[MD] Neopragmatism isn't pragmatic.

[Ant McWatt]

David Buchanan noted to Matt Kundert October 29th:

I was astonished to find that Hildebrand [in “BEYOND REALISM AND 
ANTIREALISM; John Dewey and the Neopragmatists”], 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.” (“BEYOND REALISM AND ANTIREALISM”, page 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…

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.” (“BEYOND 
REALISM AND ANTIREALISM”, page 168-9)


Ant McWatt comments:

Well said Dave.  I think you are correct in concluding that neo-pragmatism 
isn't pragmatic.  From my initial acquaintance with Rorty’s “Contingency, 
Irony and Solidarity” I always suspected his work was just a disguised form 
of linguistic analysis rather than genuine pragmatism.  However, your post 
indicates that it’s even more insidious than its mid 20th century forebear 
because the SOM assumptions that Rorty’s philosophy is boxed into are 
completely overlooked by the man himself and his followers.  BTW, this 
omission is also observed by Professor David Cooper in “The Measure of All 
Things” (2002) which I would recommend to anyone seriously interested in 
this issue to read.

However, a wider point about Rorty’s type of neo-linguistic analysis that 
particularly disturbs me is that it has largely hijacked the progressive 
pragmatic project of John Dewey.  Remember that Rorty was taught and 
strongly influenced by Richard McKeon towards Aristotle and Plato in the 
late 1950s rather than the work of Dewey (McKeon's predecessor at University 
of Chicago).  If one examines the history of Chicago University this move 
from the pragmatism of Dewey towards McKeon’s “safer” concerns with 
Aristotle and Plato occurred in the 1950s with the cold war.  This process 
(which is alarmingly echoed in Matt Kundert’s non-partisan writing on MOQ 
Discuss) was partly due to conservative concerns in removing radical 
politics from American colleges:

“By the 1940s, progressive ideology and rhetoric (but not necessarily 
progressive practices) had become (in historian Lawrence Cremin’s words) the 
‘conventional wisdom’ in American classrooms. In the cold-war atmosphere of 
the 1950s, however, educational progressivism came under serious attack. 
Progressive education was seen as endorsing Dewey’s… ethics and as being 
insufficiently patriotic. Progressive curricula were held responsible for a 
lag in preparation for scientific and technological careers, culminating in 
the Sputnik crisis of 1957.”

(http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1012.html)

Fortunately, McKeon and his cold war anti-progressive influence on his 
students didn’t completely hold sway.  For anyone interested in knowing what 
_genuine_ pragmatism has developed into, may I suggest “Pragmatism and The 
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” the excellent paper by Dean Summers (at 
www.robertpirsig.org/Pragmatism.htm) which shows how the work of Pierce, 
Dewey and James has been developed (and improved on) by Robert Pirsig.  The 
conclusion of Dean’s paper is pasted below.

Best wishes,

Anthony

=====================================

We have shown in outline that [Pirsig’s] philosophy is a substantial one – 
it provides much ground for comparison with the work of Peirce, James, and 
Dewey. It is also a coherent philosophy that seems to remain consistent 
throughout, that is, from the central concept of reality as being Dynamic 
Quality, his concepts of experience, knowledge, truth, and of evolutionary 
morality follow logically and without contradiction. If one accepts the 
concept of dynamic quality then it is difficult to see how one could then 
deny any of the ideas which Pirsig believes that it entails.

His philosophy then, which he calls the Metaphysics of Quality, seems to 
deserve rather more consideration, as a genuine philosophy, than it has so 
far received. Not only is it interesting and controversial in its own right, 
but it is also consistent with and a significant development of American 
pragmatism. The fundamental development consists in the metaphysical concept 
of reality. This is not found in previous pragmatic thought, but it does not 
contradict it either. In fact it seems to allow for considerable 
strengthening of the pragmatic position in terms of its epistemology, of its 
idea of truth as the “highest quality intellectual explanation” (Pirsig, 
1991, 103), and of its ethics in which morality is shown to be real in the 
human realm because humans are part of a, quite literally, moral universe…

Perhaps though the most important thing, the ultimate demonstration of 
Pirsig's pragmatism is that his philosophy grounds out in everyday 
action...in everyday life. Like the founders of pragmatism Pirsig shows 
above all that there is a demonstrable reason why that which we feel is 
good, is good. Experience is not subjective, it is of the good, therefore 
the moral good issues directly from reality. Pragmatism breaks the picture 
in which knowledge is somehow ‘higher’ than experience and action. It does 
this by showing that knowledge is actually a form of action which is guided 
by experience. Pirsig's contribution has been to show that that experience 
is of an absolutely real good. Furthermore, the moral theory that this gives 
rise to is an extremely interesting one. It is perhaps the most dramatic 
advance that he makes upon pragmatism, which is itself, for most critics, 
above all a moral philosophy. If for this reason alone, Pirsig's philosophy 
deserves to be re-evaluated in order to generate further analysis of its 
concepts.

Dean Summers, 1994, www.robertpirsig.org/Pragmatism.htm


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