[MD] DMB and Me

[david buchanan]

DMB said:
It is just a philosophological fact that the analytic tradition grows out of this logical positivism and that's exactly where Matt's intellectual heroes are coming from.

Steve:

Doesn't Pirsig come out of the same tradition? Pirsig was steeped in but later rejected the "scientific" mindset and so did Rorty. Rorty got really good at using analytic tools before figuring out that the whole game was rigged and rejecting it along with the "scientific" mindset. Pirsig rejected it based on eastern philosophy.  Rorty rejected it based on American pragmatism. That's the difference.

dmb says:

No, as a matter of fact I quoted chapter five, where he says "Logical positivism's criteria for 'meaningfulness' were pure metaphysics, he thought". That line ends a paragraph about the time he took a "course in symbolic logic from a member of logical positivism's famed Vienna circle, Herbert Feigl, and he remembered being fascinated by the possibility of a logic that could extend mathematical precision to solve problems of philosophy and other areas, BUT EVEN THEN the assertion that metaphysics is meaningless SOUNDED FALSE TO HIM. As long as you're inside a logical coherent universe of thought you can escape metaphysics. Logical positivism's criteria for 'meaningfulness' were..."

I think this shows that Pirsig's distaste for positivism goes all the way back to his school days, but that isn't quite the point. I'm trying to explain that Rorty and friends are offering a post-positivist critique of positivism. I'm saying that Rorty and friends are attacking a certain kind of empiricism. They assert the linguistic approach against traditional empiricism in general and logical empiricism in particular. See, this is just the beginning part of a larger argument about the differences between that empiricism and radical empiricism. 


Steve said:
...Pirsig's importance is in confronting the fact that though positivism was discreditted as bad philsophy, it continued and continues to be used in other areas of inquiry.


dmb says:

Well, his discussions of positivism serve two main purposes. They are one of the two main opponents of metaphysics so he takes up their objections when he's setting out on the task. The other purpose is to sharpen his empiricism in a similar way. They are the kind of empiricist that he is not. 21 chapters before we get to his identification with radical empiricism, he's already distinguishing traditional empiricism from his own....
"The MOQ subscribes to what is called empiricism. ... Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The MOQ varies from this by saying the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons." 


Steve said:
...Once you've dropped all that "sense data" empiricism, why argue anymore about what is more or less empirical?  How can anything experienced be more experiential than anything else that is experienced? How can the low quality of sitting on a hot stove be any more empirical than the low quality of a bad idea?

dmb says:

If you're asking about the Pirsig quote, the unloaded question is "how can Quality be more empirical than subjects and objects?" That's what the DQ/sq distinction is all about. Conceptual, verbal reality is secondary. That doesn't mean that talking and thinking don't count as experience but this is derived from a more fundamental empirical experience. Primary and secondary experience are two kinds of experience or two elements in experience. This primary experience is said to be MORE empirical because the secondary concepts are always a small portion, a taking from or an extract of the original experience as it is had and felt.

Steve said:
The "just" reveals your distaste. Philosophy is a linguistic practice. It isn't out of touch with reality. It can't take you closer to or further from reality. It is already part of reality.

dmb says:

It's not my distaste. It is the main thrust of radical empiricism. Radical empiricism says that the limits of "linguistic practice" have strangled philosophy for far too long already. This is definitely what I'm trying to get at. I'm trying to show you how this emphasis on language pushes against the whole point and purpose of the MOQ, against it's central term and against it's empiricism. As James puts it, "Philosophy must pass from words, that reproduce but ancient elements, to life itself, that gives the integrally new." He says, "There is no complete generalization, no total point of view, no all-pervasive unity, but everywhere some residual resistance to verbalization, formulation, discursification, some genius of reality that escapes from the pressure of the logical finger.." James and Pirsig are both saying that reality is much richer than words and concepts and that the overflowing wildness that can't grasped by the logical fingers is not just part of life, but the central part of life. To the extent that our rationality and philosophies leave this part our, we are impoverished. 

dmb says:Yesterday I tried to show how the assumptions of subject-object metaphysics could be seen in Rorty's position, even as he was denying the possibility of objective knowledge. "They [Fish's idea of pragmatists] believe with Richard Rorty that 'things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include mental states' - the world, in short, is 'out there' -

Steve said:
That "the world is out there" bit doesn't sound like Rorty. I've only read him to use "out there" to poke fun at Platonists.

