Hi dmb,
> Steve said: > Again, what is it about determinism that has "devastating consequences" and > will "render your actions inert and your life meaningless"? ... Determinism > (pragmatically understood as the hope of explaining events in terms of causes > and effects) is a belief held to fulfill our desires to predict and control > things. .. How does that hope make you or James or anyone else suicidal? > dmb says: > Oh, I see. Your question is predicated on the assumption that determinism is > just pragmatically useful when we're doing physics. Now that I understand > your point, I see how ridiculous it is. Steve: Implicit in this claim is that you didn't understand what I was saying before, so why are you so certain that you have finally grasped it now? No, I am not limiting determinism to the study of physics. But the good news is that you are getting closer. You've made some progress! dmb: >Physics isn't one bit depressing but determinism is, you unbelievable hack. >I'm just not going to talk to you anymore until get a dictionary. > > determinism |diˈtərməˌnizəm|noun Philosophythe doctrine that all events, > including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the > will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human > beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their > actions. > > Because, you see, when I use the word "determinism", see, what I mean by > "determinism" is view that we are determined, which implies that we have no > freedom and that we cannot be responsible for anything we say or do. See? Steve: But dmb, that just simply CAN'T be the way that you use the word "determinism" since you have insisted over and over that you've rid this idea of all its metaphysical baggage. Just as we agreed that pragmatically we can conceive of "free will" without the SOM business about internal versus external control, if we are going to compare a pragmaticized "free will" with an adequately pragmaticized "determinism" then to be fair we will need to drop all the SOM business in the definition you just provided about what is ULTIMATELY true about us--the stuff about external causality being the one true description of what is REALLY going on. As I've repeatedly quoted James (and you are perhaps just now ready to hear), "If this be admitted, we can debate on even terms. But if one pretends that while freedom and variety are, in the first instance, subjective demands, necessity and uniformity are something altogether different, I do not see how we can debate at all." You see? You keep getting all pissed off when I say that you only dropped the SOM baggage from free will while you haven't dropped it from determinism, but then you provide an SOM definition of determinism as a concern for what is ULTIMATELY true. My point has been that the implication you raise "that we have no freedom" only comes up when you think of determinism as what is ULTIMATELY true rather than being one true description as part of an inexhaustible possibility for other true descriptions such as the one about being morally responsible for the choices we make. So again, I ask you: If we are viewing the issue as pragmatists--when determinism is not conceived as what is ULTIMATELY true but rather as one description on a metaphysical par with all others--how could determinism as James described it pragmatically (as a hope for finding explanations for things in terms of a "sequence of events [which] shall someday manifest a deeper kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary juxtaposition which now phenomenally appears") possibly make you or James or anyone else suicidal? It seems clear to me that the answer to this existential discomfort is pragmatism rather than the rejection of determinism. And for pragmatists the notions of free will and determinism can be described in ways that make them entirely compatible rather than mutually exclusive opposites. That's why Putnam says, "In contrast, Dewey holds that the question of whether we have free will arises out of a radically false worldview--a dualism that regards the moral agent as separate and different from the natural world and takes the world to be deterministic. Dewey takes it that the free will issue disappears once that radically false wordview is rejected." Now you can go ahead and think I am a hack if you want, but Dewey surely read and understood James, and Putnam surely read and understood both James and Dewey. Dewey did not think we need to get all hysterical or depressed over the free will/determinism issue once we embrace pragmatism. How could James feel still feel that way AFTER he became a pragmatist? Why do you still feel that way if, as you have insisted, you have dropped the SOM baggage from both terms in question? Best, Steve Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
