[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[david buchanan]

Matt said to dmb:
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 says:
It seems to me that these two "spaces" are a modified version of the same dualism we find in SOM. I had to look it up because I don't recall any of your elaborations and don't recall any encounter with the terms before now. Feel free to correct my embryonic understanding of this distinction, but I really don't see how it can be equated with Dewey's "had" and "known" experience. For example, I found this in Simon Blackburn's "Julius Caesar and George Berkely Play Leapfrog":

1. Early in Mind and World we are introduced to the Sellarsian concept of the space of
reasons, and made to face up to the idea that only conceptual items, things within that
space, are capable of justifying or being justified. The idea of the Given is the enemy, and
The idea of the Given is the idea that the space of reasons, the space of justifications or
warrants, extends more widely than the conceptual sphere. The extra extent of the space
of reasons is supposed to allow it to incorporate non-conceptual impacts from outside
the realm of thought. But we cannot really understand the relations in virtue of which a
judgement is warranted except as relations within the space of concepts: relations such
as implication or probabilification, which hold between potential exercises of conceptual
capacities. The attempt to extend the scope of justificatory relations outside the
conceptual sphere cannot do what it is supposed to do.
McDowell goes on to elaborate:
What we wanted was a reassurance that when we use our concepts in judgement, our
freedom—our spontaneity in the exercise of our understanding—is constrained from
outside thought, and constained in a way that we can appeal to in displaying the
judgements as justified. But when we make out that the space of reasons is more extensive
than the conceptual sphere, so that it can incorporate extra conceptual impingements from
the world, the result is a picture in which constraint from outside is exerted at the outer
boundary of the expanded space of reasons, in what we are committed to depicting as a
brute impact from the exterior.

dmb continues:
Leaving aside the MOQ's re-conception of causation, the problem that concern's me here is that Sellar's dualism doesn't really reject the Cartesian problematic. In rejecting the myth of the Given, he is rejecting the possibility of finding justifications in the causal realm. It doesn't reject the gap between mind and world so much as declares it forever uncrossable. If I understand what's going on here, Rorty's emphasis on intersubjective agreement as a replacement for objectively verifiable truth is based on that declaration. No?

This is from Simon Blackburn's journal article "Relativism and the Abolition of the Other":

from p. 230 of the Investigations,
Wittgenstein says ‘Our interest certainly includes the correspondence
between concepts and very general facts of nature.’ I see this as a corrective
to the dualistic doctrine of the division between the ‘space of reasons’ and
the ‘space of causes’, a division which, far from helping to dissolve Kant’s
problem, renders it effectively insoluble. The enemy here is nicely summed
up by the Davidsonian formula that nothing can justify a belief except
another belief.

If we can generalize the moral of this kind of passage, we will approach the
position forcibly described by Richard Rorty:
There is no way in which tools can take one out of touch with reality.
No matter whether the tool is a hammer or a gun or a belief or a state-
ment, tool-using is part of the interaction of the organism with its envi-
ronment. To see the employment of words as the use of tools to deal
with the environment, rather than as an attempt to represent the
intrinsic nature of that environment, is to repudiate the question of
whether human minds are in touch with reality – the question asked by
the epistemological sceptic. No organism, human or non-human, is
ever more or less in touch with reality than any other organism.

dmb continues:
You've echoed this idea. I think I get it. Words are tools, like hammers and guns. We use them to do certain things when we are interacting with the enviroment, but we can NOT use them to "represent the intrinsic nature of that enviroment". By way of these tools, we are in touch with the enviroment to the same extent other organisms are in touch. Our linguistic tools can't represent the intrinsic nature of nature because that would be a claim that the "space of reasons" does offer a way to obtain closer contact with the enviroment than is enjoyed by other creatures with their claws and teeth. Is that about right? Rorty would say that words and concepts are already in contact with the physical world. Don't try to mirror it in language, just use language to cope with it. 

Well, I think that Dewey's distinction between "had" and "known" says something very different from all this. Dewey's distinction is between kinds of experience or rather between phases in a developing series of experiences. He uses "organism" and "enviroment" quite a bit and I can see how a guy could read Dewey as Rorty seems to be reading him, but I don't think he's THAT kind of naturalist. Dewey replaces the distinction between appearance and reality with the distinction between "had" and "known". In “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” (a chapter in his "Experience and Nature") Dewey says, “The content of the latter experience cognitively regarded is doubtless truer than the content of the earlier; but it is in no sense more real” but, he adds, “it is only in regard to contrasted content in a subsequent experience that the determination ‘truer’ has force”. The former is consummated or terminated in the latter so that a sort of circuit is formed uniting the two. The same experienced conjunctive relations that James describes in his essays on radical empiricism is what connects the two types of experience. 

