[MD] Neopragmatism isn't pragmatic.

[david buchanan]

Hey Matt, Dean, Paul, Arlo and all pragmatic MOQers:

"When a man perceives clearly and adequately that he is within nature, a 
part of its interactions, he sees that the line to be drawn is not between 
action and thought, or action and appreciation, but between blind, slavish, 
meaningless action and action that is free, significant, directed and 
responsible. Knowledge, like the growth of a plant and the movement of the 
earth, is a mode of interaction; but it is a mode which renders other modes 
luminous, important, valuable, capable of direction, causes being translated 
into means and effects into consequences." John Dewey, Experience and Nature

Matt said:
"Rorty, building off of work on the distinction between the literal and the 
metaphorical, has suggested that our literal words are simply dead 
metaphors.  Metaphors are themselves meaningless, and it is only through 
repeated use that they gain a meaning, become literal, and die. ..."

dmb says:
I think that's a very odd and loaded way to characterize the situation. Dead 
metaphors, meaningless metaphors? It seems to me that Rorty is only talking 
about the way new concepts begin as analogues and become increasingly 
abstract so that the original analogy is buried or obscured. The movement 
from pictographic language like egyptian heiroglyphics to one based on a 
phonic alphabet like ours, for example, even shows intermediary stages where 
the original reference can still be dectected, so that the symbol for fish 
still somewhat resembles an actual fish, etc.. In any case, its seems odd to 
refer to literal meaning as a dead metaphor when it seems more like an 
evolved abstraction of one, an abstract symbol that refers to an abstact 
reality as opposed to a biological organism like a fish. I mean, using words 
like "dead" and "meaningless" seems a lot more provocative than accurate.

Matt splained:
...what Rorty has suggested is that what counts as philosophy or not, what 
has driven the creation of the "problems of philosophy" that philosophers 
work on, are certain assumptions, certain working, though now dead, 
metaphors that underlie the literal things we say.  For instance, 
"ocularcentrism", that lovely $25 word is pointing at is that the underlying 
dead metaphors we use to describe
knowledge are ocular, as in the commonsensical phrase "seeing is believing". 
  What "anti-ocularcentrism" suggests is that, to purge ourselves of various 
problems of philosophy engendered by these metaphors, we need to purge the 
old metaphors (like the "mind's eye") and get some new metaphors.

dmb says:
I see what you mean. ;-) But again, it seems such an odd way to put it. Why 
put it in terms of getting new metaphors? It seems pretty clear that he's 
talking about the philosophical assumptions rather than the figures of 
speech that reveal or express them. But more than that, his way of putting 
it is so odd that his basic agreement with Pirsig on this point is almost 
enitrely obscured. You could have offered something in the way of 
translation or a bridge to the MOQ. Pirsig aversion to jargon would prevent 
the use of any such $25 dollars words, but we can see a very muscular form 
of antiocularcentrism in his attack on the assumptions of subject/object 
metaphysics, where the picture of a subjective self peering out onto a 
pre-existing objective reality is described as "a ridiculous fiction", etc.. 
The are the assumptions that Pirsig wants to get rid of too. But these 
assumptions aren't dead or meaningless so much as limited, flawed and 
obsolete. I mean, that perceptual model still works just fine when you're 
taking snapshots or measuring drapes or running away from tigers. As a 
practical matter, it works. But when this perceptual model is expanded to 
cosmic proportions and becomes a philosophical assumption about the nature 
of reality itself. This is what Pirsig calls SOM, what Hildebrand calls 
metaphysical realism and what Rorty calls essentialism, which is a telling 
metaphor if Freud can be believed. Anyway, I don't balk at the examination 
of assumptions. That's what this game is all about, eh? Its just that 
Rorty's odd way of talking complicates and frustrates the task of comparing 
his pragmatism to Pirsig's.

Matt said:
Now, I guess I don't have a problem with seeing "assumptions" and 
"metaphors" as interchangeable, but that might be the "extremely 
objectionable premise" you might be looking for.  As I see it, by rejecting 
an assumption, you've rejected a way of talking about this or that topic.  
You're exchanging one paradigm of explanation for another.

