[MD] Psychology and Philosophy

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Dave,

Matt said:
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 said:
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.

Matt:
Really?  I don't know.  Something doesn't sound right to me in your 
sense of the conversation.  Perhaps, in retrospect, I was "mistaken 
to take Mark's claims as philosophical," but they were _trying_ to be 
philosophical (and I am not, currently, _actually_ judging Mark's 
claims to be only personal and not philosophical, just supposing for 
the sake of argument).  It's not as if he was saying, "I hate 
psychiatrists," and left it at that.  He was trying to state claims at a 
suitable abstract level.  I would think, to not prejudge other people, 
it is an interlocutor's responsibility to give them the benefit of the 
doubt, that there's more to their claims than just animus.  If at the 
end that's all they seem like, then at least one can make that 
judgment based on a suitable experiential basis.  So, it seems to me, 
to treat people with intellectual respect, one has to give them rope 
enough and only judge in retrospect.  (Not that everyone needs to be 
treated with intellectual respect all the time.)

Perhaps you know Mark better than I do.  But I also tend to wipe my 
memory clearer of past conversations when they would tend to make 
me to stop listening.  I can't imagine why I would want to say 
anything to anybody here if I was not prepared to listen with fresh 
ears.

DMB said:
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?

Matt:
Sorry, no, I don't.  By "single window" I just meant that we only are 
allowed to have one body/mind at a time (there are a lot of ways of 
attenuating that claim, like by talking about dissociative personalities 
or Emersonian perspectivalism, but I really didn't mean anything 
controversial, just repetition of "first-person").  By "ultimately thrown 
back," I meant just to recall Pirsig's philosophical individualism (e.g., 
"first decide what you believe").  But...you've never liked my writing 
or formulations, so I'm not sure what I could say to wipe your ears 
of nihilism or whatever other chill you're currently feeling.

DMB said:
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.

Matt:
What I said doesn't strike me as very Marxian or Foucauldian, whose 
philosophies were very impersonal, nor quite Nietzschean (though I 
was striking a Romantic-authenticity note in "violates the experience 
we've accumulated," which one might be able to hear in Nietzsche).  
I guess I didn't catch where the implicit characterization in my 
remarks of "truth is just whatever the powerful say it is" occurred.  
To my mind, I was simply trying to describe even-handedly a view 
any pragmatist would subscribe to.  (I find it odd that you'd accuse 
me of the thing Mark was accusing you of: reducing things to 
conditions.  But perhaps I shouldn't.  Rorty has become something 
like your scapegoat for all the bad things pragmatists get accused 
of by others.)

DMB said:
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..

Matt:
Well, I do find "negotiate" to be a natural term to use to characterize 
discourse and communication once one takes the "rhetorical turn," 
as I think Pirsig has done.  I guess I don't see how that frame leads 
to something pernicious.  And as for "truth as a matter of what the 
culture let's us say"...I don't recall characterizing it that way.  That 
seems to me a mangled version of a bad Rortyism that you've 
foisted on me for textual gestures I'm unsure of.

DMB said:
I also suspect this might be true even if you're not aware of it.

Matt:
Ah, that certainly might be true.  I wouldn't want to claim perfect 
understanding of myself, and am suspicious of those who do.

Matt