[MD] DMB and Rorty

[david buchanan]

dmb quoted from Stanford's article on Rorty:

"Rorty suggests, that "we see knowledge as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature." (PMN 171) Rorty provides this view with a label: "Explaining rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than the latter by the former, is the essence of what I shall call ‘epistemological behaviorism,’ an attitude common to Dewey and Wittgenstein." (PMN 174) ... Indeed, many who share Rorty's historicist scepticism toward the transcending ambitions of epistemology—friendly critics like Hilary Putnam, John McDowell and Daniel Dennett—balk at the idea that there are no constraints on knowledge save conversational ones. Yet this is a central part of Rorty's position, repeated and elaborated as recently as in TP and PCP."   I find it pretty strange that you object to Rorty dropping epistemology while quoting a passage describing what Rorty calls his "epistemological behaviorism."


dmb said:

..."Epistemological behaviorism" refers to Rorty's anti-empirical stance. It refers to the view that knowledge is "a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature". That is Rorty giving up on epistemology because, for him, epistemology is defined as the attempt to mirror nature. ...Because Rorty defines the question in terms of that failed answer, he thinks we should give up on the question altogether. 

Steve replied to dmb:
Here we go agin. "THEE question." What is THEE question has Rorty given up on that you think is still important? You say that he has "given up on truth" and yet he still talks about truth. You say he has given up on epistemology yet you take him to have an anti-empirical stance on the very same matter. ...It is only "giving up on epistemology" if you don't count it as epistemology. What, according to the whole quote, that Rorty is missing is constraints on our beliefs provided by "the way reality actually is." Yet, like Rorty, you reject the notion of The Way Things Really Are. So again, what is THEE question that you need answered but Rorty has dropped?


dmb says:

Your question defies the fact that I have already said three or four times that the question of truth ought not be a loaded question. As I see it, there is no such thing as "THEE question of truth". Again, to say that we are not doing epistemology because we are not looking for the objective truth or the essence of truth is like saying that we are not really doing astronomy because we are not looking for the crystalline spheres. Like astronomy, epistemological questions ought not be defined in terms of the old failed answers. To define epistemology as the search for "the way things really are" is exactly what we ought not do. Like astronomical questions, the question of truth ought not be asked in such a way that it defines in advance what the nature of truth is. That's why there is no such thing as "THEE question of truth". Instead, we should ask generic open ended questions like, "what is true?" or "what counts as true?" But if we insist on asking what is OBJECTIVELY true or ESSENTIALLY TRUE or ETERNALLY true, we are asking loaded questions. They are loaded with failed answers and this is what creates a false dilemma between Platonic essentialism and Rorty's relativism. I'm saying that the pragmatic theory of truth is neither of things. You seem to think that there is only one way to be anti-foundational, Rorty's way. You seem to think that truth is either a matter of mirroring nature or it's a matter of conversation and social practice. I'm saying that the pragmatic theory of truth is neither. I'm trying to tell you this is a false dilemma but you keep asking me questions as if no third option could be possible.


Steve asked:


Now, what mileage can you get in practice from this notion that truth is grounded in experience? How does it help us get beyond Rorty's ability to say true things or determine which statements are true or not be forced to believe things that are false? What is the pragmatic value in all this? ... exactly what does that empiricism and theory of truth do for them in practice that Rorty cannot do? ... What is the practical difference between James saying that true beliefs lead to successful action and saying that true beliefs lead to successful action IN EXPERIENCE? Does that last bit add some explanatory power? Does it keep us from getting fooled or keep us from being able to fool others?


dmb says:

