[MD] Sam Harris attacks Pragmatism

[david buchanan]

DMB said:
..., the idea of using mysticism to save the correspondence theory is a pretty jarring idea. Pirisg says does the opposite of that and the mystical experience itself would be conceived as non-conceptual so that we could call it unmediated experience but not unmediated knowledge. This would be related to Quality or pure experience more than the pragmatic theory of truth, however, and it's not the sort of thing that can be used as evidence for propositional sentences. 

Steve replied:
I can't think of how else to say it. The argument is from around page 175 in The End of Faith.


dmb says:
Okay, I just read that section of Sam's book and I can see what he's doing. Sam is suffering under a misconception about the nature of mystical experience. He's using it as a kind of uber-realism wherein the mystic can know reality perfectly and he "must be right or wrong realistically". This is in the midst of making a case for realism under the correspondence theory of truth as opposed to Rorty's linguistically inspired relativism. I suspect Sam is framing mysticism in these terms because that's the frame that Rorty uses to deny the possibility of unmediated knowledge.

In any case, no matter where he's getting this conception of mysticism, this is very different from the claims made by Pirsig and James. Basically, Sam's misconception is the result of trying to understand mysticism in terms of SOM and realism. Under this notion, there is an objective reality that can be directlly known by the mystic in a way that is not mediated by language. He mistakenly thinks we can get propositional sentences out of such experience whereas James and Pirsig are saying that such an experience is pre-conceptual and pre-intellectual. It is known directly and unmediated by language so that it would be a logical contradiction to claim any propositional knowledge or factual knowledge on it's basis. 

If we make these qualifications, however, we are still closer to Sam than to Dick. According to radical empiricism, cognitive or linguistic experience is not the only kind of experience and they insist that anything experienced has to be accounted as real in the sense that it really was suffered, enjoyed or otherwise gone through. When we talk about it, like right now, of course it has to be expressed in language but that does not mean that non-verbal experience is unreal or unimportant. As Pirsig puts it, mysticism "is sometimes confused with 'occult' or 'supernatural' or with magic and witchcraft", as we see in Krimel's case, "but in philosophy it has a different meaning". He says that Swedenborg (WJ's dad was a Swedenborgian), Zen Buddhists, and many other philosophical mystics share a view in common, namely the view that "the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided". If we read the mystic's claims about direct knowing or unmediated knowledge with this in mind, then you don't have to explain how the mystic gets propositional knowledge from a reality that's outside of language.

As I see it, it's not quite correct to say that Sam is attacking pragmatism. His objections are directed against relativism in general and Rortyism in particular. His concerns are not so easy to pin on classical pragmatism, which puts the emphasis on experience and the practical consequences of our beliefs rather than language and intersubjective agreement.