David Harding said to dmb:
...So really, it's interesting to me that you disagree with Pirsig dmb, where
he writes: "James had tried to make his pragmatism popular by getting it
elected on the coattails of practicality. He was always eager to use such
expressions as 'cash-value,' and 'results,' and 'profits,' in order to make
pragmatism intelligible to 'the man in the street,' but this got James into hot
water. Pragmatism was attacked by critics ..."
dmb says:
But, David, I already told you that I wanted to put this issue off until later
and so I never even commented on this point. Since I haven't even addressed the
point, how can you portray my position on as "interesting" or anything else?
In fact, I don't disagree with Pirsig's observation. The problem is that you
are committing a basic error of relevance and in a particularly egregious
manner too. You're assigning positions to me on a topic I'm not even
discussing! That's the kind of gumption-sucking move that I find so frustrating
- and I almost never encounter this sort of problem anywhere but here.
Sigh.
I'm guessing that you're totally unaware of what James was actually up to with
his use of his term "cash value". I'll bet you didn't know that it is an
analogy used in contrast with beliefs held on "credit". It was part of an
explanation as to the difference between truths that are actually verified in
experience and truths we adopt at second hand. James went on to explain that
most of our beliefs are never cashed out by us personally, like results of
every scientific experiment that you never personally witnessed. James's point
was that it's quite alright to adopt these second hand truths so long as they
are cashed out by somebody, somewhere. This is what guarantees that the check
will not bounce if you do personally try to cash it. He said the whole system
beliefs is held up by truths with real cash value. Which is to say, switching
to an architectural analogy, that empirically verified truths are the central
pillars that support the whole structure of belief.
The critics preformed a similar hack job on his use of the word "practicality".
In an effort to be almost deliberately stupid about it, his critics took
"practical" to mean trivial daily tasks but in fact "practical" just another
word for "pragmatism". The idea here is just that our hypotheses can only be
rightly tested "in practice". Our ideas are useful and meaningful only insofar
as they make an actual difference in experience, when they are put to work or
put into practice. While it's true that James's critics failed to understand
that, it's also true that James's critics were mostly Positivists or religious
fanatics, who felt James was a threat to their objective certainties and their
absolutist certainties respectively. In other words, James's critics were arch
SOMers who could not comprehend pragmatism because of those metaphysical
assumptions - and their personal attachments such eternal certainty.
I'd also remind you that Pirsig's comments about the critics of James's
pragmatism are situated in a context wherein Pirsig is making all kinds of
comments about James's work and it's relation to the MOQ. As a reader and
interpreter, you must realize that context is one of the most important
elements, if not THEE most important feature. In terms of deriving the proper
meaning of any given passage, the context is everything. The general thrust of
the whole context in this particular case is to show how and why the MOQ can be
identified as mainstream American pragmatism. Not to mention the fact that with
his metaphysics of Pure Experience James ends up using exactly the same terms
as Pirsig (static and dynamic).
In other words, it seems to me that you're giving more weight to one negative
point than you are to ninety-nine positive points. What kind of weird blinders
does it take to do that? What motive could prompt a person to select that bit
and ignore everything else he says about James? Seriously, how do you justify
such a distorted perspective, such arbitrary selection?
Sadly, you never really grappled with the evidence against your central
complaint and, apparently, never really figured out what actual topic was. This
leads me to suspect that you didn't even understand you were objecting to in
the first place.
God, it's just so frustrating to be so completely misread all the time. I never
realized what a drag that is until I went away and found a place where people
understand things like relevance and fairness.
This isn't David. You strike me as a very decent and sincere guy. But that
doesn't mean that it's okay to hold opinions on philosophers you've never read
and it's not okay to put words in the other guy's mouth. It's not okay to
confuse topics or ignore the context in which these claims are made. That's
just not good enough. Errors like that will shut down a conversation faster
than you can say "fallacious reasoning".
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