[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[David M]

Hi Matt K

Damn fine post, if nothing else, Rorty has taught you how to write.

Thanks
David M

> 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