[MD] DMB and Rorty

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB,


> Steve said to dmb:
>
> 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.

>
> dmb says:
>
> I want to call attention to the fact that Pirsig is frequently and explicitly opposed to SOM. So, no. No honest person could do that to Pirsig. To suggest he's a SOMer would be silly and wrong in the extreme.


Steve:

Well that is exactly how it looks to me when you try to do the same to
Rorty who also explicitly opposes SOM.


DMB:
> I'd also point out that Hildebrand, along with Putnam's help, makes a case that the kind of thing I pointed out in the Fish article is not just a Freudian slip but rather it is an integral part of his position that's implied all the time.

Steve:
It was no Freudian slip. He just wasn't saying what you thought he was saying.

DMB:
in other words, it would just be a pointless gimmick to hang such a
thing on Pirsig but showing this incoherence in Rorty, even Rorty
admits, is well argued and well informed.

Steve:
It is just as wrong to try to hang SOM on Rorty.

Rorty's blurb is an example of Stout's claim that "no American
intellectual in his generation responded with more grace in response
to his critics."

You are just using the fact that he is not a dick against him. He
never said that Hildebrand was right about him. He just said that
Hildebrand did a good job arguing against what Hildebrand took to be
Rorty's position. In other words, he did a good job beating up on a
straw man. Rorty was apparently too nice a guy to say that.


DMB:
> Not only do I think these two cases are incomparable, other radical empiricists talk about these issues in such a way that we don't have to wonder whether they're operating within those assumptions or not. As I mentioned the other days, it turns out that G. William Barnard makes the same argument in his book. (Exploring Unseen Worlds: William James and the Philosophy of Mysticism)
>
> "...I also note that in the context of James's radical empiricism, even the very notion of a separate 'knower' and 'known' becomes problematic when viewed through the lens of James's theory of 'pure experience.' This theory postulates that everything that exists is inherently neither physical nor mental, but rather, is an expression of a more primal nonduality (pure experience) that forms the basis for traditional dualisms, such as subject/object or mental/physical..."


Steve:
Postulating such a metaphysical notion as a "primal reality" can in
itself easily be construed as Platonism and as setting up an
appearance-reality distinction. The difference between you and me is
that I recognize that taking such language that way is a misreading of
James. I see it is a useful turn of phrase for making a particular
point that should not be used as an affirmation of some other point.
The analogous reading would be for me to alledge that this is one more
example of Jamesian otherworldliness which is actually integral to his
philosophy. Nonsense.


DMB:
...The notion of pure experience is significant to the study of
mysticism not only because it overcomes the often negative assessment
of mystical experience as a purely subjective event, but also because
it overturns the philosophically problematic understanding of mystical
experience as an interaction between two ontologically separate
'things': the mystic and what the mystic experiences. ....I seek to
demonstrate that the truth-claims that James makes for the reality of
these 'unseen worlds' are justified not by any alleged correspondence
to some predetermined paradigmatic reality, but instead, by the
positive transformative effects 'on the whole' and 'over the long run'
which come about as a result of those mystical experiences."

Steve:
Oh my gosh! Did he really just start talking about "unseen worlds"???
What a Platonist!

Why is it that Rorty's denial of linguistic idealism in saying that
the world is "out there" gets construed by you as an affirmation of
realism or positivism. but James gets a pass for talking about "unseen
worlds"??? (Of course I think he should get a pass. To take this is
Jamesian "otherworldliness" would be a mistake.)

You keep asking for one good statement of rejection of SOM by Rorty,
but all his pithy denials of one side of the SOM argument get taken by
his critics as affirmations of the other side. (James has the same
problem wih his critics. You do know that James has critics?) This is
the nature of the beast called SOM. One who thinks in terms of SOM
will always see his denials that way. You are seeing it that way when
you accuse Rorty of being a realist one day and an idealist the next.
You point out that others read him as incoherent. Of course they do.
This is the SOMers complaint for anyone who tries to deny both sides
of an SOM dualism. It can't be done!

If you want to understand Rorty's position on the issue, you'll need
to read more than one of his pithy slogans. If Pirsig could have
rejected SOM in a single pithy slogan, he wouldn't have needed to
write two books.

In the  following from "Consequences of Pragmatism," Rorty rejects SOM
as capital-p Philosophy--the idea that the way to try "to believe more
truths or do more good or be more rational [is] by knowing more about
Truth or Goodness or Rationality." SOM is the notion that to be
Philosophical, we should be asking about the nature of these things.
The traditional difference of opinion about the nature of Truth has
fallen into two camps which Rorty identifies with the Platonists and
the positivists.

