Hi Dave,
Matt said:
Dave, you said.., "I'm simply saying that one can deny
correspondence AND the slogan." ... What would be less misleading
is to say that you don't want to use the slogan (because there are
other ways to deny correspondence).
Dave said:
I honestly don't know what the difference is between denying the
slogan and refusing to use the slogan. I have the same problem
understanding what you mean when you say "we don't want to deny
radical empiricism, we just don't want to use it." I do not see any
difference.
Matt:
If we agree that differently composed sentences can mean the same
thing (which one can find out through a process we've been calling
"translation"), then to refuse without denying is to say "I recognize
that these two sentences say the same thing, but I prefer to use one
of them over the other." The grounds of preference, then, exist to
the side (as it were) of the ground upon which the two different
sentences mean the same thing.
I take that to be nothing particularly contentious. What I mean then
by not wanting "to use" radical empiricism is just that I don't feel the
need to use the philosophical vocabulary supplied by radical
empiricism (in books like James's Essays on Radical Empiricism,
Pirsig's Lila, and Dewey's Experience and Nature, say) to do
philosophical work that I take another vocabulary also able to do.
This is what the "parallel claim" is for: to establish that the two
vocabularies "mean the same thing" over a particular ground. The
grounds for preferring one over the other, then, exist to the side,
from some other consideration. This is what I take you to recognize
when you say, "I object to the slogan ["it's language all the way
down"] on grounds that Rorty probably never seriously considered."
When you chart the affinity between Pirsig, James, and Rorty in the
other post, you are making a "parallel claim," an argument about
where they "mean the same thing." When you say you "don't reject
the slogan BECAUSE it denies correspondence or even because of
the WAY it demolishes sensory empiricism," you are saying, "so
that's where we agree, but there are other things radical empiricism
does for me that neopragmatism can't do for me."
The issue over a "false dilemma," I think, is simply a
misunderstanding over what the force of "it's language all the way
down" is when pushed on the neopragmatist's part. Because it is
only pushed as a negative thesis against the enemy of Platonism, if
there is no enemy, there is no more force on our part. We aren't
trying to say that you must use the slogan, only that you not be a
Platonist. That's why actively denying the slogan looks like actively
denying anti-Platonism. But, as you point out, that's just an
appearance. Likewise, however, is the appearance that we are
posing a "false dilemma." We, like you, just don't want people to
be Platonists or SOMists anymore.
So: the issue has been, and still is, what radical empiricism does for
you that a psychological nominalist vocabulary is unable to do (i.e.
the specification of that ground of preference to the side of the area
of agreement) and whether everyone needs to do it. For example,
one uncontested thing the vocabulary of radical empiricism does
better is "talk to," as it were, Pirsig, James, and Dewey's texts. I
take it that neither Steve nor I have any wish to argue about that.
The link with the second half of the issue is whether everyone needs
to "talk to" (i.e., read and assimilate to) Pirsig, James, and Dewey's
texts. My impression of how you've responded to issues, when
stated like this, is that you will say "no, people don't need to 'talk to'
their texts in that specific sense." I take that to be an uncontested
kind of claim, too, basically a "different strokes" approach.
A different kind of answer would be along the lines of "the best
positive move forward." This is something like taking stock of the
present state of X (the world of philosophy, the general world, etc.),
and betting that because of A, B, and C, radical empiricism should
be the vocabulary of the future over other vocabularies. This will
be a somewhat unresolvable kind of disagreement, because it is
about betting, and only time will tell.
A third kind of answer is that, despite agreement over a narrow
range of terrain, psychological nominalism _violates_ a central tenet
that _should_ be promoted exclusively to its opposite (and that
radical empiricism does this). I take this to be the avenue you have
been pursuing, whereas I wishy-washily oscillate between the first
two vague, unresolvable kinds of answer. I think you sometimes
take me to be forwarding this third, "violation" kind of answer, but
that is a misunderstanding. When push comes to shove, I'd (likely)
field a "best move forward" kind of answer for neopragmatism,
but--as you like to point out--because I'm talking to people here,
who needs to shove? If this denotes a change in my self-awareness
in the MD, then it's that I only push when pushed, and the primary
impetus is when I smell Platonism (and I think I've been behaving
like this for a while now). This isn't based on isolated fragments of
phrasing swishing around in someone's post, but on what I discern
as _their_ possible purpose behind the deployment of philosophical
theses. I might be wrong, but that's why I join in dialogue and not
just silently (mis)judge. Also, I emphasize "their," because I think it
is important to note that we are using someone else's vocabulary
and, like a gun, it can be misused or used for ill. I think it is
important for Pirsigians to recognize that they can't just mimic the
texts and be fine, because--as I come back to below--truth, it is
agreed on all sides, is created dynamically in the deployment of
ideas in situations and not an inherent property of an idea. This
means that (as another way of putting it) truth arises as the
dynamic between idea and situation.
