Ron said:
...The philosophical question I need help on (in the rhetorical counter
argument) is "How does Pragmatism explain how truths are verifyable in
experience? How does it explain how one truth (concept) is better than another?
dmb says:
Basically, ideas are tested in experience and true ideas are the ones that work
out when you put them into practice. Unlike other truth theories, this cannot
be reduced to a universal formula because a practice is always particular and
concrete and there are specific purposes and goals involved that will determine
the meaning of "works". Like radical empiricism, the idea here is to prioritize
experience over concepts.
“…Had pure experience, the naturalist says, been always perfectly healthy,
there would never have arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing any of
its terms. We should just have experienced inarticulately and unintellectually
enjoyed. This leaning on ‘reaction’ in the naturalist account implies that,
whenever we intellectualize a relatively pure experience, we ought to do so for
the sake of redescending to the purer or more concrete level again; and that if
an intellect stays aloft among its abstract terms and generalized relations,
and does not reinsert itself with its conclusions into some particular point of
the immediate stream of life, it fails to finish out its function and leaves
its normal race unrun.”
I think this is what “practical” means in pragmatism; the truth or falsity of
a concept is determined by the effects of putting it into practice. We want the
concept to fit in with other related concepts but, according to the pragmatic
test of truth, it cannot “remain aloft” among them forever. At some point we
have to bring the concept down to the earth of things and put it to work in the
concrete realm of experience. Ideas become true in the course of experience, he
says, and this practical application is all that “true” can ever really mean.
Again, the general thrust of both doctrines is to prioritize experience over
conception and so James’s doctrines are both deeply empirical. This is an
empiricism that goes further than traditional sensory empiricism, one that
includes sense experience of course but also everything else that is felt and
known in experience; i.e. feelings, moods, concerns, frustrations and thrills.
This expanded empiricism counts any concrete experience as real and radical
empiricism goes so far as to say that “experience and reality amount to the
same thing”. In other words, experience IS reality and concepts are secondary
additions, tools we invent as shortcuts for handling empirical reality. And
basically he is pressing this priority of experience over concepts against its
opposite; against the priority of intellect over experience, which he, like
Pirsig finds throughout the history of philosophy going all the way back to the
ancient Greeks. He is pressing this against what he calls “vicious
intellectualism” or “vicious abstractionism”.
Here is how James puts it in “A Pluralistic Universe”… “…Both theoretically
and practically this power of framing abstract concepts is one of the sublimest
of our human prerogatives. We come back into the concrete form our journey into
these abstractions, with an increase both of vision and of power. It is no
wonder that earlier thinkers, forgetting that concepts are only man-made
extracts from the temporal flux, should have ended by treating them as a
superior type of being, bright, changeless, true, divine, and utterly opposed
in nature to the turbid, restless lower world. The latter then appears as but
their corruption and falsification. Intellectualism in the vicious sense
began when Socrates and Plato taught that what a thing really is, is told us by
its defintion. Ever since Socrates we have been taught that reality consists of
essences, not of appearances, and that the essences of things are known
whenever we know their defintions. So first we identify the thing with a
concept and then we identify the concept with a definition, and only then,
inasmuch as the thing IS whatever the definition expresses, are we sure of
apprehending the real essence of it or the full truth about it. So far no harm
is done. The misuse of concepts begins with the habit of employing them
privatively [to negate or exclude] as well as positively, using them not merely
to assign properties to things, but to deny the very properties with which the
things sensible present themselves. …It is but the old story, of a useful
practice first becoming a method, then a habit, and finally a tyranny that
defeats the end it was used for. Concepts, first employed to make things
intelligible, are clung to even when they make them unintelligible. Thus it
comes that when once you have conceived things as ‘independent,’ you must
proceed to deny the possibility of any connection whatever among them, because
the notion of connection is not contained in the definition.”
How's that? Maybe you still have questions but, hopefully, now the questions
are more specific.
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