[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[Matt Kundert]

DMB,

I'm sorry if I seem repressive.  I wrote out most of one of my usual responses ("I'm talking about what you're talking about! Are you dense?") to what I consider one of your usual responses ("What are you talking about!?  Are you dense?"), when I stopped and figured I'd give it another shot.  I'd try to again calmly explain where Rorty's coming from and how to connect the two up.  I hope you'll understand that I'm trying to create connections between the two and try and meet me halfway on our terminology differences.

DMB said:
We must have very different ideas about radical empiricism because I'm
confused by all three of your sentences about it. Its end point is to
make epistemology indistinct the sociology of knowledge? I don't see
the relevance of the particular cartesian problematic mentioned. And
the connection between Rorty's slogan and radical empiricism is
definately lost on me.

Matt:
Let me try again to explain at the level of generalities: 

1) you have said before that radical empiricism consists (at least) in part in the collapse of the knower/known distinction.  
2) the knower/known distinction is what I'm calling the Cartesian problematic.
3) therefore, the Cartesian problematic is relevant insofar as radical empiricism rejects it
4) Rorty follows Dewey in thinking that distinction creates what Dewey called the "epistemology industry"
5) Rorty argues that Dewey was trying to shut down that industry
6) Rorty argues that what Dewey was involved in was _not_ that industry but something else
7) "changing the subject" is the same as "working in a different industry"

My paragraph again:
My Rortyan contention with radical empiricism is that if one becomes a
radical empiricist, then the end point is that there is eventually very
little to say about epistemology as distinct from the sociology of
knowledge. Cartesian epistemology was an area of inquiry that was
distinct from the practices of accumulating knowledge, and if radical
empiricism is what we call the demolition of that problematic, we are
left to focus on the various practices of the various areas of inquiry,
which is what Dewey did move on to after a fashion. The connection
between radical empiricism and Rorty's slogan of "changing the subject"
is that radical empiricism closes one subject to move to another.

("Sociology of knowledge" is an encoded buzzword; it basically is just description of what various practitioners of disciplines are doing.  Epistemology was supposed to a subject distinct, in fact undergirding, our description of, say, scientific method.  E.g., Pirsig's description of scientific method at the beginning of ZMM would count as "sociology of knowledge"; epistemology would ask the question, "How is it that the scientific method works?", but wouldn't want in reply detailed explanations of why it might be important it keep a record of what you're doing, hypotheses you're testing, etc.  It wants to know how scientific method brings you closer to reality.)

DMB said:
Yes, I understand that you have no objection to metaphysics when it
only means a coherent picture or framework, and I think we agree that
the MOQ is the kind that does NOT assert thee Reality behind appearance
or seek knowledge of it. (Although I don't see how this is related to
rorty's slogan or psychological nominalism.) But I still want to say
the same thing about your version of the MOQ. I mean, you seem to
dismiss all the main features of the framework and seem to have
disagreements with all the central terms so that even in a non-Platonic
sense the metaphysics amputated.

Matt:
No, you can't have it both ways.  If you say "Yes, I understand that you have no objection to metaphysics," then that's it: you have to rescind your pithy formulation of what's wrong with my account of Pirsig.  I _don't_ take the metaphysics out of Pirsig because "metaphysics" on both of our accounts is "a general framework."  And you just said that I don't do that.  You can have all sorts of other objections, but if you want a useful dialogue and not just shouting, you have to be able to move forward from agreement.

DMB said:
As I already explained, "pure experience" is William James's term. I
use that term among many others and have no particular attachment to
the word "pure". In Dewey's terms, pure experience is "had" and
reflective experience is "known". This would be dynamic and static in
Pirsig's terms. These terms, obviously, are employed to mark a
distinction between two kinds of experience and that's what I think is
important. The distinction is what matters. The terms used to make that
distinction are of secondary importance at best.

Matt:
Okay: no attachment to "pure."  I still consider it a bad rhetorical move, but we can move on by stipulating that whatever rhetorical measures are opened by its use are not essential to its functioning.

The distinction between "had" and "known" experience: I have no problem with that distinction.  Never have.  This is the distinction I've elaborated as Rorty's distinction between the "space of causes" and the "space of reasons".  Knowledge (or at least, propositional knowing-that) occurs within the logical space of reasons, of language, of reflective experience, which is different than having an experience, being caused to move your arm because it was on a stove and having a reason to move your arm ("It was hot!").  (I'll just register here that I don't understand your problem with causation, which you've shown every time I bring this Sellarsian distinction up: I thought Pirsig showed us how to move back and forth between causation and pre-conditional valuation.)

DMB said:
Other pairs of terms that make the same contrast are undivided and
divided, pre-intellectual and intellectual, pre-cognitive and
cognitive, pre-linguistic and linguistic, pre-conceptual and
conceptual, undifferentiated and differentiated, undefined and defined,
flowing and stable, dynamic and static. Since these labels for
experience are all descriptive and are all similar in that description,
I would imagine that further explanation would insult your
intelligence. But then, I've made lists like this before.

Matt:
Ask yourself: 1) Doesn't Pirsig and Dewey tell us that all description is evaluative?
2) Why are there so many things that say the same thing?