I think that it's been well established that Rorty thinks "there are no constraints on knowledge save conversational ones". This approach does not allow anybody to say true things. It only allows us to have verbal agreements about what's true. Going beyond intersubjective agreement, for Rorty, means a return to foundationalism, a return to the quest for the way the world really is. Again, I'm saying that the pragmatic theory of truth says knowledge is not grounded in anything essential or objective but neither is it just a matter of linguistic behavior. For James and Pirsig, truth is matter of practical success, like health or wealth. Knowledge produces actual, practical solutions like bridges and motorcycles. Verbal agreements and cultural consensus does not determine whether or not these things work. Experience does. Tools like bridges and motorcycles are good concrete analogies for the way conceptual tools work, according to the pragmatic theory of truth. Like I said, "Truth is what happens to an idea in the course of experience. It is made true by events, not by mirroring objective reality or revealing the essence of truth, whatever that is. This is what it means for truth to lead to successful action. If we can ride an idea into the future then it proves itself true."  In other words, knowledge operates within the ongoing stream of experience. It functions to relate past experience to future experience in such a way that we can successfully "ride" from here to there. That's what it means to say "truth" is agreement with experience. That's all truth can ever mean to a pragmatist, as opposed to "truth" as accurately mirroring nature. Rorty's view that knowledge is a matter of social practice is empty and incoherent without this this empirical dimension. As David Hildebrand puts it, "our very ability to assess 'needs' and 'social practices' depends upon our ability to measure the meaning of these abstractions against something more intimately present, namely the lived moments to which they supposedly apply." 


Steve said:

Talking about empirical reality is still talking. It is one of those linguistic practices. Do you think Rorty can't talk about his experiences in justifying his beliefs to others? That's just one of those conversational practices that doesn't have any way of trumping all other practices such as deciding whether a person's account of his personal practices are generally trustworthy and appealing to culturally constructed standards of evidence and critiquing our culturally constructed standards of evidence.


dmb says:

You're begging the central question here. You're converting the constraints of lived experience into the constraints of linguistic practices and conversational practices. But this whole debate is centered around the difference between the classical pragmatists' emphasis on experience and the neopragmatists' emphasis on language. Yes, of course talking about empirical reality is still talking. But like I said a month or so ago, you're confusing form with content. I mean, talking about animals is still talking but that doesn't mean animals are nothing but talk. By the same token, talking about non-linguistic experience is still talking but that does not make the talked-about experience any less non-linguistic. And of course the non-linguistic is where Rorty's worldview really clashes hard with the world of James and Pirsig. It's not quite so bad when we're sticking to the pragmatic theory of truth but when it comes to the core part of radical empiricism, "pure experience" or DQ, it becomes most obvious that Rorty's approach is wildly at odds with the whole program. Here the dynamic and the ineffable come up against the static and the verbal. Quality is outside the mythos. Pure experience is had prior to our conceptualizations. Intersubjective agreement is determined by what society let's us say and is always conceptual. Like I said a couple of months ago, these radical empiricists are saying that awareness is NOT just a linguistic affair.  I don't just mean that they acknowledge the existence of non-verbal experience. I doubt that Rorty would deny that there is such a thing. I'm saying that Pirsig and James both make this central to their philosophical views and they both make a case that our past philosophies have suffered because they didn't.  


 
Steve said:

This common sense notion that an idea either "proves itself to be true" or not in the course of experience is fine by anyone. (The "made true" bit gets James into trouble with some.) For a philosopher interested in theories of truth, however, the next questions are about how exactly that works. How do we compare an idea to our experiences? Before we can say that philosophy has added anything to this common sense notion, you'll need to explain the microstructure of how a proper relationship ought to be between an idea and our experiences before we ought to say that an idea is true.


dmb says:

I totally disagree with the premise of your question. You're demoting the pragmatic theory of truth to common sense and you're insisting that it only counts as philosophical truth if we can say exactly how our ideas compare to our experience, explain the microstructure, whatever that is, of the relationship between our experience and our ideas. But aren't you asking exactly the kind of loaded question I was complaining about above and in several prior posts? Why does it have to be a dualistic correspondence theory to count as a theory of truth? Who decided that anything less was unphilosophical? Anyway, the pragmatic theory of truth says that knowledge functions within the ongoing process of experience. Concepts are not supposed to be representations of experience, they are one of the phases or elements within experience. And finally, it's important to remember that Pirsig and James aren't talking about experience in terms of SOM. That is the REJECTED ontological dualism in which the correspondence theories make sense. By contrast, James and Pirsig say that experience is reality. You could even say reality is a vast experiential field. In any case, there is no thing or stuff or physical reality to which our ideas are supposed to correspond. For these guys, truth is what carries you forward from one experience to the next. It functions to relate moments within the continuity of experience. 