Rorty:
"Within Philosophy, there has been a traditional difference of opinion
about the Nature of Truth, a battle between (as Plato put it) the gods
and the giants. On the one hand there have been Philosophers like
Plato himself who were otherworldly, possessed of a larger hope. They
urged that human beings were entitled to self-respect only because
they had one foot beyond space and time. On the other hand –
especially since Galileo showed how spatio-temporal events could be
brought under the sort of elegant mathematical law which Plato
suspected might hold only for another world – there have been
philosophers (e.g., Hobbes, Marx) who insisted that space and time
make up the only Reality there is, and that Truth is Correspondence to
that Reality. In the nineteenth century, this opposition crystallised
into one between “the transcendental philosophy” and “the empirical
philosophy,” between the “Platonists” and the “positivists.” Such
terms were, even then, hopelessly vague, but every intellectual knew
roughly where he stood in relation to the two movements. To be on the
transcendental side was to think that natural science was not the last
word – that there was more Truth to be found. To be on the empirical
side was to think that natural science – facts about how
spatio-temporal things worked – was all the Truth there was. To side
with Hegel or Green was to think that some normative sentences about
rationality and goodness corresponded to something real, but invisible
to natural science. To side with Comte or Mach was to think that such
sentences either “reduced” to sentences about spatio-temporal events
or were not subjects for serious reflection.

It is important to realise that the empirical philosophers – the
positivists – were still doing Philosophy. The Platonic presupposition
which unites the gods and the giants, Plato with Democritus, Kant with
Mill, Husserl with Russell, is that what the vulgar call “truth” the
assemblage of true statements – should be thought of as divided into a
lower and an upper division, the division between (in Plato’s terms)
mere opinion and genuine knowledge. It is the work of the Philosopher
to establish an invidious distinction between such statements as “It
rained yesterday” and “Men should try to be just in their dealings.”
For Plato the former sort of statement was second-rate, mere pistis or
doxa. The latter, if perhaps not yet episteme, was at least a
plausible candidate. For the positivist tradition which runs from
Hobbes to Carnap, the former sentence was a paradigm of what Truth
looked like, but the latter was either a prediction about the causal
effects of certain events or an “expression of emotion.” What the
transcendental philosophers saw as the spiritual, the empirical
philosophers saw as the emotional. What the empirical philosophers saw
as the achievements of natural science in discovering the nature of
Reality, the transcendental philosophers saw as banausic, as true but
irrelevant to Truth.

Pragmatism cuts across this transcendental/empirical distinction by
questioning the common presupposition that there is an invidious
distinction to be drawn between kinds of truths. For the pragmatist,
true sentences are not true because they correspond to reality, and so
there is no need to worry what sort of reality, if any, a given
sentence corresponds to – no need to worry about what “makes” it true.
(Just as there is no need to worry, once one has determined what one
should do, whether there is something in Reality which makes that act
the Right one to perform.) So the pragmatist sees no need to worry
about whether Plato or Kant was right in thinking that something
non-spatio-temporal made moral judgments true, nor about whether the
absence of such a thing means that such judgments are is merely
expressions of emotion” or “merely conventional” or “merely
subjective. “

This insouciance brings down the scorn of both kinds of Philosophers
upon the pragmatist. The Platonist sees the pragmatist as merely a
fuzzy-minded sort of positivist. The positivist sees him as lending
aid and comfort to Platonism by leveling down the distinction between
Objective Truth – the sort of true sentence attained by “the
scientific method” – and sentences which lack the precious
“correspondence to reality” which only that method can induce. Both
join in thinking the pragmatist is not really a philosopher, on the
ground that he is not a Philosopher. The pragmatist tries to defend
himself by saying that one can be a philosopher precisely by being
anti-Philosophical, that the best way to make things hang together is
to step back from the issues between Platonists and positivists, and
thereby give up the presuppositions of Philosophy.

One difficulty the pragmatist has in making his position clear,
therefore, is that he must struggle with the positivist for the
position of radical anti-Platonist. He wants to attack Plato with
different weapons from those of the positivist, but at first glance he
looks like just another variety of positivist. He shares with the
positivist the Baconian and Hobbesian notion that knowledge is power,
a tool for coping with reality. But he carries this Baconian point
through to its extreme, as the positivist does not. He drops the
notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether, and says
that modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds,
it just plain enables us to cope. His argument for the view is that
several hundred years of effort have failed to make interesting sense
of the notion of “correspondence” (either of thoughts to things or of
words to things). The pragmatist takes the moral of this discouraging
history to be that “true sentences work because they correspond to the
way things are” is no more illuminating than “it is right because it
fulfils the Moral Law.” Both remarks, in the pragmatist’s eyes, are
empty metaphysical compliments – harmless as rhetorical pats on the
back to the successful inquirer or agent, but troublesome if taken
seriously and “clarified” philosophically."


Steve:
I already anticipate your response. "Where in there was a denial of
SOM???"  Right?

Best,
Steve