dmb said to John:
While it's true that pragmatism is opposed to metaphysical claims, I don't see
why that would preclude the discussion of ideals.
John replied with explanations from Auxier:
"The Dewey-James approach decapitates philosophy, forbidding it fully to use
its powers of abstraction, for fear that it will put the head before the
embodied heart and neglect or try to tyrannize the "problems of men," in
Dewey's phrase, with the "abstractions of philosophers". Given the excesses of
rationalistic philosophy in its history in the West, this is certainly a
legitimate fear."
"This inability to deal with abstract thinking is most keenly problematic when
Dewey and James [...] are obliged to confront ideals. ...While ideals are
treated as concrete concepts by Royce and Perice, available for the work of
philosophical reflection, they are bloodless abstractions in James's
estimation, and at most promissory notes in Dewey's view. One will not be able
to keep a philosophy in play for very long without learning to work with
ideals, and that requires a mastery of logic and metaphysics."
dmb says:
I removed everything from your reply except the part that most directly speaks
to the point. It's pure Auxier as a result.
It does clear up the meaning of "ideals" as Auxier uses the term. I thought you
were talking about "ideals" as a conception of the best or a model of the
perfect but Auxier uses the term to refer to metaphysical entities. It's
certainly true that James (Dewey and Pirsig too) rejects the metaphysical
version, rejects ideals as a concrete reality. But an "inability to deal with
abstract thinking" simply doesn't follow from that rejection. That's Auxier's
claim, apparently, and that makes no sense at all.
"The only value of universal characters is that they help us, by reasoning, to
know new truths about individual things."
— William James, The Principles of Psychology.
To take ideals, abstractions, universals and the like as actual things is the
most persistent feature of Idealist (or Rationalist) philosophers. Plato turned
the Good into an actual thing, a fixed and eternal thing. And of course this is
exactly what James and Pirsig are rejecting. Idealism will illuminate their
empiricism and pragmatism by showing you what empiricism and pragmatism are
reacting to and rejecting. It will illuminate the MOQ in the same way that
theism will clarify the meaning of atheism.
To take ideals and universal as conceptual tools rather than ontological
realities certainly does NOT mean you can no longer use them as conceptual
tools. So I still see no reason why nominalism would preclude the use of ideals
in our reasoning or thinking. It just means the pragmatist takes abstractions
as abstractions. In fact, as I've talked about many, many times in this forum,
this sort of Idealism or Platonism is rejected for being the result of a
conceptual error called reification. And in this context, i hope, you can see
exactly that means because that's what Auxier is demanding of pragmatism! I
must say, this argument really exposes the man's ignorance of James's
pragmatism.
Wikipedia on "Reification" (fallacy)
"Reification (also known as concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction
(abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a
concrete, real event, or physical entity. In other words, it is the error of
treating as a concrete thing something which is not concrete, but merely an
idea."
He's very weak, this professional of yours.
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