You find my and Rorty's overbearing negativity towards Platonism to
be at a certain point bad conversationally. But, I've been arguing,
that's not a substantive disagreement, because you appear to have
dropped the charge that Rorty is in performative self-contradiction
by being anti-metaphysical and having a metaphysics (though you
might be suggesting this for epistemology now?). There would be
something close to a substantive disagreement if Rorty was so
negative that he could never bring himself to acknowledge any
positive program. But this isn't the case (particularly in assessing his
agreement with Robert Brandom's systematic philosophy of language).
At best, along this particular avenue, this claim would be that Rorty
and I are not much fun to talk to if you want to do anything other
than beat up Platonists.
The one substantive disagreement about a violation of a central tenet
we should be promoting exclusively that I understand you presently to
be making is that Rorty (and/or I, Steve, neopragmatism, analytic
philosophy generally) is a scientific materialist. I agree with you that
this would be a violation. We should not be scientific materialists.
This would be a violation of anti-Platonism, in fact. However, I do
not think that Rorty is assimilable to anything disagreeably "scientific
materialist." Rorty and you believe in physics, and neither of you
believe in God. So there's that, but that's not disagreeable (though
some seem to think so).
My understanding, then, of where we might disagree is that I think
that to be a thorough-going anti-Platonist ipso facto clears you of
being a scientific materialist and that you think that you can be a
thorough-going anti-Platonist yet _still_ be a scientific materialist.
Showing that would be displaying those grounds of preference to
the side of the agreed anti-Platonism in terms of philosophical
theses, the ground on which I could determine--the icky,
disagreeable label aside--whether Rorty is, in fact, what you
substantively pick out as a "scientific materialist" and whether I
additionally think it is a position I too would endorse and not back
away from.
There might be something there. I'm just not convinced there is.
For example, you say that Rorty "takes the slogan to mean that we
ought not have truth theories at all," but this is--believe it or
not--misleading to what Rorty meant in the introduction to
Consequences of Pragmatism. It rests on how Rorty conceived of a
"theory of truth," which at that time meant an _epistemologically_
interesting theory of truth. Rorty believed at that point (though it
took him years to become more clear on this point) that Davidson's
Tarski-style theory of truth was all we were going to get, and that
because it was a _semantic_ theory of truth _only_, deployed at a
time when everyone basically thought that a criterion for a
successful theory of truth was telling us not just how a true
sentence works (a sentence is true if and only if what it says is
true), but also the mechanisms of the conferment of the property
of truth on that sentence.
For reasons I can't claim to totally understand and be able to work
out, Davidson till the end of his career argued that any
epistemological theory of truth was bound to fail, correspondence,
coherence, or pragmatist, all because (and only because) they had
epistemological aspirations. This didn't mean epistemology was
dead, just that the understanding of how we produce
knowledge-claims was not going to bridge the use of "true" and
the use of "justified." However, when Seigfried says that Thayer
"points out that for pragmatists, truth and falsity are not properties
of ideas, nor even the relation of ideas to facts, but instead are
characteristics of the performance of ideas in situations," this
states something that Rorty agrees with because of the
social-practice understanding of language paved by Sellars and
Davidson and codified by Brandom. All of the emphasis in
Brandom is on the performance of persons in situations. And if
Rorty is in agreement with James on that point about truth and
falsity, then it means--in _Rorty's_ idiom--that James too takes
his theory of truth to not be epistemologically aspiring. Or rather,
that when James said "truth," he was actually talking about
"knowledge." What their agreement means is that there are two
different notions of "epistemology" going on, and that (so the
imagined scenario goes) if James had read Rorty's sentence, and
had the state of the debate about theories of truth and
epistemology explained to him to reconcile vocabulary differences,
he would have agreed with Rorty.
That's how I make my way from Rorty's idiom to James's idiom
using the points you've supplied to explicate James. It's not just
what Rorty or James _says_, it is what they _mean_, and if James
means, e.g., what Seigfried says, then there's no disagreement
that I can find on this basis of evidence.
Matt
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