Daviest of Dave's said:
I really do not understand your attitude. Challenging your claims in a
discussion group is not exactly a humanitarian tragedy, you know? If
you'd spend as much time and energy on the substance of the ideas
as you do protecting your "reputation", then yes, I sincerely believe it
would be a benefit to every participant. If the situation were
reversed, I would relish the chance to explain my claims. The
challenge was supposed to encourage you to philosophize in a
philosophy forum. Your refusals and excuses make no sense to me.
It's like going out for bar-b-que with an anorexic vegan.
Matt:
My attitude comes from the fact that I did try explaining further.
You're like a bulimic who keeps asking for more food when you never
digested the stuff you just ate. And why should I try to prepare good
food when you're just going to throw it up? (And let me hasten to
add, as that may give the impression that I hold the keys to the
universe and just won't let you see them, that _you're_ the one who
foists that image on me, not me: I have a limited conception of what
I know and do not know, of what I have answers for and justification
for, and what I do not.)
So, again, here's my first two formulations:
----------
11/03
Pirsig's discourse on Western ghosts can be read as flirting with a
kind of solipsistic idealism (as I think I've seen aggressive critics of
Pirsig pursue in the past), but Pirsig is more like a Hegelian idealist,
whose root idea is the primacy of the community in understanding
where ideas come from (rather than an individual's confrontation
with the world, which is rooted in the pre-Kantian empiricist
tradition). A beginning formulation of understanding Pirsig's
relationship to the classical empiricists is to say that he is a
post-Kantian, quasi-Hegelian empiricist (which is pretty close to just
saying he's a Deweyan pragmatist).
----------
11/05
DMB said:
I wonder about your use of Hegel, Matt. Isn't it oxymoronic to even
say "Hegelian empiricist"? Isn't that like saying "Humean idealist" or
"Rortarian Platonist"?
Matt:
I don't think it's oxymoronic. Like I said, I'm thinking particularly of
Dewey, who was deeply impressed by Hegel's historicism and holism.
Think of it this way: pre-Kantian empiricism is loaded down with the
Myth of the Given. Pragmatists are, in some fashion, empiricists who
are not so loaded. That means something purified empiricism of that
Myth. I think Hegel is someone who can do that purification.
Was Hegel an empiricist? Well, only in a post-Kantian sense, following
out Kant's claim that the only one who can be an empirical realist is a
transcendental idealist. But I'm not really interested in what
pigeonhole Hegel really falls into, only with the philosophical traditions
he played an important role in initiating (historicism and holism).
----------
To challenge those claims is to challenge a lot of basic understanding
of the history of philosophy (from inside a well-established narrative,
that is). Which is fine, but it's not me, exactly, it's well-established
people like Brandom and Pippin and Sellars you're challenging.
Which is fine. But I can't give you amazing discourses explaining
them. That takes time and energy, and it's not my job (in more than
one sense).
And what claims did you challenge, any way? The solipsistic idealism
claim? How'd that go? Dave: "what critics?" Matt: "well, I said 'I
think,' meaning I don't rightly remember." Dave: "so, if Pirsig isn't
rightly a solipsist, why should I take seriously the idea of his flirtation
with it?" Matt: "because seeing how the passage can be read as
solipsism can help bring out the importance of the particular kinds of
maneuvers required to avoid solipsism." That's the "primacy of the
community" claim. I could see you challenging that, but I don't
remember you doing it (and that might be because you were more
interested in the red herring challenge of playing gotcha' with my
words, as if it was terribly important that I remember the time and
place of a flesh-and-blood critic, which I still can't see that it is).
And there was the challenge to Hegel being an empiricist. To which
I responded. To which you responded by saying these series of
things, to which I responded (the "DMB saids" in this series are
culled from the block of text that was the response to my above block
of text on 11/05, to which I then itemized particular responses in the
"Matts"):
----------
sent 11/06; received 11/12
DMB said:
It's not quite apparent or obvious but once again you are trying to
convert Pirsig into some kind of post-Analytic neo-Pragmatist.
Matt:
Nah, that'd be like saying that Arlo's trying to convert Pirsig into some
kind of Nietzschean. Arlo's just exploring parallels, and my point isn't
that Pirsig _is_ a post-positivist neopragmatist, but rather that Pirsig
and some of my other philosophical heroes inhabit a common
philosophical position when viewed from a little distance. Are they
exactly the same? Nah. Do I need Pirsig to be Robert Brandom?
