[MD] Realism and anti-realism

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Mark,

Matt said:
Bernstein's first move in the book is to describe the condition that 
creates the two kinds of responses: Cartesian Anxiety.  As a good 
Deweyan, he wanted to describe something like a psychological 
condition for a philosophical response because in a certain way (that 
we still don't have a good grasp of), psychology and concepts 
dovetail.  Philosophical problematics are as much a response to life 
as building a fire, prayer, and belching.

DMB said:
Let me be more specific, [Matt] and/or Bernstein are characterizing 
an idea that I basically agree with; that our philosophical positions 
are psychologically motivated.

Mark said:
I find the use of psychology interesting.  Psychology is the modern 
study of the psyche.  It is relatively new in its modern version, but of 
course the psyche has been discussed for as long as humans 
discussed and questioned motivations.  But the term psychological 
would seem to give a modern scientific sense to this interpretation 
of philosophy.  If indeed, psychology was created as a discipline not 
too long ago, I wonder if it is appropriate to apply this label to 
philosophies that occurred before its creation.

Matt:
I know the conversation has moved on since this portion, and I 
haven't been following it closely as it has proceeded, but I wanted to 
clarify my own relation to your point in your post about psychology.  
I find Dave's formulation, "our philosophical positions are 
psychologically motivated," a little unhappy, but in the same way as 
my "psychology and concepts dovetail" is a little unhappy, which my 
parenthetical right before is intended to convey.

I'm not concerned with a discipline called "psychology," exactly, but 
more with your note about the psyche.  If I grasp the importance of 
empiricism in generating a picture of the mind, the trouble with 
it--under the slogan of "associationism"--is that it _reduces_ 
concepts to psychology, such that a person's beliefs are what they 
are because of what the person associates with them.  My 
"dovetail" was my way of trying to avoid that reduction.  I have no 
wish to suggest, as you put it Mark, that "all philosophy can be 
eventually reduced (with data) to some fundamental urges, just like 
belching."

As a pragmatist, I think that philosophies do come out of urges 
(though I hesitate to start handing out golden apples of 
"fundamental" to any of them) and from our response to life.  
(Steve correctly supplied my reaction to Dave's interpretation of my 
suggestion that philosophical positions are "just covers for habits," 
concurrent with my use of "belching," had cynical or nihilistic 
impulses--as Steve said, I intended only to gesture to the pragmatic 
maxim that "beliefs are habits of action.")  But I've also come to 
think that Hegel had it right when he said that there is an important 
ontological realm that comes in between the biological/physical and 
the conceptual/intellectual--the social realm (this is his argument in 
the first section, "Consciousness," in the Phenomenology of Spirit).  
This social realm mediates between our own brain activity--which 
could be reduced to biology--and the realm of concepts, where 
things like mathematics have a truth of their own divorced from 
what we think about them.  This commonsensical platitude about 
math can be explained, by Pirsigian and Jamesian idealists who 
don't think things _can_ have a truth divorced from us, by referring 
to the process by which concepts become divorced from their user: 
when they become public in the form of language.

This is very sketchy portrait, indeed.  But it is intended suggest how I 
try and avoid the implication that philosophical positions can be 
_reduced_ to our psychology, even if there is a relationship.

Matt