Dan quoted a thing about James: "James made no concerted attempt to show or prove that the principle of pragmatism was correct. In his lectures, he put it into practice, solving problems about squirrels, telling us the meaning of truth, explaining how we can understand propositions about human freedom or about religious matters. But in the end, inspired by these applications, we are encouraged to adopt the maxim and see how well things work out when we do so." (SEP http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/)
Dan said: This is what I see you [Dave, but probably Matt, too] doing by sweeping away such questions as: is there a sound when a forest with no one around and does Don's dog dish exist when he walks out of the room. You're in effect telling us (like James) that high quality intellectual patterns work well in the real world so we should forget about questioning them. We should just take them for granted. I don't like that, though. That doesn't seem like philosophy to me... it seems more like giving in... Matt: I thought you might be making this move. Whatever about Jame, I believe that you are here conflating a globally-applicable question with specifically-applicable questions. (And this is the difference between a global, Cartesian doubt and specific doubts about specific context-dependent things. Of the former, Peirce, a good anti-Cartesian, called "fake doubt.") The thought-experiments having to do with trees and dog dishes are there to pump our intuitive responses to a situation that has nothing to do with trees or dog dishes _specifically_. What it seems like you are suggesting is that by not taking "what dog dish/tree/X?" seriously, we are thereby eliminating our ability to question specific things about dog dishes, trees, any particular X. That, by saying "what dog dish?" is usually a bad question, we are saying, "Shut your mouth and don't question reality!" The latter, indeed, isn't philosophy. However, I think thinking of "what dog dish?" as an emblem for the Socratic spirit is a bad idea. And partly because of how this conversation has rollicked forward. Neither Dave nor I has ever wanted to stop questioning specific presuppositions, but your question applies to _all_ presuppositions, and so is about the process of presuppositioning. And I don't think the three of us disagree importantly on Pirsig's position on ghosts/presuppositions. The only thing I disagree with is seeing a question that applies to everything as having, therefore, a special kind of connection to all questions about specific things (what I called "emblematic" earlier). I see questions that apply to everything as _as_ specific as the other questions, and therefore a specific kind of question that can be in and out of point depending on circumstance (it is specifically about "everything"). 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
