[MD] Mill: Quality philosopher

[ian glendinning]

Matt, Platt, et al ...

"Vulgar" common-sensical speech, jargon, technical terms ?
In a word ... "Shorthand"

We can't live without it, I may have mentioned already.

Regards
Ian


On 6/3/06, Matt Kundert <pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Platt,
>
> Matt said:
> Gene is right: we shouldn't, in our more careful moments, say that absolute
> truth does or does not exist.  Pragmatists are advocating we stop talking
> about it because talk of it (started by Plato) hasn't gotten us any closer
> in answering the question because we are no where closer towards developing
> criteria of even knowing how we'd know if we answered the question.
>
> Platt said:
> I see what you're saying. But what about the application of what you say to
> the everyday world we inhabit, such as the death of my cat, UTOE. Most
> people would agree with the statement, "UTOE is dead. He will never come
> back."  If asked, "Are you sure," the typical response would be
> "Absolutely."  In what way would that statement be wrong?
>
> Matt:
> There would be nothing wrong with it.  What I think we should do is make a
> distinction between commonsensical conversation and philosophical
> conversation, so-called "speaking with the vulgar" and more sophisticated,
> specialized talk.  Now, I've gotten the sense over the years that you'd be
> suspicious of such a distinction, seeing it at as breeding pointless
> jargonizing and instead valuing "plainer speech".  But I think one can still
> keep Pirsig's criticism of pointless Victorian circumlocutions while
> acknowledging that, for instance, scientists keep the kind of distinction
> I'm talking about between their activities at work and at home (by calling
> it a "table" instead of a "cloud of electrons between vectors X, Y, and Z"),
> or between writing articles for scientific journals and writing a "popular
> science" book.  Or take any of us: do we go around during the day talking
> about Dynamic Quality?  Probably not.  We probably reserve most of that talk
> for moments alone, with close friends, and for posts to this group.  But say
> you did--say one of us responded to a fortunate event by saying, "That was
> Dynamic!", and a friend (who'd never read Pirsig), replied, "Huh?"  You
> explain it, which takes at least five mintues, and I imagine the friend
> would say something like, "Why didn't you just say it was 'good'?"  They'd
> see _you_ as pointlessly jargonizing, proliferating words when there are
> easier ones available.
>
> The point is the commonsense one that our words gain resonance (and meaning,
> for that matter) from the contexts in which we use them.  A great impetus
> for 20th century analytic philosophy (the movement that spawned logical
> positivism) was the notion that the problems of philosophy (so-called
> "metaphysical problems" like free will v. determinism) were created by
> taking words like "freedom" out of the original, common sense contexts in
> which they arose and creating a new context for them, one that warped their
> original meaning until it had little to do with the original context, thus
> creating pseudo-problems--in other words, metaphysics was simply a set of
> pointless circumlocutions that just confused things.
>
> On the one had, the project of "ordinary language philosophy" (or Oxford
> philosophy, as it is sometimes known) foundered just as logical positivism,
> but it does create added pressure for us philosophers to justify some of the
> contexts we deal in.  How does, or could, this effect us?
>
> With this notion of "absolute", I want to say that there's nothing wrong
> with it in common sense contexts, like if I had answered your question ("Is
> logical consistency a characteristic of quality truth?") colloquially with
> "Absolutely", but that there is something wrong with some of the notions
> created in philosophical contexts--that the effects in such contexts do not
> extend to everyday life at all.  As James said after likewise dismissing the
> free will/determinism problem, it makes a difference that makes no
> difference.  If you're willing to agree that the notion of an "Absolute
> Truth" that is an object of inquiry creates an activity that has no criteria
> for even knowing if we had found what we were looking for (an activity that
> would go on indefinitely with no parameters for even knowing which direction
> is the right direction to go hunting in), then you should be willing to
> agree with me (to this limited extent) that the notion of "absolute truth"
> in philosophy is a wheel that spins idly by itself, that its dead weight,
> that it would be best to cut it loose from your philosophical language, thus
> trimming your own philosophical language and not letting it get away from
> you with pointless jargonizing.
>
> To pave the way for the possibility of agreement (many of our disagreements
> being built out of our first conversations almost four years ago, and not
> really worked on since), let me add this about truth: several years ago,
> Rorty conceded that truth is an absolute concept.  What he meant is this:
> pragmatists have gotten killed because the pragmatist theory of truth is
> said to prove its own falsity--if the true is what works, then the
> pragmatist theory of truth is false, 'cuz it don't work.  This is a line I'm
> postive you've used before.  Pragmatists like Rorty and Davidson have
> learned that this is right, that as a _theory_ of truth it _doesn't_ work.
> One of the formulations that Dewey gave is that truth is warranted
> assertability.  If truth is warranted assertability, then "truth" becomes
> the same thing as "justification".  _That_ conflation is exactly what leads
> people to call pragmatists relativists, because while we see that
> justification is relative to communities (or broadly, contexts), truth is
> seperate from it for the exact reason that relativism is absurd.
>
> So pragmatists should be willing to admit that justification is different
> from truth.  What they've realized though is that the problem is with
> thinking we need a _theory_ of truth.  The development of theories of truth
> are exactly those philosophical activities that treat Truth as an object of
> inquiry, inquiries through which we could learn more about truth (and
> therefore, ideally, the application of "true" to particular linguistic items
> like "Slavery is bad"), but how can we _learn_ anything if, in such an
> inquiry, we appear to be in an endless sea with no compass?
>
> Truth may be an absolute notion, but pragmatists think we should give up the
> hope for a theory of it, that we should stop treating it as an object of
> inquiry.  Justification (by such earmarks as Pirsig's "tests of truth") is
> our only criterion for truth, but they are different.  _Justification_ is
> relative to community, but that doesn't make us relativists because it isn't
> clear what other criterion we could have for truth.  It simply makes us
> fallible experimentalists, always in search of betterness.  There are no
> theories for truth, justification, or betterness.  We simply accrue them by
> the living of life.
>
> Matt
>
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