[MD] DMB and Rorty

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Gareth,

Gareth said:
In my opinion, as the dialogue continues it is possible to 
better understand the other. But for this to happen you 
must say what you mean and occasionally ask(as does 
Socrates) if your understanding of what the other said is 
what the other meant. If both participants are honest then 
this would be a dynamic process. And it is why I am 
here(and I think I will stay for a while).

Matt:
Well said.  As a dialogue continues, it should be possible to 
better understand the other.  And a wonderful tool in that 
department is, definitely, stopping and asking, "Is that what 
you meant?"

Sadly, some of us are too full of our own powers of 
deduction to do that.  Like me, for one.  And sometimes, 
there's too much ill-will between participants--it's not about 
honesty or sincerity always, just about willingness to shed 
one's own perspective long enough to try and get the hang 
of someone else's.

But willingness to do that is circumscribed by a number of 
other factors.  Take Bo--few who have been at the MD for 
a long time want to shed there own perspectives to dig in 
deep to Bo's point of view anymore because they feel 
they've spent enough time trying to do it already.  That's 
why that conversation is a dry well for many (not all).  
Sometimes, you just make that personal choice, where you 
ignore a point of view, instead of constantly talking about 
it.  Or take DMB and I--we each think we have a pretty 
good handle on the other person's perspective (sort of--each 
of us confesses at odd intervals that we have no idea what 
the other is talking about: how much of this is rhetorical, 
nobody knows), and that what the other says about our own 
perspective is pretty well screwed up beyond belief, so we 
just kinda' circle around, lookin' bug-eyed and gesticulating 
at each other, completely astonished as to how this 
happened.  And neither one of us really feels the need to 
drop everything, dig in, and take what amounts to a primer 
course in Understanding DMB/Matt.  It just doesn't seem 
worth it to either one of us.  So we spend our time jockeying 
for the moral high ground instead.

Oh, and this is interesting, too: your frame for dialogue was 
Socrates.  This really has nothing to do with your point about 
real dialogue, but two good questions to ask about Plato's 
Dialogues are 1) Did Socrates really care what his interlocutors 
meant? (or the flipside, did the interlocutors really add 
anything to the dialogues, particularly later ones, like 
Glaucon's reduction to repeating "okay" and "yes" throughout 
much of The Republic) and 2) Did Socrates really mean what 
he said (given the well-established phenomena of irony in the 
dialogues)?  

Matt
 		 	   		  
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