[MD] Apologies for Dropped Threads

[Matt Kundert]

This is just a central statement of apology that I'm unable to pick up 
any of the hanging threads of conversation I left last year (or last 
month, or ten days ago, depending on perspective).  I perused what 
I could, but at the very beginning of the new threads that Dave began 
to continue the main conversations about truth, I couldn't get past my 
incomprehension of the same thing that Steve and I haven't been 
able to understand about what the disagreement is.  And Steve has 
picked up on the same thoughts I had when skipping through, so I 
don't really have anything to add to the conversation, nor with the 
school year starting and a syllabus to design do I have time.

Dave quoted a lot of stuff from other people, and said somewhat 
rightly that to say that he doesn't understand Rorty is to say that all 
those people he's quoting huge blocks of text from divorced from 
their situations in the original essays don't understand Rorty.  That's 
true: that'd be my conclusion for someone that continues to treat 
"mere conversation" as a negative (as Steve has already 
emphasized).  This is one reason why I encouraged Dave throughout 
December to read something of Rorty and talk to me about that, not 
Seigfried or Weed, or even the article by Ramberg.

When Dave says (and Ian agrees with), "I think James is saying that 
justified beliefs are all we mean by the word truth," I can't get past 
the riposte that Steve supplied that we were already using before I 
left, roughly: how do you reformulate, then, the clear and 
perspicuous meaning of the English sentences: "what you say might 
be justified, but it might not be true" or "what you say might be true, 
but you've presented no justification for thinking so."  This Steve has 
supplied clearly as the existence of, on the JTB formula of knowledge, 
"justified beliefs" and "true beliefs" respectively.  The request has 
been for an account of what those two things are if you collapse 
justification and truth into a single heap.  If one was supplied by 
anyone, I apologize for not catching it.  I have not, nor will have, the 
time to give good thought to the extensive extensions of the 
conversation that went on past me.  It's too hard to play catch up 
with something like that, as anyone knows whose left a movie 
midway through to relieve their bowels.

I apologize to Ian, for I still never really caught what he thought his 
impact on the conversation was (though he gets my kudos for 
reading everything carefully).  I end up agreeing with Dave in 
thinking that Ian didn't quite catch the central gist of disagreement, 
and at the same time, I apologize to Dave for not seeing the 
distinctions that Ian apparently also didn't see.  That's how much 
confusion I perceive in the conversation, and I apologize generally 
for whatever part I played in accidentally obfuscating my position.  
Because Dave continues to think that "Matt and Steve seem to think 
these strawmen and windmils can be pressed against James," but 
I thought we'd gotten beyond that.  Because other than the 
misperception about Rorty's critique of Platonism, I have no real 
idea what Dave is thinking of by "strawmen and windmills."  I 
thought I had been clear that I have no real argument to press 
against James.  The only thing that might come up is if James had 
really meant to say that truth can be completely replaced by 
justification.  Since I don't really think this about James, though Dave 
seemingly does, my beef (and ripostes) are with Dave, not James.

I apologize to Andrie, for I don't think he quite caught the central 
disagreement either and I cannot try and discuss it with him, and I 
apologize to Jan-Anders for continuing not to understand the 
purport of his distinctions that he tried again to explain.

I apologize to Steve for not being able to better applaud what a 
good answer to the "mere conversation" slogan this is: "Of course 
conversation is not excluded from experience, but what you fail to 
get is that nothing is excluded from conversation."  What's great 
about this is that it catches exactly how the two, conversation and 
experience, are inverses of each other.  Just as part of our 
experience is conversation (so, experience-as-master-concept 
includes it), so can conversation be _about_ anything (which this 
articulates nicely about conversation-as-master-concept).  One of 
the lovely paradoxes that the mystic traditions continue to 
wonderfully exemplify is that, even if you can't ultimately talk about 
the One, you can still talk about the One.

And finally I apologize to John for not being able to talk to him 
about the relationship between Wilfrid Sellars (my Sellars) and his 
father, Roy Wood Sellars (his Sellars).  He is right to think that 
there's something close about what he read and what I've been 
saying about psychological nominalism.  From what I read of what 
John provided, dad's "ontological nominalism" is very close, and 
we can only imagine shaped the later Sellars' version.  If I'm not 
mistaken, however, Roy Wood identified as a realist, and at that 
time it meant that he was in opposition to idealism (which most 
realists included pragmatism in, rightly or wrongly).  Wilfrid is a 
movement, on that scale of the conversation, towards 
idealism-cum-pragmatism, though he too did not quite see how 
much (which is why Dave can get mileage out of calling him 
scientistic: because Wilfrid did have some residual scientism).  So, 
what John is seeing, from his perch as a committed Roycean, is 
how a lot of Royce's absolute idealism is better seen as a 
prefiguration of the conceptual pragmatism (perhaps John would 
wish to put that the other way around, though I wouldn't) we see 
at the other end of the trail of realist-analytics that opposed 
idealism at the beginning of the 20th century.

Matt