[MD] Psychology and Philosophy

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Matt:
My suspicion is that Mark's problem with psychology is personal, not philosophical. ... It's between the lines, but the man is complaining about his own personal encounter with psychology.
  
Matt replied:
Well, that's what we all do, to a certain extent, right?  It all begins personally.  Pirsig's philosophical journey began personally.  I find it hard to negotiate such personal encounters philosophically for that exact reason.  Ultimately, we are all thrown back on our first-person encounters with the world.  So what's the right mode to negotiate at the philosophical level that neither violates the experience we've accumulated nor is limited to the single window we've been granted...?

dmb says:
That where the conversation headed. The personal and aesthetic factors in philosophy. I posted about that in some detail yesterday, against Steve's Jesus-freak example, etc.. As I explained, those factors can never legitimately over-ride or defy the controlling factors such that we can simply believe whatever is pleasant - or any such relativistic drivel.

Ideally, I suppose, rhetoric would be the right mode to negotiate at the philosophical level but any kind of good-faith effort to have an intelligent conversation would be adequate in a context like this one. It seems to me that you were mistaken to take Mark's claims as philosophical or intellectual. To put it crudely, the truth is personal but that doesn't mean the personal is truth. Anyway, since you were talking to him about reductionism and data collection and otherwise entertaining the claims as if they were philosophical, it seemed like you didn't quite realize what was going on.

The single window we've been granted? That notion doesn't evoke Pirsig's "terrible secret loneliness" or the two ships at sea passing code from a distance? Are we ultimately all thrown back? When this is added to your previous characterizations - that philosophies are "covers" for our habits, for example - a chilly nihilistic wind blows around pragmatism. You don't feel that? 

I suspect that this sort of characterization has it's roots in Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault. Roughly, it's predicated on the view that discourse is a political struggle and the material conditions determine our cultural practices. On this view, truth is just whatever the powerful say it is. I suspect this is why you'd frame philosophical debate in terms of a negotiation and truth as a matter of what the culture let's us say, etc.. I also suspect this might be true even if you're not aware of it.