[MD] Humanism

[david buchanan]

Arlo said to Marsha:
... When you hit the point where "anything can mean anything I want it to", then you've removed yourself from any dialogue and become nothing more than a carnival mirror.



dmb says:
That's right. That's what Plato said about the Sophists but Pirsig takes their side and paints Plato's treatment of them as unjustified slander. William James makes this same point about those who similarly slander the pragmatic theory of truth. Marsha thinks she is defending the MOQ but she's actually taking sides with the slanderers. Usually, it is the openly hostile critic who reads "the silliest of possible meanings into our statements" but Marsha takes the silliest meanings seriously and defends them as if they weren't deeply insulting to the MOQ and to pragmatism. It's a fun house mirror indeed, the kind that turns everything upside down. In "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth" (p.588) James talks about this "impudent slander" in fairly gentle terms but he also says it is as "discreditable" as anything known to him in recent philosophic history. For James, language that strong is quite rare. He's about as angry here as he ever got, in public anyway. In private he was saying these critics were dumber than rocks. I kid you not. 

"With this admission that there are conditions that limit the application of the abstract imperative, THE PRAGMATISTIC TREATMENT OF TRUTH SWEEPS BACK UPON US IN ITS FULNESS. Our duty to agree with reality is seen to be grounded in a perfect jungle of concrete expediencies.
When Berkeley had explained what people meant by matter, people thought that he denied matter’s existence. When Messrs. Schiller and Dewey now explain what people mean by truth, they are accused of denying ITS existence. These pragmatists destroy all objective standards, critics say, and put foolishness and wisdom on one level. A favorite formula for describing Mr. Schiller’s doctrines and mine is that we are persons who think that by saying whatever you find it pleasant to say and calling it truth you fulfil every pragmatistic requirement.
I leave it to you to judge whether this be not an impudent slander. Pent in, as the pragmatist more than anyone else sees himself to be, between the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense about him, who so well as he feels the immense pressure of objective control under which our minds perform their operations? If anyone imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day, says Emerson. We have heard much of late of the uses of the imagination in science. It is high time to urge the use of a little imagination in philosophy. The unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in recent philosophic history. Schiller says the true is that which ’works.’ Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest material utilities. Dewey says truth is what gives ’satisfaction.’ He is treated as one who believes in calling everything true which, if it were true, would be pleasant."