[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[Matt Kundert]

David M,

DM said:
If I say Rorty does not take descent account of the need to test our facts I mean something like this. Is there a biscuit in the biscuit tin? Whether it is or not is a fact, within the common language we are using. I do not think Rorty would deny this notion of fact. He would call it trivial. This is my problem. Not that we cannot agree what is going on here but that it is trivial for Rorty. I think this fails to understand what science does.

Matt:
I agree, I think we might be talking past each other, but let's see.  What I don't get is this "does not take decent account of the need to test our facts".  Rorty is fairly explicit in accepting the notion of fact you lay out.  The distinction Rorty would want to make is between "our facts" and "the notion of a fact."  What we call "facts" are those things crowding around one of the ends of the intersubjective continuum.  Rorty might indeed call this trivial, but only under certain contexts, e.g. the philosophical context where you are rebutting SOM/Platonism.  On this end, it is important that the notion of a fact is trivial, because it was only exciting because of the things Plato/Descartes/Carnap said it could do.  However, actual particular facts, these have contexts of their own in which they can indeed be quite interesting.

This is the non sequitor I think DMB made in his essay on Rorty.  I don't think there is any connection between Rorty's calling the notion of facts philosophically uninteresting and trivial (after all, we all know commonsensically that you don't call a fact something only you and your Dungeons and Dragons friends agree is true) and the notion that some facts are very important indeed--like the Nazi Holocaust.  The fact that the Nazi Holocaust shares the same trait as "rocks fall to the ground" is uninteresting, it doesn't enlighten us at all.  The fact _of_ the Nazi Holocaust is a different story.

One might bring up, to counter, the existence of the Ayatollah, and press the claim that the fact that the Holocaust is a fact is actually quite important.  This has a lot of prima facie plausibility, about having to explain to people what evidence and argument are and the like.  But it is again a non sequitor, as Platt rightly knows: he has been throwing against Rorty for years the fact that just because a lot of people believe it, that itself does not make it true.  Telling Holocaust deniers that they don't understand what a fact is is not only question-begging, but by and large ineffective because usually what we are dealing with are different worldviews, worldviews that differ in _what_ they take to be evidence and authoritative lines of argument.  The struggle with people like that is a cultural life and death struggle.   At root, the line I'm taking would suggest that the notion of "facts" are philosophically uninteresting, though possibly politically interesting, because wrapped up in the notion of the Western, democratic lebensform.  (Though again, by "philosophically uninteresting" I mean within the tradition of theory begun by Plato.)

On the notion of a "dialogue with nature," I've said in the past that I think you're getting Rorty wrong on this score.  If the only thing you mean by this metaphor is that we go back and forth between the pressures of rocks and our experimental ways of dealing with rocks, then nothing Rorty's said has diminished this dialectic, or even underplayed it, I would say.  Certainly he emphasizes the part we play with language, but that's because he's promoting the Romantic tradition in an area that is largely Scientistic.  If scientism had gone away, he would have sung in a different key.  But it hasn't, so he continued singing the Romantic song of linguistic genius.  But he's never said that scientists could get on without, say, experiments.

"If 'scientific method' means merely being rational in some given area of inquiry, then it has a perfectly reasonable 'Kuhnian' sense--it means obeying the normal conventions of your discipline, not fudging the data _too_ much, not letting your hopes and fears influence your conclusions unless those hopes and fears are shared by all those who are in the same line of work, being open to refutation by experience, not blocking the road of inquiry.  In this sense, 'method' and 'rationality' are names for a suitable balance between respect for the opinions of one's fellows and respect for the stubbornness of sensation." ("Method, Social Science, Social Hope," CP, 194-5)

I think the above is exactly what Pirsig meant by scientific method in ZMM and what Dewey meant by bringing the experimental sciences to the rest of life.  In this sense, what Dewey wanted to promote was the scientific ethos, which I would suggest is coextensive with the democratic ethos.  And in this sense, Rorty is on Dewey's side of the cultural war.

Matt

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