richard Rorty. I'd certainly be open to
any specific corrections, but I don't think you've ever articulated any such
thing, none that I find intelligible anyway.
Matt said:
... The residual difficulty with the rhetoric of radical empiricism is this: if
one has already rejected the goal of transcendence (in its Platonic guise),
then it is unclear to what purpose the idea of "purity" plays in any remaining
distinctions between reality or experience, on the one side, and language, on
the other. Experience as something pure that language muddies is not something
I can make sense of in non-Platonically transcendent ways. Experience as
"immediate" whereas language is "mediating" is not something I can think of
many uses for for nonrepresentationalists either.
dmb says:
Well, I don't know why you're hanging all this Platonic baggage on radical
empiricism. It hopelessly complicates any exchange of ideas on the topic and
yet it becomes unclear to you without that baggage. I honestly don't know why
you persist in this year after year. I don't understand how you can still read
this stuff as any kind of essentialism or representationalism or how you can
try to understand Pirsig's mysticism in terms of what the Pope thinks.
Honestly, it seems like you don't understand this stuff on purpose. I suppose
that has something to do with protecting Rorty but I don't know. You're
obviously a smart guy, but when it comes to this particular topic you're just
completely incorrigible.
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