[MD] Harris and Steve

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve:
According to some end notes I just checked, Harris identifies pragmatism with Rorty and so takes its core theses to be the claim that, "All statements about the world are 'true' only by virtue of being justified in a sphere of discourse." He thinks this view is "incredible" and "covertly realistic" and that it "falls into contradiction" in several ways. I think it's safe to say he's not a big fan of Rorty's brand of pragmatism.



Steve replied:

Do you see some agreement with Jamesian prgamatism somewhere? It is safe to say that he is not a fan of anybody's brand of pragmatism since he specifically endorses the correspondence theory of truth.


dmb says:

Well, like I said, Harris identifies pragmatism with Rorty. For Harris, in other words, pragmatism is Rorty's pragmatism. James doesn't enter into it, except for one dismissive mention in a footnote. Harris says, "For the tenets of pragmatism, I have principally relied on the work of Richard Rorty, who articulates this philosophical position as clearly and consistently as any of its fans or critics could wish." (p278) Rorty is discussed at length and Harris opposes his views in favor of a kind of realism. 


Steve said:

I don't have the book handy, but as I recall, his argument that pragmatism is a covert realism comes from supposing a mystic who claims to have knowledge through an unmediated experience. He says that the pragmatist's denial of the possibility of such an experience is an endorsement of realism since it is a claim that such knowledge really is impossible. Of course the pragmatist says no such thing. She just says that she can't make any sense of the notion of "unmediated experience."


dmb says:

Well, since Harris takes pragmatism to mean Rorty's position and since Rorty is no mystic, that seems pretty unlikely. In any case, I've not seen any such argument. On page 282, Harris says, "It might be, that talking about truth and knowledge in terms of human 'solidarity', as Rorty does, could ultimately subvert the very solidarity at issue. While I believe that a pragmatic case against pragmatism can be made, I have not made it here. Instead, I have attempted to show that pragmatism is covertly realistic, arguing that in the act of distancing himself from the sins of realism, the pragmatist commits them with both hands. The pragmatist seems to be tacitly saying that he has surveyed the breadth and depth of all possible acts of cognition and found both that all knowledge is discursive and that all spheres of discourse can be potentially fused. Pragmatism, therefore, amounts to the assertion that any epistemic context wider than our own can be ruled out in principle. While I find these claims incredible, the more important point is that a pragmatist can believe otherwise only as a realist".


Steve:


I just read on his website that he has a whole chapter in his new book about how free will is an illusion. Ugh!



dmb says:

Yea, but he was always destined to say that. If you like the elimination of free will, you'll love eliminative materialism...

"Eliminativism maintains that the common-sense understanding of the mind is mistaken, and that the neurosciences will one day reveal that the mental states that are talked about in every day discourse, using words such as "intend", "believe", "desire", and "love", do not refer to anything real. Because of the inadequacy of natural languages, people mistakenly think that they have such beliefs and desires.[1] Some eliminativists, such as Frank Jackson, claim that consciousness does not exist except as an epiphenomenon of brain function; others, such as Georges Rey, claim that the concept will eventually be eliminated as neuroscience progresses.[2][11] Consciousness and folk psychology are separate issues and it is possible to take an eliminative stance on one but not the other.[3] The roots of eliminativism go back to the writings of Wilfred Sellars, W.V. Quine, Paul Feyerabend, and Richard Rorty.[4][5][12] The term "eliminative materialism" was first introduced by James Cornman in 1968 while describing a version of physicalism endorsed by Rorty. The later Ludwig Wittgenstein was also an important inspiration for eliminativism, particularly with his attack on "private objects" as "grammatical fictions".[3]Early eliminativists such as Rorty and Feyerabend often confused two different notions of the sort of elimination that the term "eliminative materialism" entailed. On the one hand, they claimed, the cognitive sciences that will ultimately give people a correct account of the workings of the mind will not employ terms that refer to common-sense mental states like beliefs and desires; these states will not be part of the ontology of a mature cognitive science."





 		 	   		  
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