[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[David M]

DMB/Matt

This is going well now, I think you are closing in on your differences, 
please keep going.

Myself, I want to talk about experience and action and transforming reality 
like Dewey, and language, values
and interpretation like Rorty, we need both sets of descriptions but we need 
a way to help them live together.
I think Rorty rejects too much of Dewey, obscuring the fact that our 
interpretations are also tested in active and
more than conversational life, yet Rorty also adds to pragmatism a better 
grasp of the workings of language,
which is perhapsmore dynamic in Rorty than Dewey as Matt suggests.

Regards
David M


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "david buchanan" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 7:21 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] subject/object: pragmatism



Matt and all:

Wish I had time to respond to everything here, sorry for the editing, but 
you know....

Matt said:
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.

dmb says:
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 said:
Part of why I want to make this connection between radical empiricism, 
psychological nominalism, and Rorty's slogan is because I think you are 
playing on an ambiguity when you say, as you often have, that "a Rortyized 
version [of Pirsig's philosophy] takes the metaphysics and the quality out 
of the metaphysics of quality."  I would halt Ian from saying that I or 
Rorty would agree to this formulation because one of the things I've 
constantly tried to do is point out the ambiguity of the word "metaphysics" 
in Pirsig's usage as compared to Rorty's usage.  Rorty's enemy is the 
appearance/reality distinctive version of metaphysics, which you agree is 
not the version Pirsig is using.  The version Pirsig uses is something wide 
like, "a general framework of understanding," and in this sense there's 
nothing to theoretically object to, as it is just like Sellars' definition 
of philosophy as "seeing how things, in the widest possible sense, hang 
together, in the widest possible sense," a definition that Rorty adheres to. 
What Pirsig calls his "Metaphysics of Quality," I would transmute to 
"Philosophy of Quality," and I don't think anything in particular is lost.

dmb says:
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. And then 
there's Quality, thee central term...

Matt said:
What requires more ink is the "Quality" bit, because both you and I ascribe 
different importance to its usage in Pirsig's philosophy.  ...part of this 
hangs on why we use "pure" at all in our use of "experience."  You think it 
is very important that we do, I don't.

dmb says:
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 said:
...you would insist that Pirsig's philosophy is not only incomplete, but 
disastrously impaired if a third is not added: the bit about pure 
experience, the pre-intellectual cutting edge of experience. ...You think 
there is dangerous amputation happening.  I'm just not sure why we need to 
say that "Dynamic Quality is the lived, flux of pure experience" as opposed 
to "Dynamic Quality is the lived, flux of experience."  Pure experience has 
to contrast with something, and I'm not sure what it is. ...Purity just 
seems out of place when talking about static patterns.  I think it creates a 
needless pathos, one that the masochistic/ascetic might go in for, but not 
one for a pragmatist.

dmb says:
In light of what I just said about the distinction between two kinds of 
experience, pure experience is simply "had" while subsequent reflection is 
cognitively "known". You know, the low quality experience that gets you off 
the stove is "had" while the talk about heat and stoves and injured selves 
is "known" experience. 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. I mean, this contrast is richly depicted here, no? 
Its crystal clear, no? If not, please explain.

Matt said:
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).  ...But in 
none of these construals do I see an important need to use "pure," "direct," 
or "pre-intellectual."  Insisting on them looks either suspicious or 
insular.

dmb says:
I think there are many subtle problems with your take on Pirsig's DQ/sq 
distinction. Wish I had the time to untangle a few because this reduces the 
MOQ to trivialities and it breaks my heart.

Matt said:
...Rorty doesn't seal off the non-linguistic, he is just being careful not 
to treat the non-linguistic the way philosophers since Plato have been 
treating it.  That, I would suggest, is what produces the strangeness you 
feel.  Rocks, lakes, beauty, all of these things count.  Rorty is just 
trying to move us away from a representationalist account of language, and 
part of that problematic, so he argues, is the idea that there are some 
things we inherently cannot express through language, some things that 
cannot be "presented in the form of a sentence."  Language isn't, in this 
sense, in the expression or presentation business.

dmb says:
Yes, I'm sure that has something to do with the strangeness I feel. And it 
seems strange that Rorty's treatment of a Platonic problematic should have 
any relevance to  a discussion of the MOQ. I mean, if Pirsig isn't doing 
Platonic metaphysics then Rorty's concerns are just a confusing distraction, 
a matter of making objections to assertions nobody made. Look at it this 
way, the difference between "had" and "known" can be expressed in terms of 
ineffability, but this is functional not absolute. Its not that "had" 
experience can't be talked about for divine reasons. In fact I'm talking 
about it right now and we do all the time around here. And the subsequent 
experience in which we reflect only makes sense with reference to the "had" 
experience. They are interconnected phases within the continuity of 
experience and both are going on all the time. The point is simply to make 
that same contrast between kinds of experience. All the various terms for 
"had" simply indicate experience prior to any conceptualizations about it. 
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 said
A good encapsulation of why I don't like your formulations of the problem is 
because when you say, "moves the emphasis from direct everyday experience to 
conversation," I want to know when conversation is not something I do 
directly everyday.  This is the problem with saying that static patterns are 
indirect, or impure, with saying that reflection is indirect.  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 says:
Again, you're barking up the wrong tree. The distinction between "had" and 
"known" is not being asserted within a Cartesian framework. Quite the 
contrary. In each case, (Pirsig, James, Mead and Dewey, etc.) that basic 
distinction is made in oppostion to it and as an alternative to it. Radical 
empiricism says that we are constrained by experience in two ways, we can't 
ignore it or go beyond it. There is no reality beyond experience and 
everything experienced is real. From this standpoint, "had" experience and 
"known" experience are equally real, although "known" experience is usually 
truer in the cognitive sense. And this, my friend, is why rorty's pragmatism 
bothers me. Its anti-epistemological attitude combined with the emphasis on 
language puts the "known" over the "had" in the same way that Platonism 
always did. I guess this is why the idea of radical empiricism leading to 
the sociology of knowledge makes no sense to me. The study of knowledge is 
fine, but I'm talking about felt qualities that pervade throughout the 
process of experience as its first "had" and right on through to the "known" 
experience. The radical empiricists want to say there are experiences that 
get lost in the abstractions of philosophy and we have to recover them if we 
want a coherent picture of reality.

Matt said:
The choice between the idiom of experience and the idiom of language, I 
would continue to argue, is insignificant at the level of destroying 
Cartesianism.  You might agree, but continue that we don't just want to 
destroy Cartesianism, we want to do other things, too.  I would certainly 
agree, but point out that not only does Rorty not preclude the use of other 
idioms, does not preclude the doing of other things,...

dmb says:
I don't feel at all compelled to choose an idiom. Pirsig is a radical 
empiricist and radical empiricism is all about experience. Why wouldn't I 
talk about experience, in terms of experience? Your concerns about certain 
terms (pure) and certain metaphors (occular) and certain idioms (experience) 
about my vocabulary (?) are aimed at making a point, I'm sure. But they only 
strike me as pointless prohibitions. I wish you'd find a less repressive and 
more direct way to make those points. And isn't that stuff all aimed at a 
position that no pragmatist of any kind would hold. Those prohibitions are 
meant as breaks on SOM based talk, no? And if that's true, throwing at me in 
the midst of discussing radical empiricism and the MOQ makes no sense. 
Aren't we way past destroying Cartesianism by now?





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