dmb says:
Well, its not just that there is an objectionable premise in Rorty's 
emphasis on language. Its also a problem that this premise remains hidden 
from view. I mean, I understand that getting new metaphors and new ways of 
talking is the way to things, as you and Rorty see it, but you do not say 
WHY this is the way to do things and so I've never been able to detect a 
justification. Fortunatley I've begun to investigate the matter beyond what 
you have told me and have a least a few pre-mature ideas about what's going 
on here. As I understand it, the reason for this emphasis on language is 
simple. "For Rorty", Hildebrand says, "talk is all we've got" and so 
"agreement with one's cultural peers" is all we can hope for (166). The 
image of "texts all the way down" pretty much says it all. As Hildebrand 
puts it, this is "a 'no-metaphysics' metaphysic"(167). Pirsig, by contrast, 
would only agree that the mythos is text all the way down but that the 
mythos exists in a larger framework. It is just the handful of sand, not the 
surrounding landscape from which it was drawn. (ZAMM 85) I think the MOQ 
would follow Dewey in asserting that "a universe of experience is the 
precondition of a universe of discourse", as Hildebrand quotes him. (187). 
This comes from his book, by the way, as you may have gathered from the page 
numbers, and not his paper. His "BEYOND REALISM AND ANTIREALISM; John Dewy 
and the Neopragmatists" makes a case that Rorty has an entirely different 
starting point than Dewey did and that Rorty's anti-philosophy philosophy 
"constitutes an evisceration of pragmatism" (154). This is parallel to my 
complaints about the Rortian reading you give to Pirsig and I think it 
explains why the conversation has so often been difficult. We are talking 
about the same things and even agree on quite a lot, but we have two 
entirely different starting points. In some ways, they are opposed starting 
points too. It comes back to that same old, same old. I repeatedly assert 
the role of experience and the empiricism of the MOQ while you repeatedly 
insist that its all about the conversation. With Hildebrand's help, maybe 
now I can say something about why this premise bothers me so much. These 
comments can serve to open the door...

Matt said:
So when you ask, "Are you saying that its philosophically incorrect to think 
that our descriptions should 'correspond' to the experience we are 
describing?", I would have to respond that, yes, if you reject 
representationalism and the correspondence theory of truth, 
then--_philosophically speaking_--you have to stay away from suggesting that 
your description of X corresponds better to X then somebody else's 
description.  Why?  Because to defend that claim you have to go on to 
explain what you mean by "better correspondence", which will lead you into 
the problems of realism and representationalism.  But there are other things 
you can say...

dmb says:
Let's see if I can sort a few things out here. First of all, please notice 
that there is a difference between the claim that a description agrees with 
experince and the claim that a descripton corresponds with objective 
reality. And notice that Pirsig can get rid of SOM (the correspondence 
theory of truth, which says subjective beliefs are true to the extent that 
they correspond with an objective reality) even while he retains a similar 
sort of "reality check", if you will. Even though he rejects the larger 
metaphysical claim, as Rorty does, Pirsig can still retain this idea that 
intellectual truth has to agree with experience. Putnam has developed a form 
of realism he calls "Internal Realism" where he thinks its okay to talk 
about "correspondence within a conceptual scheme" and so in a less than 
metaphysical sense we can have "objectivity for us" (160) even though he, 
like Pirisig, rejects Kant's idea of "things in themselves" (161-2). If this 
were translated into the MOQ, I'd guess he means that we can have 
non-metaphysical correspondence within the context of static patterns so 
that intellectual static quality could be said to correspond with the 
inorganic patterns, which would just be saying you have a good idea of 
rocks. But if we're only talking about what happens within the conceptual 
scheme, then Rorty's not really going to have a problem with it and this is 
not what's at issue anyway. I think there is a deeper problem here.

Notice the silent assumption in your assertions. What reason do you offer in 
explaining WHY should we avoid any claims of correspondence? Because it 
leads to problems of realism, you say. You say this leads us to makes the 
claim that "my description of X thusly corresponds to the true nature of X". 
See, the unstated assumption here is that correspondence with an objective 
reality is the only kind that can give us warrant for our beliefs. And maybe 
the effort to eject experience from the equation is the other side of the 
same coin. Here we get the implication that objective correspondence is the 
only kind of correspondence and subjective experience is the only kind of 
experience. Rorty seems to reason that since we can't have either of those, 
we can have nothing at all. As Hildebrand puts it..

