[MD] Putnam on Is-Ought and Truth

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
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 replied:


No doubt any experience CAN be counted as evidence, but how do you decide which particular experiences OUGHT to be counted as evidence for or against a given claim? Where do those standards for what ought to be counted as evidence in a given situation come from? ... The warranted assertibity of my claim to be an expert horseman will be tested based on whether or not I can actually ride a horse. What about my claim that Jesus actually existed about 2000 years ago? What about my claim that the square root of two cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers? What about my claim that there is probably intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? How are such claims "tested by experience"? I'm skeptical toward your implicit claim that experience can do this testing of knowledge claims for us. I think that your appeal to radical empiricism simply doesn't do much in terms of epistemology.


dmb says:

My implicit claim that experience can do this testing for us? Huh? How would that work? This is not only stupid and made-up, you're saying this AFTER I already said, "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". It's simply dishonest to repeat this complaint as if I didn't already say that in the very post you're responding. 

Anyway, let me say a few words about your questions. How would a radical empiricist test the claim that there is intelligent life elsewhere? He'd say we can only speculate. Alien life, at this point, is beyond human experience and so anything we say about it can only be educated speculation. We can try to find some, and we are doing that. But no truth claims can be made in the absence of experience. The existence of Jesus, like any other figure who might be historical or fictional, can only be inferred from historical evidence. 

But I suppose what you're trying to ask about is how we decide which particular experiences are relevant to some particular claim we've made. But this question supposes disconnection between pragmatic truths and the experiences that justify them that doesn't make much sense within the pragmatic theory of truth. These things are already knitted together in a way that you're apparently not understanding. You keep trying to understand these radically empirical claims in the linguistic terms of Rortyism and that simply does not work. The differences are too profound. Eugene Taylor of Harvard Medical school explains it beautifully in the opening of a 1995 paper titled "Radical Empiricism and the new science of consciousness". ...

"Pragmatism, the idea for which James is best known, is at once a method of testing belief-systems as well as a suggestion for reconciling conflicting truth-claims. Its essence is that truths are made real by their effect on enhancing the moral and aesthetic quality of daily living. Beliefs, in other words, are always tested by their consequences. Thus a belief is not just a verbal statement of some principle by which we live, it always has some connection to direct experience within the deepest realms of our being and to our actions in the world. At the same time, pragmatism also suggests that any philosophic statement about the nature of ultimate reality can be evaluated in terms of its outcome. If two radically different statements lead to the same consequences, then for pragmatic purposes they are functionally equivalent. The key here, of course, is in the word functional. ...to say that they are functional is to say they both work."

See, if the claim is that truth is something that happens to an idea within the course of experience, if pragmatic truth is what we "ride" successfully within experience, then the question of which experiences count as evidence for which claims doesn't really make sense. For the pragmatist, true are ideas are ideas that function in experience. 

Steve said:
... there are no standards for justifying beliefs that float free of all human being's doubts and needs to have good beliefs for satisfying particular human desires. The standards for evidence are human standards determined based on human doubts rather than determined by Experience! or Reality! That is all you should take away from Rorty's slogan "no nonconversational constraints on inquiry."

dmb says:

I totally disagree with the idea that experience and reality are nonhuman. What could experience be except human experience? Radical empiricism says that experience and reality are the same thing. 


Steve:


So you agree that there isn't anything beyond nonhuman we can appeal to in a conversation to say what ought to count as a good justification? Certainly we can't say to someone who disagrees with us "well Experience says..." Even if we say, "logic dictates..." or "according to scientific law..." we are still not appealing to anything that floats free of all things human. As James said, "The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything."


dmb says:

If you're saying experience, logic and scientific laws are human, I agree. But then you go on and reach a bogus conclusion ...



Steve continued:

There is nothing like Pure Experience that not only provides content to our awareness but also provides us with some Pure way of interpreting that content or any Pure Reason to tell us how to apply those standards of interpretation that could serve as a useful basis for epistemology--a way of justifying our beliefs that is any more than a cultural construct, i.e., "conversational." ... What we ought to rule out is not appeals to our experiences but rather appeals to Experience! Because, as I keep reinforcing "the immediate flux of life" can't provide standards of evidence and justify beliefs for us.



dmb says:

You're confusing the pragmatic theory of truth with radical empiricism's notion of pure experience. Interpretation and reason are secondary, conceptual experiences while pure experience is primary and pre-conceptual. Of course pre-conceptual experience can't tell us how to apply truth standards but then nobody said they could. Again, you are asking me to defend a claim I did not make and would not make. By definition, truth-claims are verbal and static but pure experience is neither static nor verbal. This is another way, the BIGGEST way, that Rortyism leads you into confusion. Look at this again, or maybe for the first time. I posted this series of quotes to show, among other things, that Rortyism differs from pragmatism on this very point...


“The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure experience’. It is only virtually or potentially either a subject or an object as yet” (James 1912, 23). 
 “When a subject-object metaphysics regards matter and mind as eternally separate and eternally unalike, it creates a platypus bigger than the solar system” (Pirsig 1991, 153).
“Realists and idealists assume that subject and object are discrete and then debate which term deserves first rank. Dewey assumes that what is primary is a whole situation – ‘subject’ and ‘object’ have no a priori, atomistic existences but are themselves DERIVED from situations to serve certain purposes, usually philosophical” (Hildebrand p27)
Hildebrand says, "An empirical approach to metaphysics need not presuppose a subject/object dualism - indeed, if experience is perspicuously attended to, it should not...Since Dewey will not begin metaphysical inquiries by presupposing a subject/object dualism, he does not need to ward off the same skeptical demons that plagued Descartes...Dewey hoped that through examples and empirical observations his distinction between primary and secondary experience would be patent and its adoption might economize intellectual effort."
Notice that the pragmatists are not only rejecting SOM here but also taking up those two categories of experience. Primary and secondary are dynamic and static or preconceptual and reflective. Dewey also calls them Had and Known. He, James and Pirsig are all the list of Pragmatic radical empiricists. But Rorty is not one of these precisely because he rejects this other, non-SOM distinction.
"To understand why Rorty is wrong," Hildebrand says, "requires that we briefly revisit and defend the underlying distinction between primary and secondary experience, a distinction Rorty also rejects as 'bad faith'". (116-7)

Why does Rorty reject it as 'bad faith'? He is taking pure experience to mean "Experience!" with a capital "E" and an exclamation point, whatever that's supposed to mean. As I tried to show by way of the Fish article in the New York Times, Rorty's objections are aimed at entirely different claims about what experience can tell us and these objections don't make any sense when applied to pragmatic truth or experience as it's conceived in radical empiricism. And yet you keep applying them to both anyway. It's like you don't want to understand. 

Seriously, I have no idea what non-human experience or non-human reality could even mean, let alone rest my case on them. It seems you're taking pure experience to be a claim about perfect correspondence between subjects and objects when the term refers to experience that is, as yet, neither. 








 		 	   		  
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