[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
... You say that you don't see any difference that makes a difference and I'm saying they are not even similar. You think they are close enough that one could replace the other but I think apples and oranges have more in common.

Matt said:
Okey-dokey.  Got it. Though I'm not sure what more there is for me to say, other than what I suggested in "Quine, Sellars, etc."

dmb says:

But I'm talking about what you suggest in "Quine, Sellars, etc". I'm trying to explain how and why psychological nominalism is not parallel to radical empiricism. You don't think that's worth talking about?

dmb said:
...A man's vision is the most important thing about him, James says. These two styles answer different needs and those answers appeal to different types. This is a matter of degree, of course, and hardly anyone is just one or the other. That's what I'm talking about with respect to Sellars in particular and analytic philosophers in general. .. See, you've attached yourself to the kind of pragmatism that comes out of the analytic school.

Matt replied:
Oh, shit, I didn't know!   Oh, wait, I did.  And, I also think that Rorty is an artsy fartsy reconciler.  Someone who takes the disparate tones and perspectives of other people doing different things and brings them together. So, I guess we cleared that up: Dave thinks analytic philosophy is worthless; Matt does not (though he also just uses them for what they're good at). I guess that's it for us.  For two people who so very basically disagree about so much (though I think it's all form, and not much content), like whether to care about form or content, I can't imagine there being anything worth discussing.


dmb says:
Well, the analytic school is not my cup of tea but I hardly think my observation constitutes some kind of slander. I'm just trying to get at the differences and one that definitely matters in this discussion is the basic temperament of the analytic school, from which you draw almost exclusively. And like I said, almost nobody is just one type or the other. But I think it's important to have a feel for who is sympatico with who. And more specifically, it's important to realize that Sellars and Rorty are not aiming their criticism at the claims of the radical empiricists. The term "preconceptual" means one thing in Sellars' paper and another in the post-metaphysical work of Pirsig and James. It's a translation problem too. (I strongly suspect that you have found parallels between psychological nominalism and radical empiricism because of some mistranslated concepts in this exact area.) That's what Seigfried was getting at. Here's the salient part of the quote again:

"To hold that the pragmatists rejected classical metaphysics but then kept doing metaphysics of some sort anyway is to unhistorically remove them from the central debate of modern philosophy, which became more acute with the Darwinian revolution and re-emphasized with quantum physics. How can we legitimate any claims about the world now that we know that we can never grasp it as it is in itself but only in relation to us? If metaphysical claims about reality are no longer possible, what will replace them?    ...To say that the pragmatists insisted that 'metaphysical generalizations must be grounded in immediate experience' is to miss the force of their arguments against metaphysical speculation, against metaphysical grounding, against metaphysical experience. All these terms have specific meanings if understood metaphysically and radically different meanings if understood in post-metaphysical terms." (p.349)