[MD] DMB and Me

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve:
...Rorty, for example, is quoted praising Hildebrand's criticisms on the back of Hildebrand's book. Here's what Rorty has to say about a book in which he is accused of eviscerating pragmatism, of gutting the guts out of pragmatism. (Which is almost exactly what I'm saying about your treatment of the MOQ, about your way of taking the Quality out of the MOQ.) "David Hildebrand's attempt to restate Dewey's central message is intelligent, well informed and well argued, as are his polemics against what he takes to be Putnam's and my own misunderstanding of Dewey."


Steve replied:
Do you actually read "my own misunderstanding of Dewey" as Rorty admitting that he misunderstands Dewey???? What he says is "well-argued" are Hildrebrand's  polemics against "WHAT HE TAKES TO BE" Rorty's view rather than against Rorty's actual view. His use of the phrase "what he takes to be" points out that Rorty doesn't actually think what Hildebrand thinks he thinks.


dmb says:

No, I don't see that as Rorty admitting his own misunderstanding. My point is simply that Rorty is big enough to admit that Hildebrand's case is intelligent, well informed and well argued. But when I use this exact same argument, your response is to treat it as unintelligent, uninformed and badly argued. My point is that Rorty can handle even the most vigorous disagreements with grace and dignity and without imputing sinister motives to his critics.


Steve said:
What you keep missing are Rorty's actual views, and you will keep missing them so long as you rely on Hildebrand to say what they are.


dmb says:

That's just not true. There is no shortage of Rorty critics but Hildebrand is a guy I know personally, he teaches pragmatism where I go to school. He wrote a book about the differences between Dewey and Rorty's reading of Dewey and he is the chairman of my thesis committee. (His wife is co-director of the program and teaches the thesis class I'm taking now. So he has become one of my favorite pragmatists. Rorty's position is attacked from many different angles but Hildebrand has done so by mounting a defense of Dewey, who is both a classical pragmatist and a radical empiricist. For my interests, defending the MOQ's pragmatism and its radical empiricism, nothing could be more appropriate.


dmb said previously:

This is another example of the error I've talking about. You're describing the claims of the philosophical mystic in terms of SOM.


Steve now says:
I had hoped you would respond to this bit from before... Isn't this EXACTLY what you keep trying to do to Rorty? I showed how mystics can easily be read as Platonists and you chided me for misreading them as if I said that mystics actually ARE Platonists. That's not what I did. But it IS what you keep doing with Rorty.


dmb says:

Well, there you were responding to John's question about "the fundamental nature of reality", a phrase taken directly from Pirsig description of philosophical mysticism. Later you said you were only talking about mystics in general and not radical empiricism but I don't think you can blame me for thinking you were talking about the claims of Pirsig and James. The thing is, I don't think it's misreading mystics in general to see them as Platonists. A lot of them are Platonists, especially the theistic varieties of mysticism.

As I keep trying to explain, the argument is more subtle than you think. I'm not simply saying that Rorty is a SOMer. I'm not simply saying that he has positivism in his background. Obviously, he is centrally concerned with rejecting objectivity and the correspondence theory of truth. I'm just saying that he does this work without trying to rearrange the basic metaphysical categories that give rise to objectivity and the correspondence theory of truth. He abandons all the positions that arise from those assumptions but Pirsig and James take a different approach. They attack the whole notion that there are two ontological categories in the first place. Unlike Rorty, they don't deny that we have access to the objective realm of things and events in space and time. They deny that there is any such realm. That's a pretty big difference. Both reject objectivity and the correspondence theory of truth, but still the differences are huge.

This is not very different from our debate about truth. In a similarly strange way, Rorty insists that truth is separate from justification but also insists that we can never have such a thing and so he gives up on truth theories of any kind. By contrast, the pragmatic theory of truth insists that there is no such thing as truth apart from what can be justified in experience. In effect, Rorty has to maintain a certain of definition of truth in order to reject all truth theories. And yet the pragmatic theory of truth rejects that impossible definition for something that we can have here and now, for the kind of truth that is never separate from what can be justified in the here and now. 

