[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[david buchanan]

dmb quoted Rorty:
"What ties Dewey, Foucault, James and Nietzsche together", Rorty says, is "the sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criteria, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions." ...And dmb asked: How does that NOT count as relativism? Isn't that practically the definition of relativism? I think so.


Steve replied:
Are you trying to say that James or any one of these others DOES offer a criterion for knowledge or a standard for rationality that was not created in the course of creating a practice? Are saying that certain criteria are simply handed to us by reality? Are you saying Pirsig thinks so? Surely not. But then what the heck could you be objecting to here?



dmb says:
Yes, I'm saying that radical empiricism and the pragmatic theory of truth include criteria. This is why I say the difference between Pirsig and Rorty is the difference between having an epistemology and not having an epistemology. This is why I keep talking about experience and empiricism in opposition to relativism (as expressed in the Rorty quote). 

This is another version of the false dilemma posed I spoke to in your last post, wherein the choices are saying it's language all the way down or adopting the correspondence. Here you say all standards of knowledge are conventional and man-made or we believe such standards are simply handed to us by nature. Again, I'm saying those are not the only options. The pragmatic theory of truth is very, very empirical but rejects the correspondence theory all the same. The pragmatist not only says that experience is the test of truth because it offers resistance and thereby constrains what we can assert or believe. He also says that truth doesn't have any meaning outside of its relation to experience.
One of the original aims of James's pragmatism as a method was to distinguish differences that have a practical consequence of some kind as opposed to merely verbal disputes. One of the major zingers that James used against Bradley was to say that Bradley's Absolutism was almost entirely verbal. It was like a self-contained, free-floating system that made no contact at any point with actual experience, he charged.
And so the most basic question when inquiring into the validity of this or that assertion is "what difference does it make in practice?". The particular applications of this criterion are endless because the particular purposes and situations in which we apply our ideas are endless. Their value and meaning depends on their relation to the ongoing stream of experience. Even when the experience is intellectual and verbal, the emphasis on practical results is at the center all the same. It's about getting things done. It's about what happens when the rubber meets the road. It puts experience at the center, despite its rejection of correspondence theories and Cartesian dualisms.