Absolutely not: I'm glad Pirsig wrote ZMM, because no one else was,
though I am glad to have Brandom's Making It Explicit. I'm glad
they're working two different sides of the street, because I think both
sides should be worked, and my claim would only be that they are on
the same street.
DMB said:
There is a group of Analytic philosophers (your heros Wilfred Sellars
and Robert Brandom among them) and they have tried to revise
"absolute empiricist philosophy in the light of Hegel".
Matt:
My understanding is that Sellars wasn't trying to revise Hegel, he was
trying to revise Kant. Brandom you're right about, though I don't know
what the phrase "absolute empiricist philosophy" in the quotation
marks means. And I'm not sure I'd call Sellars one of my heroes.
Brandom, yes.
DMB said:
Everyone who did philosophy in James' and Dewey's time was
influenced by Hegel.
Matt:
Well, kind of. That's roughly the same as saying that everyone in the
50s was influenced by Oxford philosophy (Ryle, Austin, and
Strawson). Sure, but only a few people thought it was really amazing
and tried to internalize it and transform it into something even more
amazing. As far as I can tell, you're saying this to downplay my claim
about Hegel's influence on Dewey, or at least as how you perceive
what _my_ claim entails (versus what the exact same claim would
entail in your hands), but I'm just thinking of the Dewey of "From
Absolutism to Experimentalism." (And if you remind me of Dewey's
self-described break with Hegel in that essay, I'll just remind you
that the Hegelians he was breaking from were the Absolute
Hegelians that inhabited St. Louis and Oxford. Neither Dewey nor
Rorty, Brandom, Robert Pippin, or Terry Pinkard are Absolute
Hegelians, though I would call them all Hegelians.)
DMB said:
But their (James and Dewey) sensible emphasis on the cultural and
historical context of knowledge becomes a kind of unhinged
relativism in the hands of the post-structuralists and the new
historicists.
Matt:
Yeah, that's kinda' true. Did you think Rorty or Brandom or I was a
post-structuralist or New Historicist?
DMB said:
I mean, people draw very different conclusions about the extent and
meaning of contextualism.
Matt:
You're telling me. I have to live with you drawing very different
conclusions from what I draw from Rorty.
DMB said:
The similarities between Pirsig and these other neo-Pragmatists is
mostly just a superficial resemblance based on some common
enemies. But, following them, you've landed in a very different place.
Matt:
Meh, I don't think so. Rorty, Putnam, and Brandom didn't pick up the
moniker "pragmatism" just because they held some common
enemies as James and Dewey.
DMB said:
Their Hegelian revisions are mostly a matter of exorcising their own
demons, of disavowing the assumptions and projects of their own
quasi-Postivistic tradition.
Matt:
And? Didn't Socrates initiate philosophy by saying that the
unexamined life is not worth living? Philosophy begins at home, with
yourself, in an attempt to sort through what in you is an angel and
what a demon that needs to be exorcized.
DMB said:
Think about this way; when Pirsig gets around to the point where he
is explicitly identifying his MOQ with James's radical empiricism, with
mainstream American Pragmatism and Instrumentalism, he also
thinks it's worth mentioning Hegel in order to rule him out as saying
something comparable. Why do you suppose he felt the need to deny
Hegel at that point?
Matt:
I think Pirsig said it because he had Absolute Hegelians in mind. I
would reject them, too.
DMB said:
The comparison to Hegel isn't crazy because Phaedrus was some
kind of Monist and the MOQ is a Monism in some sense, among other
things. It's plausible enough that Pirsig feels the need to explicitly
deny it just as he's identifying with pragmatism.
Matt:
So, you're saying you're not going to read Hegel to find out what
Dewey thought was good in him because Pirsig, among others,
disavows one piece of Hegel? (And, because you won't read Hegel,
you can't even be sure whether Pirsig is disavowing one piece or the
whole thing.)
I don't know, I read people like Pippin and Pinkard on what Hegel
really meant, and the stigma of the Absolute Hegelians' interpretation
of what the "Absolute" meant tends to go away. (Though even then, I
don't really feel inclined to talk about the "Absolute.")