dmb says:

According to Stanley Fish and the New York Times, that's a quote from Rorty whether it sounds like him or not. Anyway, you've interrupted poor Stanley Fish in the middle of a sentence. After "the world, in short, is 'out there'", Fish goes on to say, "but they also believe that the knowledge we have of the world is not give by it [the world], but by men and women who are hazarding descriptions within the vocabularies and paradigms that are in place and in force in their cultures. Those descriptions are judged to be true or false, accurate and inaccurate, according to measures and procedures that currently have epistemic authority, and not according to their fit with the world as it exists independently of any description." "While there surely is such a world, our only access to it, Rorty and Margolis say, is through our own efforts to apprehend it. Margolis: 'The real world ... is not a construction of mind or Mind ... but the paradigm of knowledge or science is certainly confined to the discursive power of the human.'" (Stanley Fish quoting Rorty and Margolis and explaining their neopragmatic position.)

Steve replied:
Do you oppose the common sense notion that you are in the world? I think we can keep that notion without falling back into SOM so long as this notion isn't used as metaphysics. If it is a tool for using reality rather than a way of getting at what reality really is there is nothing wrong with saying the above as a denial of idealism as well as scientific realism.

dmb says:
I'm asking you to look at the assumptions at work in their reasoning. Fish has framed the pragmatist position in terms of a real world out there and our ability to access that world. He has done so three times here, once with a Rorty quote, once with a Margolis quote and once in his own words. That is an awful lot of SOM talk and I don't think you can just sweep it under the rug because it doesn't sound like him. You think Fish would blunder a Rorty quote in the New York Times? You know kind of shit storm would follow if he fudged it or misconstrued? Sorry, but your denials aren't very plausible. 

Steve said:
You said, "Matt is saying that philosophy is confined to the things that can be put under a description." Everything can be put under a description, can't it? What is Matt leaving out of bounds for philosophy in saying this? If you say DQ, you've just put DQ under a description. You've paradoxically described it as something that cannot be described.

dmb says:
Right, DQ is defined as undefinable because it can't be put under a description. It's not a metaphysical chess piece. It's the immediate flux of life. I'm making a case that DQ is the centerpiece of the MOQ despite that fact. I'm also making a case that Pirsig thinks philosophies should make room for all our experiences regardless of whether they are easily put into words or not. And finally, I'm saying that the linguistic approach pushes back against this effort to expand empiricism and broaden our philosophies to include the nonverbal. 

I'd also say that "Quality" is just a vague reference and it isn't meant to nail anything down. Just because we have a term for it, that doesn't mean it's UNDER our descriptions. Like I was saying, the preconceptual is primary and is more empirical than any descriptions that follow. That's why it can be referred to, described in terms of what it is not, and otherwise include it in our descriptions of experience. That's part of why I said the neopragmatic emphasis on discourse and vocabularies is very simpatico with the way Plato's dialectics put pressure on the Sophists to define their undefined Good.

Steve replied:
We can have reality in all sorts of ways, but we can only describe it with words. (Unless you have another way?)

dmb says:

You're conflating form and content. Yes, obviously descriptions require words and concepts. That's the form. But the content of the MOQ, the central term of the MOQ, refers to preverbal, preconceptual experience. And radical empiricism says that all experience must be accounted for in our philosophies. Again, as James says, "Philosophy must pass from words ... to life itself".

dmb had said:
The MOQ wants the true to be subservient to the good, not the other way around. In terms of the MOQ, that means DQ is the primary empirical reality and static intellectual quality is a species of the good that follows from and is subservient to DQ.

Steve replied:
This subservience notion doesn't sound pragmatic to me. I'm not sure it is all that Pirsigian either. DQ and SQ are two sides of the same coin. Quality is an empty jug. Its inside and outside define one another. Neither needs to bow down to the other in "subservience."

dmb says:

This talk about "subservience" is a reference to Plato's battle with the Sophists. "in order to win the battle for Truth in which ARETE is subordinate, against his enemies who would teach ARETE in which truth is subordinate. Plato must first..." And it comes from the hierarchy of the MOQ, where he says "DQ is a higher moral order than static scientific truth, and it is as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress DQ as it is for church authorities to suppress scientific method". Further, I'd say radical empiricism and all that is the attempt to recover what was lost back in ancient Greece when Plato defeated the Sophists. "And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. ...He had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it."




 		 	   		  
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