"Rorty's zeal to dismiss certain aspects of the history of philosophy - such 
as the very possibility of any kind of representationalism - causes him to 
make an illegitimate inference from the unintelligibility of metaphysical 
realism (especially the idea that words have meaning by virtue of a fixed 
totality of things outside them) to a total skepticism toward any 
representation relation at all. This conclusion is unwarranted." (168-9)

And why does Rorty make this unwarranted move? Well, this section of his 
book is titled, "When Vaccinations Kills the Patient: Rorty's Relapse to 
Metaphyscial Realism" and opens with a little epigraph from Phillip Rieff; 
"Piety never dies; it merely shifts from object to object". Here is where I 
finally found confirmation of my hunch that Rorty is not a pragmatist so 
much as he is a broken-hearted positivist. "Putnam speculates that Rorty's 
unwitting shortcut back to Metaphysical Realism (at least at the 
metaphilosophical level) is due to his inability to shed the ideological 
vestiges of postivism, his philosophical roots" (169). This echoes the theme 
of Jason Boffetti's paper, "How Richard Rorty Found Religion" and even 
Rorty's own piece, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids". Both of these discuss 
Rorty's journey as the quest of a failed essentialist. Like a man fated to 
marry his true love's ugly little sister, he has to settle for solidarity 
because he can't have objectivity. If there is no objective truth, then 
there is only agreement among cultural peers. This is a grander form of the 
same unspoken assumption you revealed here, where any claims about the 
adequacy of my descriptions can only one one kind of grounding, where such a 
claim can only be made insofar as it corresponds with "the true nature of 
X". This is the same "illegitimate inference" I was getting at in asking you 
if you thought I was saying two opposite things at the same time. I was 
asking if you thought I was rejecting SOM while at the same time making 
claims about the subjective experience corresponding to objective reality. 
Again, please notice that claims about agreement with experience are not the 
same as claims about correspondence with objective reality. Why? Simply 
because, in the MOQ, experience is not concieved in those terms. Those terms 
are explicitly rejected and then the criteria of intellectual truth is 
developed in their absence. This is where agreement with experience can be 
introduced and used without the danger of reverting back into metaphysical 
realism or SOM. I was astonished to find that Hildebrand, despite the 
complete absence of Pirsigian terms or a single reference to his work, has 
also traced Rorty's relapse in terms of subject/object dualism. He says that 
Dewey's contemporary New Realist critics, as well as Rorty and Putnam failed 
to address "the underlying subject/object dualism responsible for their 
problems." (185) You'll notice Rorty does this in his "Consequences of 
Pragmatism" where he implicates - I mean cites - Derrida, Foucault, 
Heidegger and others for support.

"They are saying that attempts to get back behind language to someting which 
'grounds' it, or which it 'expresses', or to which it might hope to be 
'adequate', have not worked. The ubiquity of language is a matter of 
language moving into the vacancies left by the failure of all the various 
candidates for the positon of 'natural starting-points' of thought, 
starting-points which are prior to and independent of the way some culture 
speaks or spoke." (xx)

Notice how Rorty just assumes that the candidates for this starting-point 
have to be "prior to and independent of"? What does that you remind of? 
Objective reality, perhaps? Hildebrand and Putnam are refering to this as a 
relaspe into metaphysical realism, but I think we can see that its more like 
he can't shake off the assumptions that produced it. I think these are "the 
ideological vestiges of positivism" of Putnam's speculations. In Pirsig's 
terms, having found that objective truth is impossible, Rorty simply removes 
the objective half of subject/object metaphysics and cranks up the 
subjective half. He remains stuck inside that SOM framework even while 
insisting that it has failed. Rather than getting out of that framework, as 
Dewey and Pirsig did, he tries to deal with its failure from within that 
box. Funny thing is, the assumptions are the problem. Without them, there is 
no problem.

"In contrast, Dewey's notion of primary/had experience allows for a type of 
experience that is not cognitive but, at the same time, is not 'given' in 
any of the various traditional senses. This obviates the need to argue for 
'access' to reality by insisting that this access is something that we find 
we already possess." (154) Pirsig is even more insistant on this point. In 
the MOQ the gap between appearance and reality is a nonsensical question 
because it says that experience and reality are exactly the same thing. It 
says they are identical. The epistemic gap between the subject and objective 
reality doesn't need to be crossed any longer because that gap is a fiction 
created by subject/object assumptions in the first place. More explicitly, 
Pirsig points out that subjects and objects are not the preconditions of 
experience. Experience is not caused by a subject's encounter with an 
objective reality but rather subjects and objects are concepts derived from 
experience. You know, this is the pivot point of his copernican revolution. 
This is very much at odds with Rorty, where we're totally hemmed in by 
language, where "nothing pre-linguistic is conceivable" (186). Language has 
a secondary or derived status in the pragmatism of Pirsig and Dewey, but for 
Rorty language is the whole game.

