[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB,


> 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).

Steve:
Your "yes" is answering a different question than what was asked. Of
course we can specify criteria for truth. Rorty could rattle off lots
of criteria for truth. The question is, where do those criteria come
from?  Look at the quote again that you are objecting to.

When Rorty says, "there is nothing deep down inside us except what we
have put there ourselves," he is agreeing with the existentialists
that existence precedes essence. There is no such thing as an
intrinsic human nature to which we have a duty to conform. Doesn't
Pirsig agree? Certainly there is no essence to an ever evolving
collection of static patterns.

When he says that there are "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" he is not saying that there are
no criteria. He is saying that reality doesn't hand us criteria. Where
do you think criteria come from if they don't arise out of the course
of human practices of inquiry? The point is that we wouldn't have the
criteria we have if we didn't have the desires we have. If we had
different desires, we would have different practices.



dmb:
> 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.

Steve:
The practices of asking such questions as, "Does this claim cohere
with our existing beliefs?" and  "Is this claim born out by
experience?" "is this idea as parsimonious as competing ideas?" are
human conventions. What else could they be? Truth itself is a tool
that humans developed to satisfy human desires. What else could it be?


dmb:
> 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. ....And so the most basic question when inquiring into the validity of this or that assertion is "what difference does it make in practice?".

Steve:
How is this thee "most basic question"? Asking about the practical
consequences is a great idea, but it is a practice that arose out of
other human practices for inquiry rather than handed to us by nature.
It is not basic in the sense of "given." Otherwise, James wouldn't
have been able to make a name for himself by promoting the notion that
philosophical problems can be dissolved by thinking of it as more
basic than the philosophical problems it helps solve.

Best,
Steve