In “Dewey and the Aesthetics of Human Existence”, Thomas Alexander offers further explanation. “Classical and modern theories presuppose that all experience must be ultimately cognitive”, he explains, but, “Dewey believes that this is one of the greatest mistakes made by philosophy. There are many types of experience” and experience “is not even primarily cognitive”. “For Dewey”, he says, “the term experience refers to a vast body of talents and capacities that connect an organism intelligently to its world. Experience ranges from subconscious drives and memories to habits to prereflective consciousness to highly refined acts of deliberation, analysis, and creative synthesis”. Naturally, had and known experiences would both be found within this range but, roughly speaking, they’d be on opposite ends of the spectrum. And yet they are connected insofar as the latter is a transformed or corrected version of the former. “Without the precognitive and emotional side of experience, the cognitive would never arise and could have no meaning if it did” and, Alexander adds, “To characterize pragmatism apart from the precognitive …(as is commonly done) misunderstands it completely”.

We also see this circuit in the case of aesthetic experience. This serves to illustrate the connections between "had" and "known" insofar as aesthetic experience is a heightened form of experience in general. Dewey says, “In such experiences, every successive part flows freely without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what ensues.” “There are pauses, places of rest, but they punctuate and define the quality of movement. They sum up what has been undergone and prevent its dissipations and idle evaporation”. This quality of movement and the summing up that goes with it provide the whole affair with an extra dose of coherence that holds it all together. “The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts. This unity is neither emotional, practical, nor intellectual, for these terms name distinctions that reflection can make within it”. Here we see a distinction between the single, unifying quality and the subsequent acts of reflection. Thas is parallel to the distinction between the precognitive "had" experience and the cognitive acts of reflection in experience as it is "known". Like James's "pure experience", this unifying quality is only “virtually classifiable” as emotional, practical or intellectual and that classification is developed in subsequent experience.  James wants experience to define the limits of what can and cannot be included in a philosophical system. In that sense it is not the experience that is “pure”. Instead, the world is purely empirical. Reality is nothing but experience or they are not two different things. On the other hand, James describes “pure experience” or “the instant field of the present” as “experience in its ‘pure’ state, plain unqualified actuality, a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as someone’s opinion”. Both hands work together, if you will, against the same Cartesian problematic. I should say that Dewey's notion of experience had its inception in James's work and is considered a radically empirical pragmatists and his book on aesthetics "Art as Experience" was based on a lecture series by James. I get the impression that Dewey practically ran from the lecture hall to his typewriter.  

Matt also said:
Well, granted that psychological nominalism was adumbrated in a specific context that you may not understand the background of,..  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.

dmb says:
Okay, I looked up "psychological nominalism" too and I still fail to see how it could be relevant. It seems to be a form of verbal behaviorism or epistemological behaviorism but Dewey is insisting that felt qualities are real empirical data. Substituting that, let alone cognitive content, for whatever is observable in external behavior is just about the opposite of what Dewey does. His distinction between "had" and "known" was invented as an alternative to old-school empiricism and is diametrically opposed to their notions of "had" expeience as raw sense data. In "Experience and Nature" responding to critics who take him for an old-school empiricist and object that, "to view experience naturalistically is to reduce it to something materialistic, depriving it of all ideal signigicance", he responds, "If experience actually presents esthetic and moral traits, then these traits may also be supposed to reach down into nature, and to testify to something that belongs to nature as truly as does the mechanical structue attributed to it in physical science. To rule out that possibility by some general reasoning is to forget that the very meaning and purport of empirical method is that things are to be studied on their own accont, so as to find our what is revealed when they are experienced. ...They are FOUND, experienced, and are not to be shoved our of being by some trick of logic. When found, their ideal qualities are as relevant to the philosophic theory of nature as are the traits found by physical inquiry." All that put together makes me think that we can't even compare the "space of causes" to Dewey's "had" experience, let alone equate them. They have about as much in common as does the physical reality of science and the dynamic Quality of Pirsig's metaphysics, which is to say almost none at all.




  

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