Steve replied:

What you keep getting wrong is that Rorty actually accepts this common sense notion of truth. He doesn't reject truth. He rejects so-called "theories of truth" when they don't add to our ability to do any of the things for which anyone would bother to pursue a philosophical theory of truth in the first place. His objection and mine here is that you haven't added anything  to it with your talk about radical empiricism that we didn't already have. You are just talking about the dormitive power of opium as an explanation of how it helps people sleep.


dmb says:

How could I keep getting it wrong if I haven't even said a word about it. You keep bringing up "common sense" notions as if I'm not talking about philosophical positions. C'mon Steve, how many philosophers have I quoted in the course of this conversation? Is anyone I quoted not a philosopher? I think you don't quite appreciate the power this view has to oppose essentialisms and foundationalisms while still retaining a modest and sensible restraint on our truth claims. It opens up the entire field of human experience to include the full range of our capacities and dimensions at the same time that it rules out all kinds of metaphysical fictions and trans-experiential entities. 


Steve said:
James and Pirsig didn't try to do what you are trying to do here by the way. James, according to Pirsig, thought radical empiricism was separate from his pragmatism. 


dmb says:

That is a very weak point. First of all, James only meant that the two were not logically connected. Accepting one does not necessarily entail accepting the other. That certainly doesn't mean they don't go together quite well. They're both James's babies after all. The fit is so neat, in fact, that James soon began to think that pragmatism was a special chapter within radical empiricism. On top of that, it doesn't matter if radical empiricism is attached to it or not. The pragmatic theory of truth is still very empirical. It's all about experience. Experience is not just the test of truth, it is the only context in which truth has any meaning or purpose. On top of that, Pirsig explicitly takes up both theories into a unified picture AND many of today's James scholars do that too. James's work has taken as a whole since John J. McDermott showed a coherent picture of James back in the mid 1970s, at least. So your point is a rather pointless point in at least three different ways. 


Steve said:

Pirsig liked James's notion of truth as what is good to believe probably in part because it puts aside all this "theory of truth" business. It is simply undefined Quality where beliefs are concerned. He didn't get into what MAKES a belief true or what truth is supposed to consist in and only gave vague criteria such as agreement with experience, parsimony, and logical coherence. He offered us a paintings in an art gallery view of truth rather than any static method or theory for deciding between true and false beliefs.



dmb says:


No, you're just converting Pirsig into Rorty here. You're also presenting that false dilemma again. Just because Pirsig isn't claiming there is a single exclusive truth, it doesn't mean that his theory doesn't count as a theory of truth. The criteria is just as vague as a non-essentialist, non-foundational theory should be. The use of the art gallery analogy of truth expresses this open-ended, provisional, pluralistic, contextual and perspectival version of truth without losing the ability to distinguish true and false beliefs. That's just what you want in a third option. It doesn't assert essentialism against contextualism. It simply sets the standards of truth so that truth can change as the context changes and different truth can work in different contexts. In other words, we don't have to pick one painting of truth and assert it above all the others but that doesn't mean we can't evaluate the quality of each painting or that we can't make comparisons. In any case, the basic idea here is that truth functions in relation to lived experience. It's not the product of a static method and it's not just about the relations between one sentence and another. Sometimes knowledge is a hands-on skill, an ability to interact with concrete realities like paint brushes and doorknobs. Like I said, "We can't persuade a motorcycle to fix itself by using the right vocabularies or the right rhetorical strategies. Your ideas about the machine are going to lead you through the process of repairing it or they are not. Trying to fix it with the wrong ideas in mind is probably going to teach you something about what's true and what isn't. I think Pirsig chose a practical, hands-on analogy to explain the scientific process AND Zen meditation for a reason. Think about that. Think about how non-verbal that second one is and how empirical they both are. That's what Rorty ain't got."









 		 	   		  
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