[MD] Harris and Steve

[Matt Kundert]

> Steve:
> Though we both wish Harris were a pragmatist, I still wonder whether
> pragmatism would well serve his rhetorical purposes. To make the case
> he wants to make against religious faith and in favor of moral truth,
> he may be more effective posing as a realist even if he had pragmatist
> leanings. He can only be taken seriously in pop culture if he does not
> take too many radical stances at once. What do you think of that idea?

Well, I guess let me put it this way:  I've never felt the 
need to lie or be inauthentic when talking to my dad.  I 
don't think of myself as posing as a realist, however, just 
because I talk about facts or truth.

So if Harris wants to talk popularly, then godspeed.  But if 
you're going to talk about Rorty, then you need to face 
down Rorty (or whoever) and face the fact that pretty 
much only other academic intellectuals care if you face 
down Rorty.

In other words, by discussing and taking sides in 
sophisticated debates, he doesn't get a pass because he's 
talking about them to a popular audience.  Because popular 
audiences don't care anyways.  And if you're trying to 
include popular audiences in the sophisticated debates (by 
bootstrap education), then all the more reason to get the 
debate right and not be "posing."

So if Harris wants to be a realist, then that's fine, and he'll 
suffer the wrath of pragmatists (in combat in specifically 
philosophical space).  And at the same time, there's no 
need for pragmatists to feel "realist-envy"--Rortyan 
pragmatists, in particular, should be wise to the contours 
of different conversations and take shifts in vocabulary in 
stride.

This is something Christopher Norris was always confused 
about.  He accused Jean Baudrillard, Stanley Fish, and 
Richard Rorty of causing the first Gulf War because of some 
silly things Baudrillard said about it.  But just because 
Baudrillard's an idiot about politics doesn't mean the 
philosophical theses he holds are bad, pernicious, or untrue.  
(Though, in deference to Norris, Baudrillard's philosophy is 
nearly useless.  And in deference to Fish and Rorty, half of 
Norris' books--endlessly reiterating this conflation of his 
between philosophy and the rest of life--are nearly useless, 
too.)

Matt
 		 	   		  
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