Again, we have been talking about the same issues but from two incompatible 
starting points. Despite the fact the Dewey was not exactly a mystic, he 
shares Pirsig's view that experience comes first and our concepts about it 
are drawn from that...

"Distinctions and relations are instituted within a situation; they are 
recurrent and repeatable in different situations. Discourse that is not 
controlled by reference to a situation is not discourse, but a meaningless 
jumble, ...A universe of experience is the precondition of a universe of 
discourse. Without its controlling presence, there is no way to determine 
the relevancy, weight or coherence of any designated distinction or 
relation. The universe of experience surrounds and regulates the universe of 
discourse but never appears as such within the latter." (187)

This is very much like Pirsig's claim that reality is "direct everyday 
experience" and also the idea of the primary empirical reality being 
pre-intellectual. Dewey's "situation" is the pragmatic starting point, the 
experience where it all starts. As Hildebrand says, "This quality is FELT or 
HAD and is not predetermined by the characterizations we may later attach to 
it in discourse." (188) This echoes Dewey when he says, "Only upon 
reflective analysis does it break up into external conditions ...and 
internal structures" (187). Pirsig's hot stove example (LILA 68) illustrates 
this principle too. The negative quality of that situation will get your ass 
moving even before there is any concept of a stove or a burning self. The 
example that uses the language aquisition process of an infant (LILA 122) 
also demonstrates this notion, that language and concepts are derived from a 
more basic kind of experience and exist as a response to it, if you will.  
Its actually kind of absurd to imagine that talk is all we get. Rorty's view 
is weirdly reductionist, cramped and paralyzing, don't you think? Somehow he 
remains a slave to the thing he's rejected. As Putnam says, "Failing to 
inquire into the character of the unintelligibility which vitiates 
metaphysical realism, Rorty remains blind to the way in which his own 
rejection of metaphysical realism partakes of the same unintelligibility" 
(169).

Matt said:
Remember all that talk about pragmatism being about making negative points?  
And I'm sure you remember or have heard of Rorty described as an 
end-of-philosophy philosopher.  The reason he says things like the former 
and gets called things like the latter is because philosophy since Plato has 
_revolved_ around these addenda.  And pragmatism has come along and tried to 
put an end to it--in favor of common sense.  Drop philosophical speculation 
when it comes to rocks and physics, just deal with the rocks and the 
physics.  However, this doesn't end philosophy because that would be 
impossible--you can't end the love of wisdom.  You can only suggest that one 
avenue to find wisdom shut down, a mine shaft stripped of all its diamonds.

dmb says:
Well, I know what you mean but I think you've got to take Rorty's reading 
with a grain of salt. As I hope you see by now, Rorty sometimes misconstrues 
the matter so that use of certain metaphors is enough for him to detect the 
presence of one of these essentialist addendas whether they actually exist 
or not. And I don't think pragmatism is an anti-philosophical move toward 
common sense so much as an anti-theoretical philosophy with an interest in 
real life improvements. To the extent that Rorty thinks, for theoretical 
reasons, that we can only improve the conversations and vocabularies, he is 
not much of a pragmatist. "Pragmatism," Putnam writes, "goes with the 
criticism of a certain style in metaphysics; but the criticism does not 
consist in wielding some exclusionary principle to 'get rid of metaphysics 
once and for all." (167)

Matt said:
So, as I said before, its not that "there is a rock" _implies_ 
representationalism.  We can say "there is a rock" trivially and 
commonsensically.  Its rather that analytic philosophers have been 
construing it representationally for some time.  They've somehow created a 
problem out of getting the uttered words "there is a rock" to refer to the 
rock on the ground.  If that seems stupid, you'd be right and I'd agree, 
however neither of us at that starting point would be that close to 
understanding _why_ they would make that construal.  That's most of what 
Rorty has been involved for pretty much his whole career--explaining why 
philosophers think the way they do.

dmb says:
Right. This is the positivism from which Rorty suffers so tremendously. 
Apparently he's not drunk on it anymore but the hangover lasts a lifetime. 
This is the reference problem you mentioned before. Rorty threw up his hands 
when it failed and set about telling us all to just find better ways of 
talking about rocks, but to forget about rocks as such. Dewey was talking 
about "positrons" or something, but rocks will do just as well. He said that 
the reality of things or objects like rocks, "consists both in the immediate 
experiences they create" (for example, stubbed toes, fascinated geologists 
or dead giants) "and in the way they guide future experience" (184). Beyond 
the very obvious emphasis on experience, there are really just two features. 
First, you notice the rock according to your values and interests at the 
time (avoidance of minor pain, scientific curiosity or surviving a battle) 
and the second is that the action is aimed at the future. This seems to me 
the place where that basic sense of betterness comes into it and we are also 
talking about patterns of experience. What do I know about this from before 
and how can this or the next encounter be improved? And in a less engaged or 
more observational sense, rocks seem so solid and real because their 
hardness and such properties are an extremely persistant pattern of 
experience within a wide range of contexts. The toe stubber, the scientist 
and the giant would all agree that rocks are hard, for example. Anyway, the 
point here is really just that the pragmatist can say all kinds of things 
about all kinds of experience all day long without resorting to metaphysical 
realism or essentialism of any kind.

