[MD] Relativism

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:

I don't think you've added anything to conversational constraints on knowledge by talking about "the epistemic value of experience." It's not like Rorty can't justify a belief by saying talking about his experience. Experience is included in "conversational constraints." Its just that talk about experience when providing a rationale for a belief is still talk. It's not that Rorty "rejects the epistemic value of experience," it's just that he gets all that we can get from experience in justifying beliefs by talking about conversation.



dmb says:

Steve, you keep trying to gloss over this difference in various ways as if there was no real difference between Rorty and our radical empiricists (Pirsig, James and Dewey). But, as Hildebrand says, Rorty eviscerates Dewey's vision. Haack and Putnam both think Rorty can't rightly be called a pragmatist. Basically, your glossing-over defies the history and current state of pragmatism. I mean, you're way off on this, sir. Way off.

"Contemporary pragmatist philosophy is quite clearly riven. The recent revival of pragmatism by neopragmatists like Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Robert Brandom has generated a wealth of intramural debates with contemporary scholars of classicopragmatism devoted to the work of Charles Santiago Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Of all the internecine conflicts that have raged in recent decades between these neopragmatist upstarts and the classicopragmatist establishment, perhaps the most ink has been spill over issues concerning the relative priority of language and experience in pragmatism. Defenders of classical pragmatism locate experience as the conceptual center of pragmatism; Rorty and many of the neopragmatists drop the concepts of experience altogether in favor of a thoroughly linguistic pragmatism. Although this is certainly not the only debate burning between [them] .., it is very much a flash point for pragmatism today, according to a number of recent surveys by esteemed intellectual historians including James Kloppenberg (1996), Robert Westbrook (2005), and Martin Jay (2005). This is one issue on which nearly everyone agrees that there is an important split within the heart of pragmatism." (Colin Koopman, 2009:73)







 		 	   		  
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