[MD] Apologies for Dropped Threads

[Ian Glendinning]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for that, love to pick up the specific points in new threads
when you are able.

For now, just want to compare two statements in your post here.

Early on you say "Steve and I [Matt] haven't been able to understand
about what the disagreement is."

Later on you say " I [Matt] 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."

That's why I preferred the style of stepping back and attempting to
summarise what the core disagreement actually was - eg which parts are
safe to summarise as "language all the way down" and which not, etc.

I didn't expect my short summary to be right, just to help focus on
what the disagreement actually is.

My summary is (again, but in alternative wording) - you/we are in fact
"agreeing" on what the definitions and distinctions ARE (between the
different forms of "truth"), but some of us are failing to see the
SIGNIFICANCE which others (particularly Dave) see, in our MoQ context.
The "Yes, but so what ?" conclusion. (Given the pragmatic rider ....
for all practical purposes .... a rider of Dave's you actually
clipped-off a quote that I agreed with.)

Given our focus on pragmatism (of some kind) .... the "for practical
purposes" point still seems key to me ... having made such
distinctions what are you/we going to do with them - other than write
essays ;-) - in the real world. My frustration is to get us back on
the living philosophy track.

Enough.
Ian

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 7:49 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
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