[MD] continental and analytic philosophy

[Matt Kundert]

DMB said:
I don't know what that means [whatever it is Matt said] but 
it seems that your reticence about this distinction stems 
from issues that have nothing to do with the distinction. ... 
I know it's an unpleasant thought, but I'd like you to 
entertain the possibility that your reticence is the result of 
conceptual errors with respect to the meaning of the 
preconceptual/conceptual distinction.

Matt:
You are right that it is possible that my reticence has 
nothing to do with "issues that have nothing to do with the 
distinction," properly understood.  It is possible, it is what 
you've been trying to convince me of, and it is what I 
remain unpersuaded of.  I'm sorry, I don't feel persuaded.

When I said this:
As I've moved further away from certain problems, I've tried 
harder and harder to articulate the honesty that I think is a 
necessary component of the argumentative process.  How, 
on the one hand, there are arguments and, on the other, 
there is being persuaded by one.  It's difficult, but the 
affective dimension of argumentation has long been lacking i
n the structure of presentation in professional philosophy.  
More attention to it would perhaps do some good.

I was, of course, thinking of you, as you and everyone else 
knows.  And what I was talking about, in the rhetorical 
presentation of the "affective dimension of argumentation," i
s exemplified in your rhetoric of "error"--"if I just sorted the 
concepts out properly, I wouldn't be making these freshman 
blunders!"  Well, that's problem, isn't it: I remain 
unconvinced that your way of sorting out concepts is a 
useful way of sorting the concepts out.  The rhetoric of error 
and confusion typically lends credence to the Platonic 
notion of demonstration, to notion of dialectic over rhetoric.  
Since there is no method of demonstration in the area, one 
that satisfies the Greek urges it was first formulated in (I 
think philosophy will ever remain the one area where this 
will always be true), I think the rhetoric of error and 
confusion should be laid aside.  It is the kind of rhetoric the 
early analytics used, is it the kind of thing that gives 
professional philosophy a bad name, and it is the kind of 
thing I wish you didn't like about professional philosophy.

The risk you run in your style of dialogue, in the model of 
discourse you exemplify, is the conflation of "understanding" 
with "agreement."  So often it seems that disagreements 
are attributed to misunderstanding--but at a certain point, 
it is unclear what good understanding looks like other than 
"I agree with you."  There is a philosophical point about the 
confluence of understanding and agreement, and some 
interesting stuff has been written about it (usually under 
the heading of "hermeneutics"), but as a practical point of 
composition, it is unclear that we've ever had a 
disagreement--it is, rather, that I don't understand the 
issues.  At a certain point, I've moved to conceding that I 
don't understand the issues in the face of your glare, 
because your responses to me say so.  I don't think I 
misunderstand them all that much, but I will concede that 
I have no idea what's going on in your head most of the 
time, just as apparently I boggle you.  Our only 
difference--so far as we've been able to suss out--is that 
I refuse to think that you are making errors.

DMB said:
As I understand it, the analytic philosophers deny that 
there is any such thing as the preconceptual. Apparently, 
McDowell's Mind and World is all about about denying 
exactly that.

Matt:
Hunh--maybe I misunderstood the import of McDowell's book.  
I thought he was recouping the idea of experience in the 
face of Rorty's so-called linguistic idealism.

DMB said:
But it seems that in our case, you remain unpersuaded as 
to the value of the preconceptual/conceptual distinction 
because you're listening to the analytic critiques of 
traditional empiricism and mistaking that for a critique of 
radical empiricism.

Matt:
Kind of--my trouble is not that I don't realize that 
retro-pragmatists claim that their radical empiricism avoids, 
say, Sellars attack on the Myth of the Given, it is that I 
don't understand why I should be a radical empiricist, and 
recoup the preconceptual/conceptual distinction, after 
we've destroyed traditional empiricism.  The few reasons I 
can think of have to do with Platonism, and all the reasons 
I see are things I can do with other theses (so I think).

DMB said:
If I'm right, then you and I have been talking about two 
completely different things for a long time and it would explain 
a lot as to why there has been so much progress.

Matt:
Something like that.  I just can't figure out why I should talk 
about the things you want to.

Or as I've put it for years, I don't know where our real 
disagreements lie because I don't know why I need to use 
your vocabulary, what the advantages of your's are over the 
disadvantages of mine.

After all--have I ever offered a _critique_ of radical empiricism?

Matt
 		 	   		  
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