My answer to the second is that each knife cut represented by those dichotomies you've ushered out is slightly different.  We make choices about which ones we use--choices we make based on reasons.  I've tried elaborating reasons why I avoid most of the dichotomies you've trotted out above and instead use other ones, ones that we could otherwise say "make the same contrast."  You say these reasons are based on a Platonic understanding of things that Pirsig already rejects.  Fine, great--Pirsig doesn't mean the things I suspect him of occasionally meaning (which doesn't mean anything about Pirsig, but rather about you and me).  But they are still my reasons for avoiding certain terms and construals of them (mostly based on their context in the history of philosophy, a context you've oddly expressed you could care less about, considering Pirsig cared quite a bit about it).  Rather than taking your correct inference that I'm avoiding Platonism as a broad agreement on strategy with minor disagreements in tactics, you take the opportunity to register supercilious indignation at my even writing.

This last formulation I forwarded you called a reduction to triviality:
"I would agree to a Deweyan construal of Pirsig's DQ/static patterns
distinction. From a metaphysical standpoint, DQ is the flow of lived
experience and static patterns are the train of past experiences with
which we interpret new experience. When an anomaly occurs, we seek to
accommodate it as best we can, but sometimes it calls for an entire
reappraisal of the train. From an epistemological standpoint, the
Dynamic point of view is the one in which we live life as it happens.
The static point of view is a special case in which we look at the way
in which we have been living life. In the former we are looking
forward, out past the head of the train, in the latter we are looking
behind ourselves at the train of experiences that shape how we are
living life. The first is non-reflective, instinctual living of life,
the second reflection on our instincts (which is no less instinctual,
since it requires a special set of instincts to guide the
process--hence the apparent problem of "boot-strapping" and the search
for a final resting place, a foundation to avoid infinite regress)."

This might be a good place to start the continuation of our dialogue, since I was trying to meet you halfway terminologically.  What is so wrong with this formulation?

DMB said:
Since language is conceptualization and "had" experience is prior to
and contrasted with cognition, it is functionally ineffable. And this,
my friend, is what keeps me from buying into statement like "all
awareness is a linguistic affair". I'm saying there is a kind of
experience that is NOT a linguistic affair.

Matt:
Well, granted that psychological nominalism was adumbrated in a specific context that you may not understand the background of, but just look at the surface of what you just opposed: "all awareness is a linguistic affair" is wrong because there is a kind of experience that is not a linguistic affair.  But where in the slogan does it deny a non-linguistic experience?  Psychological nominalism arose as a response to the Myth of the Given.  As you say, we refer to "had experience" all the time but it is functionally ineffable.  That's what Sellars was saying in response to old-school empiricists who thought that our "had experiences" _gave_ us justifications.  Justification, Sellars said, is something that only happens in the logical space of reasons, which can certainly refer to these "had experiences," but they don't come pre-encoded in English.  Rather, we bring English, the logical space of reasons, to bear on "had experiences" to help us deal with them.

Matt said:
If we collapse the experience/reality distinction, then reflection is as
direct as any other experience to reality... Direct and indirect seem
out of point, if for no other reason than once you collapse the
Cartesian problematic, you are always directly experiencing whatever it
is you are experiencing because there is no longer a distance between
knower and known.

DMB replied:
Again, you're barking up the wrong tree. The distinction between "had"
and "known" is not being asserted within a Cartesian framework....

Matt:
I'm isolating this to point out that I think you are enacting a bad dialogue practice, which is fairly endemic of your responses to me.  I understand that the had/known distinction is non-Cartesian.  You, however, have switched in that distinction as the gloss upon "direct/indirect" when that is not the understanding of the latter distinction that I find rhetorically objectionable.  You will no doubt complain your gloss is perfectly clear in Pirsig and Dewey and etcetera, but I want you to consider that people might be wearing differently colored glasses than you, that they may have different understandings of things, and that the functional beginning of a dialogue is the supposition that two people _don't_ see eye to eye and therefore need to talk things over, communicate.  What you are practicing is a kind of communication that short-circuits the dialogue by imposing your grid of understanding on all things, which makes everyone else seem very muddled indeed.

That may seem like what I do, but I'd like to suggest that my practice (when I'm doing it well) is to show the route between two people's ways of saying things.

To reiterate my qualms with the rhetoric of "indirect/direct": the experience/reality distinction made it possible to say that some experiences were direct experiences of reality and some were indirect, cloudy, off, bad.  Collapsing the experience/reality distinction makes that dichotomy lose its old point.  You can redesign the significance and deployment of the distinction: but I'm talking about my qualms (qualms that have resonance inside Pirsig's texts, I might add).  And if I agree with the "had/known," then who the hell cares whether I accept any of the other ones, especially considering you were the one that just said: "The terms used to make that
distinction are of secondary importance at best."  Excuse me, but your argumentative practice begs to differ.  And, while I agree with you on one level, on another level, our dialectical terms--the terms we use in an argument--do matter because as Pirsig taught us, dialectic rests on rhetoric.  The rhetoric we deploy makes a difference.  The rhetoric of purity, in my estimation, is a bad rhetoric to use and we should be willing to slap James on the wrists for it.

Resisting _that_ is what bothers me.  A pointless priggery that lovers of Pirsig's philosophical individualism would do well without.


Matt
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