[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[Matt Kundert]

DMB,

I'm shaking my head again.  You seem pretty sure of yourself about a lot of these things about Rorty, so I'm not so sure what good conversation with me is going to be.  I've been trying for years to hook up what Rorty says with what Pirsig says, and for about the same length of time I've been trying very hard to hook up what I'm saying with what you seem to be saying.  I'm not sure how to go about it anymore, partly because I don't think you're giving me a lot to go on.  We have to both try and find common ground, to find things we agree to call certain things.  I thought we'd found some areas, like the thing about knowledge, but you slipped away on that one again.  I'm just not sure what "pure experience" means--you use one vocabulary to explain it, but you need more than that to hold conversations with those who use different vocabularies.

DMB said:
As he puts it, [Rorty] reads the history of philosophy and draws a moral
from it. And the moral he draws is that we should forget the whole mess
and talk about something else. James and Dewey see that history too,
but they formulated things like radical empiricism as a specific
alternative to SOM. That's very different from simply changing the
subject.

Matt:
I disagree.  I think that in some cases, what James and Dewey suggested weren't good suggestions--say, the many, many different versions of what truth is that James forwarded.  Not every philosopher is perfect.  Do I think the letter of radical empiricism is worth keeping?  Meh.  I just don't talk that way, I don't use the vocabulary they were using, so I don't get too excited.  The _spirit_ of radical empiricism, however, I think _is_ to change the subject.  I've intimated that I think I can make the case that radical empiricism in the idiom of experience has its corollary in psychological nominalism in the idiom of language.  I can't do it in the MD, but I'm working on it.

DMB said:
Rorty's distinction between "caused to think" and "reason to think"
can't be relevant to the pre-intellectual experience insofar as it
designates something that precisely is not thinking.

Matt:
I think you're misunderstanding.  In the first case, I'm referring to non-linguistic causes, I'm referring to a rock's effect on us.  I'm referring to something that is precisely not thinking.  The reason Rorty puts the difference the way he does, as opposed to the way other's do, is because the only way we know about rocks is by the way the rock affects us--it produces a belief in us, "Hey, there's a rock."  So Rorty makes a distinction between two ways in which beliefs are produced.  But it looks like the same thing you would say: what we think when we are caused by something non-linguistic (or linguistic, for that matter) depends on what static patterns make us up, e.g., whether we say, "Oh, it's a plate of spaghetti" or "Oh! Jesus is in that plate of spaghetti!"

DMB said:
Give Bob, John and Jim the benefit of the doubt just long enough to
ponder what a non-Platonic version of the concept looks like.

Matt:
Oh, DMB--I am.  I'm trying to figure out what they're talking about.  In Pirsig's case, I have--what I think are--well-founded textual suspicions.  In Dewey's case, I've written about an interesting interpretation of what he meant that seems to go against the grain of some of the things Pirsig says (http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2007/03/notes-on-experience-dewey-and-pirsig.html).  In Prof. Hildebrand's case, I haven't read enough of his work to know what he thinks, but I wrote about that one essay you suggested I read (http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/10/dewey-pirsig-rorty-or-how-i-convinced.html).

Matt said:
If it counts as pure experience to think that there is a difference
between causal chains and inferential chains, then Rorty has such a
component. The way Rorty puts the point is that we could never become
unanchored from experience/the world/reality because the distinction
between anchored/unanchored is a Cartesian distinction—created when
Descartes said that we might be radically wrong about the world because
of the radical disconnect between subject and object.

DMB said:
Causal chains and inferential chains? Unanchored from experience? I
also doubt that these concepts are relevant to the debate, but feel
free to explain.

Matt:
This is why I don't like talking to you DMB.  You seem to have the memory of a fish.  It's almost impossible for a conversation to build.

I apologize for the "causal chains and inferential chains."  I was referring back to "caused to think" and "reason to think," which you've already announced are irrelevant (though in my defense you only did so, ya' know, in the course of the same post I'm responding to, so I hadn't had a chance yet to jump in my time machine and rewrite history).  Hopefully I've at least cleared up the difference between the two.  By "causal chain" I mean to refer to rocks, by "inferential chain" I mean to refer to thinking about rocks.  They're relevant insofar as I thought that distinction was what you were getting at with the distinction between pre-intellectual and intellectual.  I stand corrected (though still waiting for what you do mean).

