Hi dmb,
> dmb replied with a quote from SEP which says otherwise: > "..., it is not surprising that Rorty's commitment to epistemological > behaviorism should lead to charges of RELATIVISM or subjectivism. Indeed, > many who share Rorty's historicist scepticism toward the transcending > ambitions of epistemology—friendly critics like Hilary Putnam, John McDowell > and Daniel Dennett—balk at the idea that there are NO CONSTRAINTS ON > KNOWLEDGE SAVE CONVERSATIONAL ONES. Yet this is a central part of Rorty's > position,.. > > dmb says: > The criticism I'm offering is much more subtle than you're willing to > acknowledge, apparently. Please notice that I'm criticizing Rorty's > neo-pragmatism from the position of classical pragmatist, namely Pirsig, > James and sometimes Dewey. But you keep making your counter-arguments as if > this criticism could only ever be leveled by some kind of Platonist or > Objectivists. I'm sure Rorty has those kinds of critics but I'm not one of > them. Religious people go nuts over anything that even remotely smells like > relativism. But I'm not one of those either. The conversation should NOT be > about Kantian critics or about the kind of relativism that we find only among > co-operative freshman, the kind where "anything goes". It's more subtle than > that, Steve. Steve: Okay, but what exactly _is_ your criticism. What the heck to you mean by relativism? I think you'll have a difficult time defining it in a way that doesn't apply apply equally to James who of course is also routinely accused of relativism. Your case has simply been that other people seem to think he is a relativist. How about specifying what you mean by relativism (since SEP says it can mean lots and lots of things) and how Rorty fits the bill while James does not? dmb: It's about the consequences of thinking that conversation is the only constraint on truth. That's what his critics balk at and I think every serious person should think about why they're balking, especially those who follow Rorty or who call themselves a pragmatist of any kind. Steve: But Rorty never said that conversation is what constrains truth. In fact Rorty doesn't have a theory of truth other than to say with James that the beliefs we call true are those that are earning their keep in leading to successful action. (Unlike James, however, he does not simply equate truth and justification since we may be now justified in believing something that turns out to be false.) You've quoted SEP saying that Rorty says there are no constraints on knowledge save conversational ones. It is your Jamesian conflation of justification and truth that is the problem in your misreading here. What Rorty actually said in Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism is, "... pragmatism: it is the doctrine that there are no constraints ON INQUIRY save conversational ones -- no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers. The way in which the properly-programmed speaker cannot help believing that the patch before him is red has no analogy for the more interesting and controversial beliefs which which provoke epistemological reflection." SEP has taken Rorty's claim that there are no non-conversational constraints on "inquiry" to mean there are no constraints on "knowledge" (rather than on claims to knowledge or what is to be considered justified), and then you took it one step further still to say that he is talking about truth itself. Plus, do you have any idea what he is excluding and including with the phrase "non-conversational constraints"? I've continued the quote where he unpacks his slogan so you can see exactly what it is he is denying. I suspect you will likewise want to deny the very same things that Rorty is denying as "non-conversational constraints." Rorty: "The pragmatist tells us that it is useless to hope that objects will constrain us to believe the truth about them, if only they are approached with an unclouded mental eye, or a rigorous method, or a perspicuous language. He wants us to give up the notion that God, or evolution, or some other under-writer of our present world-picture, has programmed us as machines for accurate verbal picturing, and that philosophy brings self-knowledge by letting us read our own program. The only sense in which we are constrained to truth is that, as Peirce suggested, we can make no sense of the notion that the view which can survive all objections might be false. But objections -- conversational constraints -- cannot be anticipated. There is no method for knowing when one has reached the truth, or when one is closer to it than before. I prefer this third way of characterizing pragmatism because it seems to me to focus on a fundamental choice which confronts the reflective mind: that between accepting the contingent character of starting points, and attempting to evade this contingency. To accept the contingency of starting-points is to accept our inheritance from, and our conversation with, our fellow-humans as our only source of guidance. To attempt to evade this contingency is to hope to become a properly-programmed machine. This was the hope which Plato thought might be fulfilled at the top of the divided line, when we passed beyond hypotheses. Christians have hoped it might be attained by becoming attuned to the voice of God in the heart, and Cartesians that it might be fulfilled by emptying the mind and seeking the indubitable. Since Kant, philosophers have hoped that it might be fulfilled by finding the apriori structure of any possible inquiry, or language, or form of social life. If we give up this hope, we shall lose what Nietzsche called "metaphysical comfort", but we may gain a renewed sense of community. Our identification with our community -- our society, our political tradition, our intellectual heritage - is heightened when we see this community as ours rather than nature's, shaped rather than found, one among many which men have made. In the end, the pragmatists tell us, what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right. James, in arguing against realists and idealists that "the trail of the human serpent is over all", was reminding us that our glory is in our participation in fallible and transitory human projects, not in our obedience to permanent non-human constraints." 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
