Hi Matt,
On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 8:55 PM, Matt Kundert <[email protected]> wrote: > > Why did Rorty write a paper, in 1986, called "Beyond Realism and > Anti-Realism"? Why did he write in 1991 that "Philosophers in the > English-speaking world seem fated to end the century discussing the same > topic -- realism -- which they were discussing in 1900. ... Nowadays the > opposite of realism is called, simply, 'antirealism'" and then go on to say > that "Dummett turned away from the 'therapeutic' conception of philosophy > familiar to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and from such > earlier books as James's Pragmatism and Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy" > ? Steve: I wasn't able to find Rorty's paper on the internet. Would you say that my response to Ham (below) was consistent with Rorty's view on the pragmatist's take on the issue? Best, Steve Steve previously: It isn't meant as a pejorative term for idealism so much as a broader term for positions (including idealism) that deny the existence of an objective reality. Pragmatists and MOQers don't affirm the existence of objective reality. But the anti-realist's denials sound like a _realistic_ denials to us. (Would anti-realists have us think that it is objectively true that objectivity is an illusion?) So pragmatists are neither realists in affirming the existence of objective reality nor anti-realists in denying the existence of objective reality. We are anti-anti-realists. Behaving as though there is an objective reality has born much fruit for scientists, and therefore it is good to believe that there is a world that is not mind-dependent for certain purposes such as predicting and controlling things, but we don't hold the existence of objective reality as a metaphysical certainty that must be regarded as true for ALL possible purposes. (That belief seems to have reached its limit even for scientific purposes.) And we don't take objective reality as a _basis_ for developing a system of thought or as an axiom to which all our ideas must adhere. Our descriptions of reality are always descriptions made for a purpose. When the realist or anti-realist asks, do you affirm or deny the existence of objective reality?, what is desired is not a description made in relation to particular purposes but a practice-transcending description. We have no practice-transcending descriptions to offer. We aren't denying that reality is objectively real. We just can't make any sense of the notion of descriptions of reality that are objective in the sense of being true without regard to human practice when we take the meaning for words like "true" and all others words as having meaning only in relation to practice. 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