----------
To my above responses, you replied to the block that included "I'm
just thinking of the Dewey of 'From Absolutism to Experimentalism,'"
with:
----------
11/13
See, that's what I'm talking about. If you want to claim that somebody
is Hegelian in some sense (but not an Absolute Hegelian), then why
not just say what you mean? In what sense is anyone a Hegelian and
why does that matter? What's the point? What's the idea? I guess it
would be safe to assume that you think Pirsig or Dewey is Hegelian
in the sense that they've adopted some form of some of Hegel's
ideas. Okay, what ideas and in what form? Why wouldn't you want to
say exactly how they are Hegelian? That term could mean quite a
number of things, right?
----------
But I'd already trotted out the idea of the primacy of the community,
obstructing the Myth of the Given, historicism, and holism. So, what
more did you want? Should I just repeat myself? Or move on with
my life? (For everyone but Dave, if you want some stuff on holism
vs. the Myth of the Give, try
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/04/quine-sellars-empiricism-and-linguistic.html)
And to my facetious, "So, you aren't going to read Hegel" block of
text you replied with "There you go again" and a repetition of your
request for explanations I'd already tried to give.
Instead of actually challenging the content of my claims, it looks to
me like you were more focused on catching me out in supposed lies,
inconsistencies, and a style you don't like. And that's why I said,
when my 11/6 post finally dribbled through on 11/12, that it was just
us flinging our usual bullshit. You hadn't offered any new challenges
to any of the important claims I had advanced.
Because you are so fond of block quotes from authorities, I thought
I'd transcribe for my pleasure a couple long paragraphs from Robert
Brandom's Making It Explicit (p.177-78). The ideas in play at this
point in the book is that Brandom is trying to offer a theory of how
language works that is modeled on assertion, and he's in the
process of understanding what the model of assertion is. His model
(which I've trotted out and tried giving short primers to in two places
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/07/spatial-model-of-belief-change.html
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/07/reading-academically.html)
is that an assertion is a commitment kept by a person, and that
justification is understood as entitling that person to the
commitment. He is in the midst of trying to understand entitlement:
----------
The model presented here has what might be called a _default and
challenge structure_ of entitlement. Often when a commitment is
attributed to an interlocutor, entitlement to it is attributed as well,
by default. The prima facie status of the commitment as one the
interlocutor is entitled to is not permanent or unshakeable;
entitlement to an assertional commitment can be challenged. When
it is _appropriately_ challenged (when the challenger is _entitled_ to
the challenge), the effect is to void the inferential and communicative
authority of the corresponding assertions (their capacity to transmit
entitlement) unless the asserter can vindicate the commitment by
demonstrating entitlement to it.
This is what was meant by saying that the broadly justificatory
responsibility to vindicate an assertional commitment by
demonstrating entitlement to it is a _conditional_ task-responsibility.
It is conditional on the commitment's being subject to a challenge
that itself has, either by default or by demonstration, the status of
being an entitled performance. Indeed, the simplest way to
implement a feature of the model of asserting is to require that the
performances that have the significance of challenging entitlements
to assertional commitments themselves be assertions. One then
can challenge an assertion only by making an assertion incompatible
with it. (Recall that two claims are incompatible just in case
commitment to one precludes entitlement to the other.) Then
challenges have no privileged status: their entitlement is on the table
along with that of what they challenge. Tracing the provenance of
the entitlement of a claim through chains of justification and
communication is appropriate only where an actual conflict has
arisen, where two prima facie entitlements conflict. There is no
point fixed in advance where demands for justification or
demonstration of entitlement come to and end, but there are enough
places where such demands _can_ end that there need be no
_global_ threat of debilitating regress.
----------
Why is this important? It's not. (Though one might notice that the
two paragraphs engineer a response to Cartesian skepticism, and it
articulates my sense that Dan--in my other conversation--isn't
entitled to his question in the context he's asking it.) But it does
theorize my ability to say that I do not think you are entitled to most
of your challenges. If you ask me to explain, and I do, and you
don't like it and complain about my vocabulary and ask me again
without hardly trying to engage what I said previously, then I don't
know what else I am to do. You behave in manner that suggests to
me that you should not be taken seriously. Since you think the
same of me, I wonder why you keep at it?
Matt
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