[MD] Putnam on Is-Ought and Truth

[david buchanan]

Steve said:
I'm pretty sure that RMP would see a difference between asserting "X is true" and "One ought to do X." There is a difference between saying "DMB thinks this distinction is meaningless" and "DMB should see this distinction as meaningless."

dmb says:

"This problem of trying to describe value in terms of substance has been the problem of a smaller container trying to contain a larger one. Value is not a subspecies of substance. [You can't get oughts from ises.] Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the container process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a 'stable patterns of inorganic values.' The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified."(Lila p101)

"The physical order of the universe is also the moral order of the universe. RTA is both. This was exactly what the MOQ was claiming. It was not a new idea. It was the oldest idea known to man." (Lila p382)



Steve:

I'm asking for more specifics here. Though our truth claims await future justification or falsification, reality doesn't just hand us the standards for deciding what sorts of expriences ought to be considered support for our claims and what sorts of experiences should count as evidence against our claims.

dmb says:

Radical empiricism says ALL experiences can be counted as evidence for or against our claims. It insists that all kinds of experience be accounted for in our philosophies and says that anything beyond experience should not be included in those accounts. This empiricism is so radical that experience and reality amount to the same thing. 



Steve said;
... I don't know how else such claims could be tested if not in the course of human inquiry. But you recite the refrain "tested by experience" as though reality sets up parameters and does the testing for us and then communicates to us the outcome of the test.

dmb says:

That interpretation is quite bizarre. Do you imagine this is about something other that human experience and human claims? Obviously, it was William James who set up the parameters of radical empiricism people do the testing and telling.



Steve:

This question of second order justification is also quite relevant. Until you can make sense of this question, you shouldn't get on Rorty's case for saying "no nonconversational constraints on knowledge" because second-order justification (how we can be justified in our standards for justification) is what Rorty is talking about in that quote. He doesn't think that there is anything nonhuman we can appeal to in a conversation to say what ought to count as a good justification. I'm pretty sure that you agree with Rorty on this point. Don't you?

dmb says:
Ah, but see the meaning of that quote is at the heart of our dispute. I don't know if you realize it or not, but this all about the difference between language and experience. It is Rorty's belief that appeals to experience would count as one of those non-human justifications. But of course this is an objection to the claims of traditional empiricism, particularly positivism. In that case, the nonhuman standard would be an objective physical reality. This concern does not apply to radical empiricism simply because it does not make any such claims. But - and this is a very big but - experience does push back, it offers resistances, displays a certain recalcitrance and is also filled with regularities. This is human experience, of course, but there is still a kind of realism involved when experience is the test of truth. And so, unlike Rortyism, radical empiricism says there most certainly ARE non-conversational constraints on what we can claim. In fact, the radical empiricist can be totally convinced by experience even if no one else believes it or even knows about it.

It seems you don't realize how very different these two views are. You keep asking me to defend claims I never made and misunderstand the claims I do make. Like I tried to explain by way of Fish and Standford, Rockwell, Weed, Hildebrand, Hickman, Putnam and others, Rorty dismisses epistemology because he defines the question in terms of the failed answer. Matt finally saw what I meant. Ask him. Read one of the papers I suggested. Like I said, I honestly don't know what else I can do to help you see it. 

 



 		 	   		  
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