[MD] brief tangent with Steve

[david buchanan]

Matt said to dmb:
 The one substantive disagreement about a violation of a central tenet we should be promoting exclusively that I understand you presently to be making is that Rorty (and/or I, Steve, neopragmatism, analytic philosophy generally) is a scientific materialist.  I agree with you that this would be a violation.  We should not be scientific materialists. This would be a violation of anti-Platonism, in fact.  However, I do not think that Rorty is assimilable to anything disagreeably "scientific materialist."  Rorty and you believe in physics, and neither of you believe in God.  So there's that, but that's not disagreeable (though some seem to think so).

dmb says:
Right, scientific materialism is the most common form of Platonism in our time. It would be to a bit crude and ham-handed to accuse Rorty of taking up that stance. My point in bringing up behaviorism, physicalism and the brain-mind identity theory was much, much broader than that. That point was made in the context of a discussion of basic temperaments like classic and romantic and how the various schools of philosophy answer the needs of those temperaments. It's only on that very broad level of analysis that it makes any sense to connect Rorty with materialism. I'm just pointing out that the pragmatists that come out of the analytic school of philosophy have a certain metallic flavor, a certain prickly, mathematical flavor. If that were the only kind of pragmatism, I'd probably quit philosophy and switch to the english department too. 
While it's true that we can agree that physics is believable whereas God is not, this is exactly the area where I find the whole tone and tenor of the analytic school to be so grating. Buddhism, at least at some level, is an atheistic religion that isn't at odds with science and requires no faith or supernaturalism. Roughly speaking, one could say the same things about the MOQ. Ant calls it the first indigenous form of American Buddhism. There is also that long passage in ZAMM where he compares Quality and the Tao and finds them to be identical. I think these comparisons are both true because the MOQ agrees with the perennial philosophy, which says all the world's religions agree once you get beyond the superficial, exoteric differences and get to their esoteric core. So one can believe in science and be an atheists while still maintaining a vital interest in religion taken in its broadest sense.  


Matt said:
There might be something there.  I'm just not convinced there is. For example, you say that Rorty "takes the slogan to mean that we ought not have truth theories at all," but this is--believe it or not--misleading to what Rorty meant in the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism.  It rests on how Rorty conceived of a "theory of truth," which at that time meant an _epistemologically_ interesting theory of truth.  Rorty believed at that point (though it took him years to become more clear on this point) that Davidson's Tarski-style theory of truth was all we were going to get, and that  because it was a _semantic_ theory of truth _only_, deployed at a time when everyone basically thought that a criterion for a successful theory of truth was telling us not just how a true sentence works (a sentence is true if and only if what it says is true), but also the mechanisms of the conferment of the property of truth on that sentence.

dmb says:
That's a good example of the analytic tradition I'm talking about. This is the school of thought that Rorty is coming out of and it certainly does have certain conceptions of what a "theory of truth" is. I think it was Teed Rockwell who make the analogy to astronomy on this very point. Learning that there is no such thing as the objective Truth and then abandoning all truth theories as a result is like learning that there are no crystalline spheres in the heavens and giving up on astronomy altogether because of that. Rockwell wants to say that Rorty makes an unwarranted leap from one to the other and that it's perfectly plausible to say that astronomers can do astronomy without looking for crystalline spheres and, by the same token, philosophers can have truth theories without search for thee Truth. 
And I think you mean to say that Rorty is really only prohibiting the search for Truth and heavenly spheres. That's where we're going to disagree. Not because Rorty explicitly slams the door on anything like a truth theory but he certainly moves as if the door where closed and those are the consequences of his views. That certainly seems to be the consequence for you and Steve. I mean, I don't think it's just a co-incidence that neither of you have much interest in the theory of truth or the empiricism.



Matt said:
...However, when Seigfried says that Thayer "points out that for pragmatists, truth and falsity are not properties of ideas, nor even the relation of ideas to facts, but instead are characteristics of the performance of ideas in situations," this states something that Rorty agrees with because of the social-practice understanding of language paved by Sellars and Davidson and codified by Brandom.  All of the emphasis in Brandom is on the performance of persons in situations.


dmb says:
Hmmm. I think you might be glossing over a very important distinction here. I fairly certain that "the social-practice understanding of language" is not what the Jamesian means by "the performance of ideas in situations". He is talking about concrete, lived experience and this is opposed to verbal abstractions. Don't get me wrong. Ideas have to function as ideas too but James is always keen to point out that the concrete situation is where we find differences that make a difference and that's where truth is made. Philosophical conversations are up off the ground, if you will, and James says that's fine most of the time. Our truths work on a kind of credit system so that we don't have to personally witness every concrete situation in order to be informed about things but ultimately an idea can only ever be verified by an actual person in an actual experience. 
Psychological nominalism says that language and thought are virtually the same thing, that it's shared and public and communal. I don't dispute that. I'm just saying that's not what the radical empiricist means by saying that truth is a performance, a doing and a making rather than the property of a sentence.  

Matt said:
 And if Rorty is in agreement with James on that point about truth and falsity, then it means--in _Rorty's_ idiom--that James too takes his theory of truth to not be epistemologically aspiring.  Or rather, that when James said "truth," he was actually talking about "knowledge."  What their agreement means is that there are two different notions of "epistemology" going on, and that  (so the imagined scenario goes) if James had read Rorty's sentence, and had the state of the debate about theories of truth and epistemology explained to him to reconcile vocabulary differences, he would have agreed with Rorty.

dmb says:
I really don't know what it means to be "epistemologically aspiring" or "epistemologically interesting".
I sure what the two notions of epistemology are either. But I think it might be related to Rockwell's analogy. Rorty would look at James's theory of truth and say that it's not really of theory of truth because it provides no promise of thee Truth. But why define the word "truth" as Platonic, why define it the way all these objectionable theories defined. Isn't that the heart of the problem, that truth was conceived as the real reality behind experience. Why not abandon that definition of truth instead of epistemology? Why define the question in terms of the bad answers?
There are scholars who make a case that Dewey and James do not need to be brought up to speed or brought up to the state of the debate. Hildebrand's bood and Larry Hickman's book (Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism) both make a case that Rorty and Putman were struggle with issues that James and Dewey had already resolved. As I see it, the things I like about Rorty are just the things he took from Dewey and James and I think he didn't take enough of their ideas on board, not least of all because of his anti-Platonism. But if you have something in particular in mind, I'd be glad to hear about it. What insights on truth theories did they miss? Tarski sentences? I'm pretty sure James would scoff at that, for temperamental reasons if nothing else.