Hey Ron, Matt said: Dave's right that it is my reading of Rorty that likely makes me so disagreeable to him, but I've apparently climbed into a box that Dave sees no reason for ever letting me out of in his own mind.
Ron said: Although that may be the case, it seems Daves fight is over different reasons. I think Steve and yourself have a particularly fine line of discussion going concerning Philosophy. However I feel Steve and Dave are talking past eachother and I think, to my reading, Steve knows what Dave is on about but is teasing him out semantically. just to fuk with him. Matt: Yeah, I think there's a lot of talking past. I don't think Steve is just "fucking" with Dave, though. The sense of getting fucked with is what Dave complained about with me, too. But I just want to get on a communicative page we can agree is the same shape. Dave calls that disingenuous, but what else am I to do? I refuse to just assume, anymore, that I know what people are talking about. And I want to refrain, as much as I can, such external diagnostics of a position, which is what Dave's chosen epithets for what I do to DQ are (that I make it "trivial, inert, and meaningless"). Those are conclusions to a train of thought that remains obscure to me. Clearly, I don't think I do this to DQ, but the line of reasoning wherein it is perspicuous as to which moves I make are claimed as evidence for these particular epithets, and how one would avoid them by making different moves, is opaque. What Dave has lacked, and what I wish I could see, is the _internal_ diagnostic of my position. The most I get is the feeling that because I don't use the same vocabulary to do philosophy as Pirsig or James or Dewey or whoever, I'm thereby getting them wrong. But that just seems to me a bad understanding of how philosophy is in fact done. And then I get blamed for not knowing how philosophy is done. (More or less.) Ron said: The problem that you and Dave share is well beyond anything I could even suggest. Matt, you often take a rather complex read to uncover the subleties of your meaning whereas Dave is more direct. If anything I could add, this would be the primary distiction in your styles of discussion. Matt: I'm not sure I catch the difference. If you're saying I write densely and precisely--such that I want to articulate to my reader that there is one thing I mean here and not a myriad of other possibilities--then yes, that's what I'm hoping I do. It's not that I hope it takes people forever to figure out what the hell I'm saying, but I do hope that people paying attention get paid for the attention they've given. But I'm not sure what the "more direct" side of the distinction is. Being direct is great, but not when you haven't figured out where the target is that you're shooting at. I think Dave gets the feeling like I'm trying to be a moving target (this being an illegitimate maneuver if you aren't also charting changes of opinion). But I'm certainly not trying to do this, or be sophistical or anything. And neither is Steve, for that matter. There's just not a lot of trust that everyone's trying as much as they can to be on the up and up. If there's a distinction between me and Dave, it's that he draws conclusions about me from these discussions, whereas I draw no conclusions about him. Because if we _are_ talking past each other, it means we don't understand what the other is saying, the point and purpose behind it. Until the communicative bridges can be built, it seems to me a mistake to draw any conclusions. Until understanding can be built, the conclusion is "mu," not 1 or 0. Matt 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
