Matt said to dmb:
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).
dmb says:
Right, scientific materialism is the most common form of Platonism in our time.
It would be to a bit crude and ham-handed to accuse Rorty of taking up that
stance. My point in bringing up behaviorism, physicalism and the brain-mind
identity theory was much, much broader than that. That point was made in the
context of a discussion of basic temperaments like classic and romantic and how
the various schools of philosophy answer the needs of those temperaments. It's
only on that very broad level of analysis that it makes any sense to connect
Rorty with materialism. I'm just pointing out that the pragmatists that come
out of the analytic school of philosophy have a certain metallic flavor, a
certain prickly, mathematical flavor. If that were the only kind of pragmatism,
I'd probably quit philosophy and switch to the english department too.
While it's true that we can agree that physics is believable whereas God is
not, this is exactly the area where I find the whole tone and tenor of the
analytic school to be so grating. Buddhism, at least at some level, is an
atheistic religion that isn't at odds with science and requires no faith or
supernaturalism. Roughly speaking, one could say the same things about the MOQ.
Ant calls it the first indigenous form of American Buddhism. There is also that
long passage in ZAMM where he compares Quality and the Tao and finds them to be
identical. I think these comparisons are both true because the MOQ agrees with
the perennial philosophy, which says all the world's religions agree once you
get beyond the superficial, exoteric differences and get to their esoteric
core. So one can believe in science and be an atheists while still maintaining
a vital interest in religion taken in its broadest sense.
Matt said:
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.
dmb says:
That's a good example of the analytic tradition I'm talking about. This is the
school of thought that Rorty is coming out of and it certainly does have
certain conceptions of what a "theory of truth" is. I think it was Teed
Rockwell who make the analogy to astronomy on this very point. Learning that
there is no such thing as the objective Truth and then abandoning all truth
theories as a result is like learning that there are no crystalline spheres in
the heavens and giving up on astronomy altogether because of that. Rockwell
wants to say that Rorty makes an unwarranted leap from one to the other and
that it's perfectly plausible to say that astronomers can do astronomy without
looking for crystalline spheres and, by the same token, philosophers can have
truth theories without search for thee Truth.
And I think you mean to say that Rorty is really only prohibiting the search
for Truth and heavenly spheres. That's where we're going to disagree. Not
because Rorty explicitly slams the door on anything like a truth theory but he
certainly moves as if the door where closed and those are the consequences of
his views. That certainly seems to be the consequence for you and Steve. I
mean, I don't think it's just a co-incidence that neither of you have much
interest in the theory of truth or the empiricism.
Matt said:
...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.
dmb says:
Hmmm. I think you might be glossing over a very important distinction here. I
fairly certain that "the social-practice understanding of language" is not what
the Jamesian means by "the performance of ideas in situations". He is talking
about concrete, lived experience and this is opposed to verbal abstractions.
Don't get me wrong. Ideas have to function as ideas too but James is always
keen to point out that the concrete situation is where we find differences that
make a difference and that's where truth is made. Philosophical conversations
are up off the ground, if you will, and James says that's fine most of the
time. Our truths work on a kind of credit system so that we don't have to
personally witness every concrete situation in order to be informed about
things but ultimately an idea can only ever be verified by an actual person in
an actual experience.
Psychological nominalism says that language and thought are virtually the same
thing, that it's shared and public and communal. I don't dispute that. I'm just
saying that's not what the radical empiricist means by saying that truth is a
performance, a doing and a making rather than the property of a sentence.
Matt said:
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.
dmb says:
I really don't know what it means to be "epistemologically aspiring" or
"epistemologically interesting".
I sure what the two notions of epistemology are either. But I think it might be
related to Rockwell's analogy. Rorty would look at James's theory of truth and
say that it's not really of theory of truth because it provides no promise of
thee Truth. But why define the word "truth" as Platonic, why define it the way
all these objectionable theories defined. Isn't that the heart of the problem,
that truth was conceived as the real reality behind experience. Why not abandon
that definition of truth instead of epistemology? Why define the question in
terms of the bad answers?
There are scholars who make a case that Dewey and James do not need to be
brought up to speed or brought up to the state of the debate. Hildebrand's bood
and Larry Hickman's book (Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism) both make a case
that Rorty and Putman were struggle with issues that James and Dewey had
already resolved. As I see it, the things I like about Rorty are just the
things he took from Dewey and James and I think he didn't take enough of their
ideas on board, not least of all because of his anti-Platonism. But if you have
something in particular in mind, I'd be glad to hear about it. What insights on
truth theories did they miss? Tarski sentences? I'm pretty sure James would
scoff at that, for temperamental reasons if nothing else.
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