Hi Coyote, (dmb, Matt) On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 12:28 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
> I like my experience like I like my wimmun- a little impure. > > What good is pure experience if you have to be an infant, insane or > severely brain-damaged to "experience" it? Seems to me the pragmatic value > of radical empiricism is non-existent. Something I've complained about for > years and nobody has ever given me a satisfactory answer. > > I think Steve's comment about "pragmatic backsliding is entirely apropos. > > Steve: I still think radical empiricism can be a good tool for addressing sense-data empiricism, but unless dmb can demonstrate how an ethical or factual matter can be settled by appeal to pure experience without tacitly smuggling in a whole bunch of "impure" thoughts and other "impure" static patterns, then I can't see how Rorty or any of us who don't get all excited about radical empiricism can be thought of as somehow lacking (relativists!) for not claiming a basis in "pure experience" for our moral and factual claims. His "I have something you don't have" claims fall flat. Radical empiricism doesn't sound like anything of epistemological value. Apparently for dmb, it is not enough to say that a belief is well-justified. In order not to be relativists we also need to think that beliefs are "made true" by reality or else we are left with free-floating beliefs that are entirely unconstrained. His fear is that if knowledge is merely what our interlocutors will let us get away with claiming then some of us will get away with murder. The problem with trying to assuage his fears by thinking of truth in this way is that it amounts to a correspondence theory of truth. dmb thinks he is still being a good pragmatist in rejecting correspondence theory since the reality he is appealing to is not the objective reality of SOM but the "pure experience" of radical empiricism. But if the "pure experience" is the reality that is supposed to make our ideas true, then I can't see how it functions differently from a correspondence idea of truth, and it has all the same problems as correspondence theory. As in correspondence to objective reality it is not at all clear how to make sense of comparing sentences we believe with "pure experience" for conformity. Without being able to clarify what that agreement between reality and sentences must be like, saying that one's ideas conform to "pure experience" doesn't give us anything that we didn't already have. We are in no better position to be able to distinguish true statements from false ones than we were before the appeal to "pure experience." So what is the point? It's like this: I have a sentence in one hand and pure experience in the other. How do I compare them to see if they are in the proper relation? Pragmatists (of the non-dmb variety) think such a comparison is nonsensical. Pierce taught us to think of meaning in terms of utility to avoid such nonsense, so understanding the meaning of "truth" is simply the matter of saying how the word "truth" is used. James pointed out that "truth" is used to say that beliefs are well-justified and that that is all there is to it. Later philosophers pointed out that "truth" has some other uses that James wasn't taking into account (usages that the retro-pragmatists continue to neglect). Fine. Nevertheless, we don't need to think of comparing sentences to reality be it objective reality or "pure experience" to make truths true. Contemplating the essence of truth in terms of some correct correspondence doesn't get us anywhere that trying to justify our believes to ourselves and one another doesn't get us. This is not to deny the existence of an objective reality or "pure experience" or "the world" or anything else (it is neither an affirmation of realism nor anti-realism). It is just to say that appeals to "objective reality" or "pure experience" just don't get us anywhere we couldn't go before. 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