Matt said:
If mythos-training goes all the way down, as Pirsig says, then what we say 
in response to a particular experience, whether non-ontological-attributing 
"mystical experience" or ontological-attributing "experience of God", is 
going to be a function of what kind of culture we were created in it.  If 
that idea makes you uncomfortable, you'll look to me like ...you're stopping 
half-way, not going all the way to say that everything we say is a 
construct.  It is _all_ under a description, it is all experienced, even 
this "supernatural being"--even if for most of us our experience of Him is 
only _as_ a description.

dmb says:
This argument is predicated on the same generally fallacy. I think you'd be 
misreading Pirsig if you think he takes sides with Rorty in this kind of 
relativism. The mythos inescapable but it is generated out of the primary 
empirical experience in an evolutionary process. It is the handful of sand 
we draw from the larger landscape of experience, the patterns and 
distinctions we find valuable to notice or make. But without "the 
controlling presence of the situation", as Dewey puts it, our beliefs will 
be meaningless and incoherent. They won't work. You gotta have some kind of 
reality check and this is a prime example as to why we need one.

Matt said:
So, I still think I'll have to include Christians, Augustine, Aquinas, 
Tillich, and Sam in my account of reality.  Saying _that_, though, you can 
still make a case against theism, while still accounting for them, by 
arguing that descriptions with ontological implications are not as useful as 
descriptions without them--which is essentially what Rorty argues in 
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.  We should stop using descriptions that 
make ontological implications.  Notice, also, that your practice of 
anti-theism has caught you up in making strictures in the way we talk about 
mystical experience.  No "God metaphors", use "nothingness metaphors" 
(roughly).

dmb says:
That's not too far from what I'm saying. It seems to me that an 
anti-essentialist has an ever greater imperitive to drop the notion of God 
than he does to drop the notion of an objective reality. Weren't all the 
Positivists basically hoping to separate scientific truth from everything 
else, trying to purify the truth by removing the metaphysics and all the 
theological baggage? Now Rorty's language-centered antirealism has his hands 
so tied that he can't even find a rational way to exclude faith-based 
beliefs. Who'd a thunk relativism would lead us in this direction? In any 
case, the objectionable emphasis on language at work here again. But to the 
extent that Rorty objects to making ontological claims, I think we'd all 
agree. That's one half of the doctrine of radical empiricism; we are obliged 
to limit our assertions to what is known in experience. This goes nicely 
with the notion that our descriptions have to agree with experience, 
although that notion is about pragmatic truth and isn't the other half of 
the doctrine. The other half of radical epistiemology (James 90, 93, 100) 
says that we ought not exclude anything known in experience either. I figure 
its okay to mix things up like that because Pirsig is trying to get 
pragmatism and radical empiricsm fused together. (373) Having said all that, 
i believe in theists but not their theism. I believe the many reports of 
alien abduction experiences are a fact, but I do not take the reports as 
evidence for the existence of aliens or abductions. These things are 
exceedingly worthy of investigation, but let it proceed from the experience 
itself and let's just try to keep unknowable ontological entities out of the 
equations. That's safe to say, huh?

Matt said:
I blended together and posted my last two letters to you on my blog as, 
"Dewey, Pirsig, Rorty, or How I Convinced an Entire Generation of Pirsigians 
that Rorty is the Devil: An Ode to David Buchanan."  There's a long 
reflective preface before the basically untouched letters (edited together), 
and then a little postscript at the end.

dmb says:
Well I certainly hope you edited out that part about me shaving my butt and 
my gratuitous insults about Wisconsin. And I hope you totally excluded the I 
wrote when I was drunk. Good thing I didn't have my old girlfriend's number 
that night, if you know what I mean. Other than that, I honored by your ode. 
And I shall take it as permission for me to post this for the MOQers.

I'm having fun without neglecting my homework. Thanks for that.

Later.
Dave

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