Hi dmb, > Steve said: > 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. > > dmb says: > First of all, pure experience can't settle any ethical or factual truth > claims. Radical empiricism says that philosophers shouldn't talk about > anything that can't be experienced and they should make room in their > accounts of everything that is experienced. Pure experience, then, would be > among the things that should be taken into account. This is an attack on old > fashioned sense-data empiricism, which couldn't or wouldn't include such > experience, and it is an attack on metaphysical entities like the Hegel's > Absolute or Kant's things-in-themselves. The pragmatic theory of truth fits > within the parameters of radical empiricism but it is more specific. > Pragmatism is like a special chapter on truth within a larger book about > reality in general. "Pure experience" doesn't really figure into that special > chapter or the pragmatic theory of truth. The MOQ let's us have philosophical > pragmatism and philosophical mysticism at the same time, but they certainly > aren't the same thing. Pr agmatic truths are static and intellectual while the mystic reality is neither of those things.
Steve: My understanding was that empiricism prevents James from being a relativist while the fact that Rorty does not claim to be an empiricist makes him a relativist. You insisted in the past that empiricism makes a big difference when it comes to the issue of relativism. Now you seem to be saying that it makes no difference since you agree with me that "pure experience can't settle any ethical or factual truth claims." What gives? > Steve said: > 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. ...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. > > dmb says: ...As I'm sure you know by now, the MOQ rejects that theory quite explicitly and Pirsig joins James in saying that subject and objects - the elements that are supposed to correspond to each other - are secondary products of experience, not the pre-existing realities that make experience possible. But it is true that the pragmatic truth is one that agrees with experience, one that works when it is put into actual practice. It is an empirical theory in that sense. True ideas are the ones that make sense of past experience and successfully guide present experience. Steve: Sure, Rorty agrees that truth is agreement with experience. The problem is that while correspondence, coherence, and "what works" theorizers about truth and everyone else all agrees on that point, none of the theorizers are able to specify how we compare experience to a sentence to objective reality or pure experience or whatever to help us distinguish true beliefs from false ones. You can say truth is "what works," but that does not in itself give us any standards for what counts as adequate justification. As I quoted Rorty previously, "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." The distinction between "works" and "doesn't work" is not a given for any non-trivial questions. It is something worked out among a community of inquirers who seek to justify their beliefs to one another. dmb: The pragmatic truth is wedge and controlled by two main elements, the conceptual order and the empirical flux. In other words, it has to fit with standards like coherence and logically consistency and it has to agree with actual experience. Steve: Here you have the problems of where these standards come from and of comparing a belief to "the empirical flux" for agreement. How exactly is that accomplished? If you think you have something here with this "wedge"--something Rorty is sadly lacking and something worth having because it can settle disputes for us, you'll need to specify how it functions. How does it help usproperly hook up our concepts with the empirical flux? > Steve said: > 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? > dmb says: > Again, that's very mixed up. An idea that is in "agreement with experience" > is simply one that works when you act on it. Steve: Again, "what works" versus "what doesn't work" is not a distinction handed to us by "the empirical flux" or whatever. For any nontrivial question (beyond being caused to believe in the redness of something red), it is a distinction that gets specified and negotiated within a community of inquirers rather than being handed to us by Nature, or "pure experience," or "objective reality" or any other term you may want to insert. By offering "what works" as not just a description of what beliefs will be held as true but as a "theory of truth," you haven't given us anything we didn't already have before adopting any theory of truth. Plus, offering "what works" as a theory of truth is what got pragmatists accused of relativism from the start since what works for you is not necessarily what works for me or what works for an African dictator. It is the reason James had to spend so much time defending his position against accusations of relativism and why Pierce had to spend so much time trying to distance himself from James. What I suspect is going on with you and other retro-pragmatists in accusing Rorty of relativism is that it seems to be a way of deflecting accusations against them for being relativists. (How can I be a relativist when I am attacking someone else for being a relativist?) I doubt there is anything more to it than that. 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
