[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[David M]

Hi DMB/Matt

Your last section below is spot on DMB.
And I agree with you that Rorty goes too far and forgets
that a pragmatic approach to life and knowledge involves
non-lingusitic aspects of our experience and very non-linguistic
physical actions. Our non-linguistic responses to experience
tell us what is good and bad, painful and pleasurable. Our actions
as agents help us to determine what works, what is possible,
and what is  impossible. Dewey tells us all this. Rorty, whilst
updating Dewey with some advanced ideas about langauage that
Dewey did not have, goes too far. I position myself between the
two.

David M

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "david buchanan" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 2:21 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] subject/object: pragmatism



Matt said:
You brought up your problems with Rorty and how he supposedly rejects 
radical empiricism (which, under certain specifications, I deny) and the 
notion of "pure experience," so I thought I might return briefly to the 
subject. The reason I've gotten in the habit of regarding Rorty as much of a 
radical empiricist as James or Dewey is because I take the thesis to be the 
collapse of the metaphysical/epistemological divide between subject/object, 
knower/known. The question then becomes, "What of pure experience? What role 
does it play?"  ...Pure experience aside, I think most of our haggling still 
consists over this notion of the "linguistic turn." .. Your stance looks to 
me like a pro-experience-talk position, and you then paint me as being 
pro-language/anti-experience. With regards to radical empiricism, this isn't 
quite right. As I see it, once we become radical empiricists, it _doesn't 
matter_ whether we talk about what we experience or we talk about what we 
talk about. It simply doesn't matter.

dmb says:
It doesn't matter? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I thought the whole 
debate was about experience and language. As I understand it, you and Rorty 
and just about everyone else believe that there is nothing outside the text, 
there is no such thing as experience outside of language. You know, all my 
awareness is a linguistic affair, its turtles all the way down, etc.. From 
this textualist point of view there can be no such thing as pure experience 
or at best it would be considered meaningless as far as philosophers are 
concerned. Isn't that your position, that pure experience is either 
impossible or (gasp) trivial? As for radical empiricism, Rorty does well 
with the half that says we can't add extra-experiential elements to our 
accounts. But when it come to the other half, where we aren't allowed to 
ignore any kind of experience in our accounts, he falls short and does so 
speciifically with respect to pure experience. Isn't that what we're talking 
about here?

I'd say the only way associate pure experience with the myth of the given is 
to construe it as something like raw sense data or the pre-cognitive 
biological response. I don't know if you're seeing it that way, but its easy 
to see how one could.

Also, of course we don't want to be like babies. The experience of infants 
is simply meant to illustrate a feature of adult experience that goes 
un-noticed. Its not that we outgrow this undifferentiated state so much as 
it falls into the background as our conceptual habits accumulate. Its that 
cutting edge of experience as in the train analogy or the immediate response 
in hot stove example.

Thanks
dmb




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