[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[Ian Glendinning]

Matt you cited James' own one sentence definition .... it hardly
addresses the problem though.

Still leaves "proof" and "good" undefined (and retrospective), and the
second clause doesn't even address the qualities of "definite
assignable reasons". Don't get me wrong, I obviously have a quality
based definition of truth in mind too, but tossing this sentence back
in just adds to the linguistic games.

I thing Steve asked a more specific question .... about what Dave did
have to object to in his summary ?
Ian

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 7:36 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> DMB said:
> "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."
>
> How does that NOT count as relativism? Isn't that practically the
> definition of relativism? I think so.
>
> Steve said:
> 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?
>
> Matt:
> The answer to Steve's rhetorical questions for James, I think, can
> be found in one of James's famous definitions of truth:  "The true
> is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of
> belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons" (from "What
> Pragmatism Means").  Stanley Fish once pointed out that people
> often only quote the first half of the sentence, but that you won't
> understand pragmatism without "and good, too, for definite,
> assignable reasons."  It's those "assignable reasons" that puts us
> within a conventional practice.
>
> Matt
>
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