[MD] Empiricism for dummies

[Matt Kundert]

DMB said:
Okay, Matt. But if Rorty wants to just drop it and change the subject
because traditional empiricism is hopeless and futile, which is
basically what you've been telling me for several years, then his
stance toward traditional empiricism is still different from the
radical empiricists.

Matt:
This might be a frustrating thing to say, but okay, DMB, I will drop the "change the subject" metaphor for the purposes of discussing radical empiricism.  The trouble with it is that, well, clearly their must be a stable sense of conversation in which we discuss the relative merits of a traditional empiricism and radical empiricism.  So I will drop that.  Because of the struggles of Quine and Sellars in breaking apart the last, bad vestiges of logical positivism, rooted as they were in traditional British empiricism, Rorty was caught up in continuing the struggle of differentiating what pragmatists were saying from, say, Locke and Hume and then Carnap and Ayer.  So, to emphasize a difference, he suggests pragmatists from James to Putnam are really, despite a few differences of opinion here and there, are broadly trying to end what the old guard thought needed doing.

DMB said:
I mean, if Rorty made an exception and said hey that radical stuff
ain't so bad, that would be different. But he doesn't pick and choose
like that. He just wants to drop everything from here to Plato, no?

Matt:
No.  I know that was a rhetorical question, but in my reading of what Rorty was saying, and my understanding of what you're trying to impute by the question, Rorty is not trying to drop Plato.  Reading interviews with Rorty on the state of contemporary philosophy helps dispell some of that feeling.  He says, many times, that it would be a real shame if people stopped reading the canon of writers that stretches from Plato to Aquinas to Hume to Frege.  There are specific things he wished people stopped, like wishing for Absolute Knowledge.  But the conversation, in the wide sense that Rorty also used the metaphor, must continue on.

Personally, I think if one reads a fair selection of his papers on Dewey and James, one won't feel that he wants to drop "radical empiricism" wholesale.  Because the question _always_ for a pragmatist, as Peirce, James and Dewey _always_ emphasized, is "what will happen if I believe this?"  Rorty consistently construes this as "what philosophical problems will we get rid of?"  On this score, one will perhaps see the continuities with Sellars' psychological nominalism.  And I will concede that is not the _only_ kind of consequence of taking this or that philosophical position.  The other main one is, "what else will this enable me to believe/do?"  This is the so-called "constructive" side that people often think Rorty overlooks to the former "deconstructive" side.  I don't think "overlook" is the right word ("emphasize" would be better), and I don't think Rorty precludes that side, nor does he want to, but I will grant people the right to choose "radical empiricism" as their slogan or program over "psychological nominalism" if they find more inspiration in James/Dewey over Sellars/Davidson.  I'm more interested in what a creative philosopher does, then in what they call what they do.  So was Rorty, though in his professional nit-picky role, he writes extensively as to why he'll choose this over that.

In other words, I think you read too much into it, though in your professional nit-picky role you have to choose and articulate these nits over those.  In my role to oppose yours, though, I want to counter with, "There are fewer nits here to choose over than I think you think."

Your interpolation that "Rorty is to Skinner and Freud as Pirsig is to Campbell and Jung," think is pretty good (except for the inclusion of Skinner--to get the analogy better you might have said might favorite classicist right now, Eric Havelock).  I don't like Jung, as compared to Freud, and Rorty would've felt the same way.  I don't like Jung because the whole idea of a "collective unconscious" that isn't rooted in the materials of culture (like communicative processes) seems unDarwinian to me.  Everything is rooted in "material," even if we can't _reduce_ everything to their material and still be able to talk about it understandably.

That being said, a friend of mine who is finishing her master's in psychology and her therapy internship recently confided that, despite not liking Jung for pretty much the same reasons as I, has found "Jungian therapy" to be her therapeutic principles of choice.  I find this perfectly understandable and appropriate because, while we might find so-called metaphysical implications of Jung unacceptable, the practices they enable might still yet be useful _in practice_.  The implications of this to metaphysics are a further conversation, but one that pragmatists have the upper hand in explaining (as opposed to reductive materialists would wield the word "lie" and have trouble explaining, then, the okay utility of lies).

Matt

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