Steve said:
I am _not_ pushing the actual shape of the earth against our beliefs about the
shape of the earth. I am pushing our common sense belief that (I) the earth did
not change shape when people developed ways of justifying that the earth is
roundish rather than flat ...
dmb says:
Sigh.
Do you REALLY think that you can weasel out of your own notion of objective
truth by putting the phrase "common sense" in front of it?
I don't. In fact, I don't see how any self-respecting conversationalist could
stoop to such a transparently bogus retraction.
Steve continued:
... if we think of truth as "warranted assertibility" then you have a
relativistic notion of truth since what one person at a given time is justified
in believing about a given proposition is not the same as what a different
person in a different time and place is justified in believing.
dmb says:
Pragmatic truth is plural so that there can be more than one truth about any
given subject matter. Pragmatic truth is also provisional so that it can grow
and evolve. Despite the mutability and flexibility of these plural and
provisional truths, they are still constrained by concepts and by experience.
This is a middle path between relativism and absolutism. We don't suppose there
is just one exclusive truth and we don't suppose the truth is somewhere waiting
to be discovered. Truths are not found so much as they are invented.
Steve said:
We already dealt with the fact that "the empirical flux" can't be thought of as
handing us standards for what can and cannot be asserted since it is by
definition pre-intellectual.
dmb says:
We already dealt with the fact? Not really, Steve. I started to untangle your
confusion of very broad categories like pragmatism and mysticism but then I
grew bored and weary. I started to unravel your knotted up versions of pure
experience and radical empiricism but of course that didn't help either. It's
true that pre-intellectual experience can't supply us with standards of truth
but that's not relevant to the empirical restraints as posited in the pragmatic
theory of truth. You're breezing right past the main idea over and over again,
denying the validity of something you clearly do not understand.
Like I said, pragmatism is much more specific than radical empiricism. Pure
experience or pre-intellectual empirical reality is the central doctrine of
radical empiricism and simply does not figure into the empirical restraints of
the pragmatist. The empirical constraints we're talking about here are not
mystical experiences or pure experiences but rather everyday experience. This
is NOT simply a matter of observing cats on mats or the whiteness of snow. The
pragmatist says that our ideas have to be put to work in experience, have to be
tested and tried and used to guide experience. The pragmatist is working with a
conception of experience that's much broader that the old sensory empiricism or
scientific observation. Instead, it's a kind of humanism that is supposed to
test more complex truths, the effects of adopting this philosophical vision as
opposed to that other one, for example. The way James personally decided to
believe in free will, for example. How does it work out if you act as if you
had free will? This is not the sort of thing that can simply be observed like
snow or cats can. And yet it is an empirical test. Put the idea to work in your
life and see what happens. Pragmatism means practice and so the pragmatic truth
is what works in actual practice.
Interestingly, researchers recently conducted a test to see what effect it
would make on moral behavior to believe that free will is an illusion. One
group was given scientific literature that denied the existence of free will
and the other group was given equally difficult reading material on
consciousness in general, material that did not discuss the existence of free
will at all. Long story short, those who read the denials of free will were
more likely to cheat on the tests and more likely to say nasty things about the
other participants.
Steve said:
You haven't at all made clear how this supposed difference makes a difference
in any relevant practice. Again, what sort of argument do you think that a
Jamesian could make for to justify a belief that Rorty could not make?
dmb says:
I think you need to figure out what "empirical" means. The pragmatic theory of
truth is very empirical and it is posited in a larger context that says
experience and reality amount to the same thing and this larger context says
that words and concepts are always secondary and derived from experience. Rorty
says this secondary addition (conversation is nothing but words and concepts)
is the only constraint. For Rorty, then, the question becomes a matter of who
can make a better sort of argument. This is the question you're asking me, But
I'm saying that you have begged the question in Rorty's favor by asking it that
way. We want agreement with each other, that harmonious conceptual fit is
certainly part of the constraint but the pragmatist says our ideas also have to
agree with empirical reality. This will include things like scientific data and
whatever can be learned from simple observation but "experience" is much more
broadly conceived. This truth theory is posited within a larger framework that
says any and every kind of experience should be accounted for in our
philosophies.
The idea that Rorty isn't saying anything different isn't even remotely
plausible. The MOQ is all about knocking words and concepts off their throne
and re-establishing the priority of experience itself, of reality itself. With
his emphasis on language (all the way down) Rorty is working against that
project. He sort of re-establishes the original problem - the usurpation of
Quality by the dialecticians. They would ban the artists and sophists from
their utopia, if they could, because they didn't have "arguments" for their
truths.
"“His mind races on and on, through the permutations of the dialectic, on and
on, hitting things, finding new branches and sub-branches, exploding with anger
at each new discovery of the viciousness and meanness and lowness of this ‘art’
called dialectic. ... Phædrus’ mind races on and on and then on further,
seeing now at last a kind of evil thing, an evil deeply entrenched in himself,
which pretends to try and understand love and beauty and truth and wisdom but
whose real purpose is never to understand them, whose real purpose is always to
usurp them and enthrone itself. Dialectic - the usurper. That is what he
sees. The parvenu, muscling in on all that is Good and seeking to contain it
and control it."
"How are you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical
ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A
person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for
his broadmindedness, but not for his virtue. Lightning hits!Quality!
Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical
relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But areté. Excellence. Dharma! Before the
Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before
dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the
Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of
rhetoric."
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