[MD] Philosophy and Abstraction

[Matt Kundert]

Steve said:
[DMB is] misreading Rorty to think he is taking one of these options. 
You say "conventional" as if if he means something like "arbitrary." 
It doesn't. ...

You are the one setting up the false dilemma for criteria for 
justification between "randomly selected for no good reasons" and 
"handed to us by nature."

Matt:
I agree with this assessment of the situation in reading Rorty, and 
why Mark's "nature vs. nurture" understanding of it doesn't work 
either.

Part of the trouble stems from the fact that Dave doesn't articulate 
recognition of the evolution in Rorty's writing.  For example, his 
tendency to throw "eliminative materialism" at Rorty like rock.  Rorty 
coined that ism in 1965, and hadn't used it to describe his position 
since 1970 (if I'm not mistaken).  Since that time, that ism has been 
picked up and used (e.g., by the Churchlands) for a position that 
doesn't have a whole lot to do with Rorty's position (as Robert 
Brandom argues).

The passage Dave takes to be patent relativism was written between 
1981 and 82.  Rorty hadn't fully appreciated yet how 
"convention"-language can lend itself to sound like "arbitrariness."  
What Rorty intends to do in that passage, however, is part of the 
same motif he would later call going "beyond realism and 
anti-realism" (a slogan, I think, coined by Arthur Fine).  This intention 
comes out in, for example, his discussion of Dummett in that same 
intro.  Getting beyond realism and anti-realism would be to get 
beyond what Dave rightly calls a false dilemma.

Matt