But screw you for being rhetorically astounded at me bringing up being unanchored from experience.  You're the one who brought it up: "Anyway, it seems to me that Rorty becomes an anti-realist precisely because there is no anchor in pure experience or anything like it."  You brought up the metaphor.  So I responded with the metaphor in an attempt to hook up the way you were thinking about things with the way I think about things.  Sorry.  Won't make that mistake again.

Ass.

DMB said:
But I'd also like to point out that for every professional backer I
could find, you could find 10 or 20 or maybe more. Hildebrand is
saddened that people tend to read Rorty and simply take his word for
it. His pragmatism is usually considered theee pragmatism. Many people
know about James and Dewey only through Rorty's work.

Matt:
Really?  This actually surprised me.  As I understood it, Rorty is fairly well disregarded in anglophone philosophical circles.  I would agree that many analytics probably only know about James and Dewey through Rorty's work, but that's because analytics are notoriously ill-read.  But as for backers, I can think of only a handful of Rorty-defenders, and a semi full of Rorty-attackers.  In humanities circles it's different, but in philosophy departments--philosophers don't like Rorty.

DMB said:
More seriously, it seems to me that Rorty's emphasis on solidarity and
intersubjective agreement is a relatively tepid form of what the
classical pragmatists were shooting for, namely inquiry as active
engagement. He's going to say that the claims we make are only
constrained by language, in a community of people who know what they're
talking about while the classical pragmatists will say our claims are
constrained by experience more generally.

Matt:
No, no he's not.  Rorty is not going to say we are _only_ constrained by language, at least not in the insidious way you think it.  The full-on explanation of what Rorty has in mind takes up Davidson's notion of triangulation--truth, meaning, knowledge, all that good stuff, is created by the tug and pull of three corners: person-community-world.  On the occasions when Rorty does say things reminiscent of "we are only constrained by language," he is indeed saying "a community of people who know what they're talking about," because implicit in the second is the idea that each individual person is already hooked up to the world, we don't have to worry about them being unconstrained by the world, they already are going to know most of the stuff you know, we don't have to worry about anybody being unconstrained by the world or experience and just making shit up.  You don't have to tell people that once you make the cross to anti-Platonism.  But because Platonism made its hay out of saying we had to worship Reality, Rorty creates his rhetorical contrasts with that as the Bad Guy--the idea that Reality could hold us down.  Reality does what it does.  We all negotiate reality as a matter of course.  We don't need philosophical theories of truth that say truth is what happens when you pin a word correctly on reality.  That creates problems.  Truth is what happens when you negotiate successfully with a community of people, a community in which each person is obviously connected up to the same world as you are.

DMB said:
That's just it. Quality plays such a central role in the MOQ. That's
what its all about. I guess that's why I'm so interested in getting you
to see what role pure experience plays. ... The
Germans who tried to write philosophy without SOM ended up with all
sorts of weird hyphenated strings of words, or words with lines through
them and other strange tatics to work around the difficulty. And so
your complaints about the word "pure", as if that usage undoes all the
anti-Platonic, anti-Cartesian, anti-SOM things that were spelled out in
ZAMM and LILA, strike me as unfounded and even a little unfair. In any
case, this way of looking at the idea is keeping you from seeing the
idea.

Matt:
I've admitted over and over that I don't understand what "pure experience" is.  I've said for years, over and over, that if my criticisms of Pirsigian rhetorical maneuvers, contained in short essays like "Dynamic Quality as Pre-Intellectual Experience" and "Language, SOM, and the Pathos of Distance" (http//pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/04/language-som-and-pathos-of-distance.html), are not what Pirsig meant, or should mean, then ignore them and tell me what they do mean.

But when you give me the same stuff, what am I to do?  If somebody rewrote the Phaedrus and said, "No, no.  You're getting it all wrong.  I'm not degrading written language or rhetoric," we might be a little suspicious.  I'm just trying to get it spelled out.  And every time I think I understand it, and try and hook it up to how I see the world working, you slap me down.  Maybe I'm inherently missing something from my own outlook.  That would seem to be it.  I'm an anti-realist free floating in a conversation.  Except that we both know that that's not an actual possibility, but only a philosophical fantasy created by a Platonic language.  But if we both know that, then what else is there to know?  What is pure experience?

My complaints about "pure" right now are that 1) it is rhetorically unwise given the weight of the history of philosophy and 2) why "pure experience" and not "experience"?

That's the question I've kept forwarding that you have not stepped up to answer directly, though I've not said anything until now about that strange lack:

Why "pure experience" and not just "experience"?  What is the "pure" doing that needs to done?

Well dude?

Matt

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