[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[Matt Kundert]

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 said:
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?

Matt:
Oh.  Well, I agree, I do think it's worth talking about.  I guess I 
missed the part where you talked about my post, and I guess I didn't 
understand your explanation (which sounded a lot to me like 
variations on, "I think it is obvious that they is  no parallel").  You 
say, for example, it's a "translation problem," but I don't have a sense 
for the specifics of the particular translation problem.  What you say 
as a generalization, and quote from Seigfried, might be true.  But my 
sense is that it isn't true of, for example, Rorty, and it would be 
swinging in the dark to try to preemptorily defend Rorty or myself of 
a position that hasn't been explicitly criticized in any particular kind of 
way.  I don't know what your exact problem is, so how I can defend 
any particular position exactly?  

I mean, have you realized yet that you're asking me a variation on 
"When did you cease to be a communist?"  Something like, "Stop 
attacking radical empiricism with psychological nominalism!"  And I 
keep replying, "I haven't been."  Or, "Sellars and Rorty's criticisms 
don't affect radical empiricism properly understood."  And I keep 
saying, "Yes, if it has evacuated Platonism, then there's nothing to 
criticize."  Do you not understand how an "if, then" conditional 
statement works?  If you vouch, as you have been, that James and 
Pirsig have evacuated Platonism, then I end up agreeing with you, 
that there's nothing to criticize.  I'm not sure how I can agree with 
you more.

You also seem to want me to defend a lot of things (like scientific 
materialism) that I have no interest in defending.  How do I defend 
that lack of interest?  You say, "Sellars was a scientific materialist"; 
I say, "Well, maybe part of his philosophy was, but not this other 
part"; you then say, "but the whole damn thing stinks of it"; what am 
I to say but, "well, I guess I have a different sense of smell than you."

Hey, you smell scientific materialism all over analytic philosophy.  I 
smell Platonism over a lot of the formulations of mysticism.  Both of 
us want to say that, for the most part, those smells are wafting from 
adjacent compartments to the ones we're actually interested in.  
Since neither one of us wants to defend either scientific materialism 
or Platonism, why can't we just let the other work their end of the 
street, follow their own predilections?  (Well, it's because you think 
I'm massively screwing up Pirsig.  I'm not sure how to argue about 
that anymore, since it seems to have so much do with elusive smells.)

I'm sorry, Dave.  I'm really not trying to be evasive.  I just must have 
a very different sense of what "discussion" means, or something, 
because we keep thinking that the other person is not doing 
something they should be doing to hold up their end of the 
conversation.

Matt

> From: dmbuchanan at hotmail.com
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 10:15:30 -0700
> Subject: Re: [MD] Philosophy and Abstraction
> 

> 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)