It's not an accident that this impossible definition of truth is construed as something beyond our justification practices. That's what truth is going to mean if you assume an objective reality, the world-in-itself, things-in-themselves, the realm of Platonic forms and all those other SOMish, appearance/reality dualisms. Nor is it an accident that radical empiricism and the pragmatic theory of truth differs from traditional empiricism, the correspondence theory of truth and the Platonic forms of mysticism. What I'm saying is that this differences are not taken into account here when Rorty's stance is used to undermine Pirsig's. All the objections raised by you and Matt are directed at positions that are nothing like Pirsig's. To say that Pirsig's claims could be taken as Platonism or kinda sounds like Platonism just shows that these claims are being misinterpreted for superficial reasons that have nothing to do with the actual position he holds. I'm saying that you misapply his post-positivist criticisms to the decidedly anti-positivistic claims of the MOQ.  


Steve said:
It would be one thing if you said that Rorty is too easily read as a relativist or an SOMer in certain turns of phrase and should have been more careful, but you keep insisting that he actually IS one even though you haven't read Rorty! You only cite such criticism from others who are reading Rorty as if he were an SOMer, which as Matt pointed out, is pretty easy to do even with Pirsig if you cherry pick.

dmb says:

No, actually in this case I was making the point based on what Rorty himself said and what Rorty's supporters say. The Fish article has this idea expressed three different ways, in the words of Fish and Margolis as well as Rorty. I even quoted Putnam saying as much about. I'm not cherry picking. Quite the opposite. Except for naked denials here from you and Matt, I have never seen anything that contradicts this. Wouldn't the most basic defense of Rorty against this charge entail a quote from Rorty saying otherwise? You're obviously interested in defending him and Matt says he's read everything Rorty ever wrote. So where is it? When and where does Rorty ever attack or reject SOM? Is his rejection of objectivity and the correspondence theory as close as he ever gets or is there some evidence you've been holding back for a special occasion? 


Steve said:

I wish you'd take Matt's suggestion: "It might be more profitable for you, Dave, to articulate the specific reasons of why Rorty seems like he's working with SOM assumptions, the things he says you wouldn't say, because anybody can look at a block of text, pick out the use of words like "subject, object, mind, world, in there, out there, etc." and claim the person's a SOMist.  We can do it to Pirsig.  I hope that's not what you thought I've been doing all these years.  I hope I've been a little more articulate and forthcoming about what the difference is between the external manifestation of linguistic tokenings (i.e. "the words one uses") and what the words mean (i.e. "the assumptions undergirding theoretical positions").

dmb says:

I've done much more than pick out of few words and I have articulated the specific reasons for thinking he's working with the assumptions of SOM. In fact I have been able to do that every single time Matt raises an objection. In each case, when I go to investigate whatever names he drops and slogans he cites I find out the criticism is directed against positivism and it is done so from within those same assumptions. Davidson's scheme/content distinction, to cite a recent example besides the Fish article and the book length criticisms, is directed against a subtle form of the Kantian analytic/synthetic distinction. That is a product of SOM too and so that distinction is not asserted by radical empiricists and can't be applied as a criticism against it. 



Further, I don't think Matt has been forthcoming and articulate in the slightest. Quite the opposite. I do not recall ever even hearing anything about the difference between external manifestations of linguistic tokenings and what words mean. I have no idea what that means. And if I ask, "what do you mean?", I'll get some long answer that says a whole bunch of stuff and which refers me to Matt's blog but it won't answer the basic question. Basically, you're insisting that nobody can be trusted to accurately portray Rorty's position and yet you won't really portray it either. Listening to you guys tell it, the only way to successfully criticize Rorty is to read everything he's ever written, quote only him in making the case and then do so in properly reverential tones. Meanwhile, you're using Rortyian position to attacked the MOQ's central terms here at MOQ.org. You using his position to attack James, even though you keep construing these positions as if they were the same as the very things they reject. 


Seriously, neither of you have given me ANY reason to doubt it, let alone a good reason or a good argument. It's just refusals and naked denials without any supporting evidence whatsoever. There are always excuses for this lack of evidence, as if it COULD be dished up if the Rorty defenders had more time, more interest or weren't so emotionally devastated that they can't think straight. But after all these years I'm just convinced that there is no such evidence. I certainly haven't been able to find any and nobody around here has presented any such thing. Isn't that a pretty good reason for remaining unpersuaded? Meanwhile, I bring tons of evidence to the table and you and Matt are constantly finding reasons to dismiss it, usually by attacking the messenger instead of the message. 


  
 		 	   		  
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